2012 April | Kelsey Timmerman

Kelsey’s Closet: Alta Gracia

By Kelsey

To celebrate the release of the new updated and revised edition of Where Am I Wearing? I’m celebrating apparel companies that are making a difference by conducting two weeks of giveaways. Each day I’ll highlight a company and then giveaway an item of theirs at 9PM (ish). To enter, leave a comment in that day’s blog post or on Facebook. Winner will be randomly selected. Wanna see more clothing companies changing the world? Visit Kelsey’s Closet.

Rocking my Ball State Alta Gracia shirt

From the closing chapter of the new edition of Where Am I Wearing?

The apparel industry has a lot of issues, including child labor and sweatshops, but these are all just symptoms of the real problem: poverty.

There’s a reason a single mom of three children in Bangladesh will work for $24 per month. There’s a reason a young woman in Cambodia will pay a month’s wages as a bribe to land a job. There’s a reason a worker in China will clock out and go back to work for free instead of telling his boss to shove it. They all have an extreme lack of options—because they all live in poverty.

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof agrees, and wrote in a January 14^th 2009 column: “. . . sweatshops are only a symptom of poverty, not a cause, and banning them closes off one route out of poverty.” But I’m not so sure about his assessment that working in a sweatshop is a route out of poverty. It might be for some, but working in a garment factory wasn’t a route out of poverty for Nari or Ai or Arifa or any worker I’ve ever met (most of whom are no longer garment workers five years after I met them). Their situations haven’t improved. Amilcar looked at his family’s needs, assessed his career as a garment worker, and decided to take his chances traveling north into an unknown future. A job at a “sweatshop” might be the best of a host of not-great opportunities, but it rarely does more than keep people just on the edge of extreme poverty.

Kristof claims that developing countries need more sweatshops. But I disagree. Developing countries need more jobs like those at soleRebels and Alta Gracia, jobs that allow parents to send their kids to school. The garment industry has huge—relatively untapped—potential to fight poverty.

Bethlehem projects that soleRebels (here’s link to my radio report on soleRebels) will have 300 full-time employees by 2015. Let’s say that every worker at soleRebels has six kids (based on Ethiopia’s fertility rate). This means that over 1,800 kids will be supported by jobs at the company by 2015. The workers, with the help of the company, are able to send all six kids to school. And since these kids have an education, they don’t grow up to be shoemakers. They do something that pays better, and they send their six kids to school. By the third generation, the 300 jobs at soleRebels will have impacted 64,800 people. Within six generations, the jobs will have impacted over two million.

I realize that this calculation might be a bit oversimplified, but my point is that a job, a good job, has an exponential impact.

Another brand that is changing lives is Alta Gracia, a brand manufactured in the Dominican Republic that makes T-shirts and sweatshirts for university bookstores across the country. They pay their workers a living wage, which happens to be three times the average wage at other such factories in the country. They are open to the workers unionizing, and allowing me to work alongside their employees on the factory floor. Actually, when I made my request, the brand’s parent company, Knights Apparel, wasn’t the only group that decided it would be okay. The workers liked the idea, too. I’m hoping to take them up on the job offer someday.

The fact that they are this open is simply amazing—as is the fact that I’m not the only one they’ve invited to their factory. Alta Gracia’s union regularly receives visitors at the factory and has Skype calls with American students. The Worker Rights Consortium also regularly visits the factory and checks the pay-records at least once per week.

The New York Times reported on Alta Gracia from the Dominican Republic on July 17th, 2010:

Sitting in her tiny living room here, Santa Castillo beams about the new house that she and her husband are building directly behind the wooden shack where they now live.

The new home will be four times bigger, with two bedrooms and an indoor bathroom; the couple and their three children now share a windowless bedroom and rely on an outhouse two doors away.

Ms. Castillo had long dreamed of a bigger, sturdier house, but three months ago something happened that finally made it possible: she landed a job at one of the world’s most unusual garment factories. Industry experts say it is a pioneer in the developing world because it pays a “living wage”—in this case, three times the average pay of the country’s apparel workers— and allows workers to join a union without a fight.

“We never had the opportunity to make wages like this before,” says Ms. Castillo, a soft-spoken woman who earns $500 a month. “I feel blessed.”

“It’s a noble effort, but it is an experiment,” Andrew Jassin, co-founder of Jassin Consulting, an apparel industry consultant, quoted in the same story. “There are consumers who really care and will buy this apparel at a premium price, and then there are those who say they care, but then just want value.”

You’re a consumer. Do you care?

(end of the excerpt, now this is me today)

Today, Alta Gracia is more than an experiment. Notre Dame just unveiled their official shirt, made by Alta Gracia, for the 2012-2013 football season and their book store announced they hope to carry $500,000 of Alta Gracia apparel in the near future.

Alta Gracia is succeeding, and with each T-shirt sold, they are proving that consumers do care.

Kelsey’s Closet: {R}evolution Apparel

By Kelsey

To celebrate the release of the new updated and revised edition of Where Am I Wearing? I’m celebrating apparel companies that are making a difference by conducting two weeks of giveaways. Each day I’ll highlight a company and then giveaway an item of theirs at 9PM (ish). To enter, leave a comment in that day’s blog post or on Facebook. Winner will be randomly selected. Wanna see more clothing companies changing the world? Visit Kelsey’s Closet.

Kelsey’s Closet: Ethix Merch

By Kelsey

To celebrate the release of the new updated and revised edition of Where Am I Wearing? I’m celebrating apparel companies that are making a difference by conducting two weeks of giveaways. Each day I’ll highlight a company and then giveaway an item of theirs at 9PM (ish). To enter, leave a comment in that day’s blog post or on Facebook. Winner will be randomly selected. Wanna see more clothing companies changing the world? Visit Kelsey’s Closet.

Kelsey’s Closet Giveaway: Cotton of the Carolinas

By Kelsey

To celebrate the release of the new updated and revised edition of Where Am I Wearing? I’m celebrating apparel companies that are making a difference by conducting two weeks of giveaways. Each day I’ll highlight a company and then giveaway an item of theirs at 9PM (ish). To enter, leave a comment in that day’s blog post or on Facebook. Winner will be randomly selected. Wanna see more clothing companies changing the world? Visit Kelsey’s Closet.

Enter a Comment below to win a shirt

They’re bringing cotton back

Farm, gin, spin, knit, finish, cut, sew, print, and dye. That’s what it takes to make a T-shirt. And Cotton of the Carolinas is happy to introduce you to everyone on each of these steps. Cotton of the Carolinas is the most transparent apparel company I’ve ever seen.

Want to talk to the farmer who grew the cotton for your T-shirt? Well, his name is Ronnie Burleson and Cotton of the Carolinas has his phone number and email address on their site. AMAZING! Ronnie lives outside Richfield and is a 3rd generation farmer and one of the first to bring cotton back to the area in 1991. Today he farms alongside his brother Dennis, son Andrew, and nephew Aaron.

Ronnie’s nephew Wes Morgan (New London, NC) does the ginning . Mark Leonard (Thomasville, NC) at Hill Spinning does the spinning. Mortex Apparel a family business run by Brian Morrell (Spring Hope, NC) and Started by his father in 1984 cuts, knits, and sews the shirts. Kenny Hoyle (Statesville, NC) over at MoCaro Dyeing and Finishing oversees the dyeing and finishing. And my buddy Eric Henry and Tom Sineath at TS Designs (Burlington, NC) print the shirts.

You can meet them all on the Harvest ’10 interactive map.

All of these efforts equal the most comfortable organic T-shirt I’ve ever worn. They are amazing! I should email all of the folks involved producing my shirts thank you notes. But as great as the shirts are, I get more excited about the transparency involved in their creation. Also, everyone is from North Carolina, which holds a special place in my heart, since Annie and I lived there for a few years.

The most local T-shirt in the world

A typical T-shirt might travel 17,000 miles on the global supply chain. A Carolina Cotton shirt travels from dirt to shirt in under 750 miles and employees over 700 people. It just might be the most local T-shirt in the world.

Every Fall I get an invitation from Eric Henry at TS Designs to attend their harvest celebration. One of these days I’m going to take him up on the offer. Watch the video below and tell me you don’t want to sit on a front porch with Eric and Ronnie Burleson and throw back a couple of cold ones (beer or iced tea), and talk about farming and cotton and T-shirts with maybe a little blue grass playing in the background!

North Carolina has a long history with the textile industry and it’s great to see folks keeping the tradition alive.

They have a couple of great designs available for purchase. And any group that works with environmental issues or is looking to lessen their carbon footprint can request a quote.

Enter a Comment below to win a shirt

Engaged Consumer

Kelsey’s Closet Giveaway: Forgotten Shirts

By Kelsey

To celebrate the release of the new updated and revised edition of Where Am I Wearing? I’m celebrating apparel companies that are making a difference by conducting two weeks of giveaways. Each day I’ll highlight a company and then giveaway an item of theirs at 9PM (ish) EST. To enter, leave a comment in that day’s blog post or on Facebook. Winner will be randomly selected.

Enter a Comment below to win a Forgotten Shirt

A Glocal Shirt

“I received my Kony Kit yesterday and I noticed that the tshirts are made in Mexico. I’d just like to know your opinion on it! Thanks!”

That’s a note I received from a student the other day. The “Kony Kit” she mentions refers to the $30 kit, including a bracelet, T-shirt, action guide, stickers, and poster that Invisible Children was selling (it’s sold out) as part of their Kony 2012 campaign. The campaign’s goal is to raise awareness about Joseph Kony. Kony is the head of the Ugandan guerrilla group, the Lord’s Resistance Army, and infamous for his use of child soldiers. You’ve probably heard of the Kony 2012 campaign. The video that launched it is considered the most viral video ever. It was kinda big news and stirred up quite a debate.

My response:

“Wouldn’t it have been great if the shirts were made in Uganda? I know a tshirt company there.”

Forgotten shirts doesn’t own the factory in Uganda, but they support it. Know who else has supported the factory in the past? Bono, that’s who. Bono’s clothing company Edun placed an order that launched the Phenix garment factory in 2007. It was Bono’s goal to support jobs in Africa and the garment industry is typically one of the first industries to emerge. (Note: Edun has since moved some manufacturing to China. Hmm.)

My point to my Facebook buddy is that Invisible Children is all about helping Uganda recover from years of violence and war and there are few things that combat both of these better than jobs; good ones that allow parents to send their kids to school. Here’s the really odd part, Invisible Children along with Edun established the Conservation Cotton Initiative in 2008 to help cotton farmers. Tell me again why they didn’t buy shirts made from the cotton grown by the farmers they support?

T-shirts are used to spread our messages and our causes. Race for the cure and get a T-shirt. Give blood and get a T-shirt. Do good things and get a T-shirt, but how often do the stories of these shirts line up with the message of the organization using them?

I talk a lot these days about thinking and acting globally and locally, about going glocal. That the local goes global and the global goes local. Our actions here impact the lives of people around the world and their actions impact our lives. Few items of clothing capture the essence of glocal than a Forgotten Shirt.

The Global

As I mentioned before my Bono/Invisible Children tangent, Forgotten Shirts are made from Ugandan Fair Trade cotton and sewn at the Phenix factory in Kampala Uganda. In a place where exports are low and unemployment can push 90%, an order for something, anything from somewhere else is a big deal. A job has a bigger impact than a sticker.

A Forgotten Shirt supports Ugandan farmers and garment workers.

The Local

The shirt is shipped to Minneapolis where 50 teenagers from poor neighborhoods work part-time to screen print the shirts and participates in a tutoring program. College becomes a possibility.

From Uganda to Minnesota, Forgotten Shirts give opportunities to folks facing poverty. You can’t get more glocal than that. During a time when so many of us have forgotten about the lives of the people who make our stuff, Forgotten helps us remember. That’s a pretty cool story. Check ‘em out.

Engaged Consumer

Kelsey’s Closet Giveaway: SustainU

By Kelsey

To celebrate the release of the new updated and revised edition of Where Am I Wearing? I’m celebrating apparel companies that are making a difference by conducting two weeks of giveaways. Each day I’ll highlight a company and then giveaway an item of theirs at 7PM (ish). To enter, leave a comment in that day’s blog post or on Facebook. Winner will be randomly selected.

Enter a Comment below to win a SustainU Shirt

You’re T-shirt is dirty.

It’s covered in water. According to SustainU, today’s induction into Kelsey’s Closet, it takes over 40,000 liters of water to make one shirt. By 2025 two-thirds of people in our planet will live under water-stressed conditions.

It’s dirtier than steel. Between manufacturing and transportation, the average shirt contributes air pollutants that weigh 12 times more than the shirt. Manufacturing a shirt releases 6 times more air pollutants than manufacturing an equal amount of steal.

It’s covered in gas. One XL polyester shirt uses 2 gallons of gas.

It’s cancerous. The inks in most shirts have a known carcinogen.

And guess how many pounds of clothes the average American throws away each year. Seriously, guess. Here’s an ellipsis for you think of a number…

Here’s another one …

Got it? The average American throws away 68 lbs of clothing each year! So take all of the crazy numbers above and multiply them by 68 (that’s if each shirt weighs 1 lb; they weigh less). You’re throwing away 2.72 million gallons of water and 136 gallons of gas.

Now I’m pro-environment as the next guy, but I’m more anti-me-being-naked. I’m not going to stop wearing clothes. So what can we do?

Recycle.

SustainU is doing just that. They are turning yesterday’s discarded cotton and plastic bottles into today’s T-shirt and sweatshirts. Now their garments still make an impact on our world, just less of one. They reduce the gallons of gas per shirt by half a gallon, release 12 kilograms less of carbon-dioxide per shirt, and save half-a-pound of clothing from a landfill.

One of SustainU’s slogans is “Change your shirt, change the world.” I have to admit that I thought that was a bit over the top when I first heard it. I believe that we aren’t going to shop our way to a better world. But after learning more about how many resources one shirt uses and how much pollution it creates, I see what they’re talking about.

Part of Sustain U’s magic is that their products are made in North Carolina, Tennessee, and South Carolina. These states were once strongholds of the American textile industry, but now that only 3% of clothes are made in America, and countless textile factories sit empty. They are employing American textile workers and sewers.

I’m not one to say that you should only buy Made in America products, but I like having a choice. Sustain U sent me a shirt. It reads: Rebuilt in America. I once saw a shirt at the Detroit airport that read: “Imported From Detroit.” It was Made in Egypt! Where that shirt missed the mark my Rebuilt shirt hit it.

Sustain U is the real deal. Shirt-by-shirt they are rebuilding our clothes. And while the garment industry is largely gone, they are providing very real jobs to American workers.

Our T-shirts change the world more than I ever imagined.

Enter a Comment below to win a SustainU Shirt

Engaged Consumer

Kelsey’s Closet giveaway #1: Rain Tees

By Kelsey

To celebrate the release of the new updated and revised edition of Where Am I Wearing? I’m celebrating apparel companies that are making a difference. Each day for the next two weeks I’ll highlight a company and then giveaway an item of theirs at 7PM. To enter, leave a comment in that day’s blog post or on the corresponding Facebook post. Winner will be randomly selected. I’m adding each of these companies to my virtual Kelsey’s Closet.

Where Am I Wearing 2nd Edition is out !

By Kelsey

The Where Am I Wearing? 2nd edition is out! Now with 38.4% more words!

It was a pretty major update. All of the old material is still there, but there are also about 25,000 new words.

Here’s where to buy Where Am I Wearing?

I always felt that the book was incomplete. I went to Honduras, met a garment worker named Amilcar who I chatted with for 10 minutes, I didn’t ask him the questions I wanted to know (dude, is this a sweatshop?), I went home and was haunted by Amilcar, so I went to Bangladesh, Cambodia, and China to meet the people who made my clothes and ask them the questions I didn’t ask Amiclar.

But what about Amilcar?

New content includes:

• Astonishing search for the Amilcar in Honduras who inspired the book and who traveled a death-defying journey of love, sacrifice, and hope (you’ll never guess where I found him!)

• A visit to a fair trade Ethiopian shoe factory that is changing lives one job at time

• Updates on the lives of the workers I met and how rising food costs and declining orders in the wake of the global financial crisis have squeezed them

• New tips on how to be an engaged consumer

• A call to arms for glocals (global and local citizens)

• Discussion guide and activities for educators focusing on sweatshops, child labor, fair trade, globalization, global poverty, immigration, individual and corporate social responsibility, labor rights, microcredit, international aid, and global development

• Service-Learning ideas for educators

• Note to freshmen on how to get the most out of their college journey

I wrote the 1st edition of WEARING within a few months of returning from the adventure. Then, the jury was still out on how the experience changed me. And boy did it! Writing the 2nd edition allows me to share the big takeaways from my adventure.

I’m so thankful to my publisher John Wiley & Sons to give me another crack at it and to all of the readers, schools, professors, and students who made the 1st edition a success. I hope you’ll buy the new edition, share it with your friends, ask your library to carry it, review it, and do all of the things you can do to support an author you appreciate.

Oh yeah, to celebrate I’m going to be giving away loads of socially/environmentally responsible apparel over the next two weeks so check back soon and you’ll totally want to be my Facebook friend in order to win.

Uncategorized

3 Things Criticizing TOMS Shoes Has Taught Me

By Kelsey

Are you wearing shoes today? In high schools and around colleges across the country students are going barefoot to celebrate TOMS Shoes One Day Without Shoes Event. Some call this event A Day Without Dignity.

Last April I weighed in with a view somewhere between the Kool-Aid drinkers and the stone throwers with my post The Problem with TOMS Shoes and Its Critics. The post has led to one of the best discussions ever on my blog.

Unfortunately half of those comments are summed up as such, “Oh yeah! Well, you’re a stupid pants jealous of Blake Mycoskie. What have you ever done?” I suppose a stupid pants is the opposite of a smarty pants. I just made up the term. No one actually called me that. At least I don’t thin they did. It’s hard to keep track; I was called so many things, which brings us to the first thing I’ve learned…

1) I don’t want to be Blake Mycoskie.

I like being Kelsey Timmerman just fine, thank you very much. That said, Blake is a nice guy who, as I mention in the post, I’ve been lucky enough to meet. It’s just that Blake isn’t married to Annie Timmerman (who can do ninja flips) and he doesn’t have Harper and Griffin as kids and Oreo the Cat as a cat. He doesn’t have a stay-at-home family. He doesn’t live in the Midwest. He doesn’t get to work as a banana worker in Costa Rica. He isn’t blessed to have people around the world tell him their stories and then get to share those stories. (Actually, I suppose he gets to do that last one a bit.) I don’t want to have a business with employees, sales reports, and meetings. Anyhow, I love being me.

2) We need to question good intents just as much as we do bad ones.

I believe that TOMS does some good. I believe that they could and should do more good. And that instead of just being a typical shoe company until the very end where they give away a pair (some question how good this actually is), they could also manufacture in a way that does good at the very start. I feel like I’m less of a critic of TOMS than I am a cheerleader.

Back in my basketball playing days, my dad was my biggest fan. If I scored 20 points and dished out 10 assists, he would still point out that one stupid turnover, or that one missed free throw on the front end of a one-in-one, or the way I reacted to that one call. No matter how good I did, Dad wanted me to do better. That’s how I feel about TOMS.

I want TOMS to do better.

They’ve earned so much goodwill and have so much potential to be a shoe company like no other, and they could use that goodwill to lead the way in manufacturing in a way that provides people with great jobs and hope.

The adventures meeting garment workers that I documented in my book WHERE AM I WEARING? and the new adventures with my new project WHERE AM I EATING? have helped me realize how important a good jobs is – a job that allows you to send your kids to school is everything.

3) We long for our things to have stories even if we fill in the blanks of those stories.

I want TOMS to do better, but more than that I want their fans to do better. I’ve met so many raving TOMS fans that have no idea where TOMS are made. All they know is that a pair was given away somewhere – probably Africa – because they bought a pair. And that’s enough for them to feel swell about their shoes.

Perhaps the beauty of the one-for-one model is its simplicity. We take the nugget of a story that can be printed on a shoebox and we make up our own story. Everyone who wears TOMS should look at where they are given and how they are given. I’m not saying they should look into this in order to find flaws or to criticize, but because if you are going to champion something, you should know something about it.

A lot of TOMS success can be contributed to that they sell shoes – and now glasses – with a story. It’s a short story, unless we dig through their site, but it is a story. So many of our things don’t have a story, or at least one we know about. In a landscape of story-less shoes, TOMS helps us connect with the world.

Engaged Consumer

Harper singing We Are Young by Fun

By Kelsey

Harper, 3, was supposed to be in bed sleeping, instead she was up singing We Are Young by Fun. I recorded her on my phone and added some photos. (note: I probably think my kids are cuter than you do. That’s okay.)