A few years ago, going organic seemed like the responsible thing to do. And we're committed to it. In fact, when we first made the decision to do it, we were committed almost to the point of not printing our shirts on attractive garments. Let me tell you what the search for the right organic shirts has been like.
Our first organic find was the one that many, many T-shirt designers use: the American Apparel "Sustainable Edition." No dyes, reasonable price. We discovered two negatives: 1) the market is so glutted with American Apparel that many stores won't carry your shirts if they know you print on that brand, and 2) the sexually explicit behavior of AA's owner in his own workplace makes us feel uneasy about buying from him. Here are two positives: 1) AA is "vertically integrated," which basically means very little work has to be outsourced and less money has to be spent on importing and transportation, allowing more money to stay within the company and workers to get much better wages; and 2) if you print kids' designs, AA is a really great source of organic shirts for kids ages 6-12 that actually fit well (although they run a tad small, so we buy a size up and put in our own size label). Bella and Alternative Apparel have good organic toddler shirts, and Econscious now has a line of bigger kids' shirts that fit pretty well. SOS from Texas also has great kids' shirts, but they shrink a lot when they are dyed, and a few have undyeable thread. But AA is the only place where you can buy kids' tees from toddler size on up to size 12 in one place. Most of the kids' T-shirt companies we've met use AA, remove the label, and relabel with their own so that no one knows the shirts are AA. And, frankly, I wish buyers for kids' stores would stop worrying about this so much. My experience from selling direct online, on my own site and on sites like Etsy, is that customers care a lot about the quality of a kids' shirt and the design on it, and hardly at all about the blank tees all coming from the same source. (After all, don't most kids' tees have the same cut anyway?)
Our next find, which we really thought would set us up forever with adults' organic tees, was Alternative Apparel. Their ladies' organic scoop neck was both soft and beautiful and came in great colors. The men's we liked equally well. But then Alternative did two really painful things to little tee designers like me: they raised their prices, AND started sewing their tags ON the inside collar instead of UNDER it, preventing us from cutting it out and printing or sewing our own in its place. We like the shirts so much that we still print on them; since we mostly sell direct and don't have to have flashy, perfect branding, we decided to keep in the Alternative label and just print our own inside the shirt, underneath theirs. None of our customers has said anything about it.
Next, we came up with a T-Rex design that wrapped around the side of a big kids' shirt. Thus began our quest for an organic shirt with no side seams. After lots and lots of Web searches and phone calls, we found Anvil youth organic tees. Imagine our excitement! We ordered some up and couldn't wait to try them out. Then we discovered that their Youth XS, which is supposed to fit a 2-4 (according to them), actually fits more like a 6. And their Youth M fits a tall woman easily. What the heck! We printed on them anyway and sold them for bigger kids. Then we had to search for a shirt for sizes 2-4 with no side seams. Nonexistent. We ended up redesigning the "toddler T-Rex" to fit entirely on the shirt front--which might have been a blessing in disguise, because many people have asked us to print the REDESIGN larger. Who knew...
We've done hours and hours of homework on the organic tee, and I can't tell you how many organic shirts out there have dowdy cuts and surfaces that are rough on the skin. Still others have little lotus flowers printed on them instead of just being blank, or tags sewn on the OUTSIDE of the shirt that can't be removed without leaving an ugly fringe...although now, I must say, because of Alternative Apparel, we're starting to embrace the concept of the "double label." After all, why shouldn't the buyer know that one company cut and sewed their shirt and another printed a cool original design on it?
Kids' stores bemoan the lack of variety in kids' tees, but we bemoan the lack of variety among women's organic blank shirt cuts. We'd like to take this opportunity to BEG women's organic shirt makers to look more closely at the fashionable shirts women are wearing, or to work with a designer who designs for beauty rather than for soccer games and yard work. Would it be so awful to design a blank organic tee with a slight drape to the neck front? Or a feminine puffy short sleeve? Or a subtle bell sleeve, like C & C California does? I'd be in heaven! And I can tell you, from what I've seen on Etsy, that other shirt decorators would want them too.
If you still don't think the word "martyrdom" applies, here's where it really comes in for us: WE'RE AMONG VERY FEW SHIRT DESIGNERS WHO ARE DOING THIS. It kills us that nearly everyone else is printing on whatever conventional-cotton or blend tee they want, and having a much easier time getting the pretty cuts and the variety. In fact, we feel that with some new ideas we're coming up with, the success is dependent on the right shirt cut, so we might have no choice but to sell some nonorganic options. Sorry. It's beyond our control. We believe in organics, but, to quote one of our screen printers, we don't feel we deserve to have to "police ourselves out of business."
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