Seven hundred people in North Carolina are basing a new business model on the idea of me and my family changing our behavior when we go to the beach this summer. They are re-inventing the T-shirt, and they are some of the most optimistic people you will ever meet.
Going to the beach is a series of rituals. We overload the car. We drive six hours from Chapel Hill to Hilton Head Island although other beaches are only three hours away, because that’s the place our family adopted. We pack cold drinks in coolers and sit in the sand under umbrellas and build castles with moats and turrets. We ride bicycles along paths shaded by palmetto trees to the plantation ruins of William E. Baynard, who grew cotton before the Civil War. We pay $18 for T-shirts that say “Salty Dog Cafe.” Sea Island cotton hasn’t been grown on Hilton Head since 1920, but when we return home, these T-shirts from Honduras and Peru remind us of happy days.
We buy T-shirts because of the messages printed on them, but we spend very little time thinking about where they come from, what they’re made of, or who makes them. This is what Eric Henry and Tom Sineath want to change.
They run TS Designs, a small apparel company in Burlington, North Carolina, and they ask a simple question. Would my family make different decisions if we knew who made the T-shirt? What if we could point to the Stanly County farm of Ronnie Burleson, who grows cotton for TS Designs, on our drive to the beach? Or to Wes Morgan’s cotton gin in New London, where the cotton is cleaned? Or Mark Leonard’s yarn spinning plant in Thomasville or Brian Morrell’s knitting plant in Wendell? It’s a 750-mile path for their shirt, about the same as our trip to the beach and back. But it’s much shorter than the 17,000-mile global supply chain for most T-shirts.
What if knowing all this would cost us $21 rather than $18? Henry and Sineath (pronounced SIGH-neath) believe we’ll spring for the extra $3, because we all want to help our neighbors and we all want to reduce consumption of petroleum. So they and about 700 other people in the textile business created a brand, “Cotton of the Carolinas,” that connects you with the people behind your shirt at the same time you’re showing personal connections to beaches, universities and football teams.
There are other reasons to buy their shirts, or, more accurately, to suggest that beach shops, schools, companies, brewpubs and athletic teams source them from TS Designs. Their smallest quantity is 200 shirts — where the price is about $10 each — but starting this summer they’re offering one-off designs on their website for $26. They use ring-spun yarn, which is more expensive than open-ended yarn, but stronger and softer. They patented a printing process that embeds the design into the fibers of a garment-dyed shirt, in a high-tech version of batik. They print with water-based inks rather than non-breathable plastic inks containing polyvinyl chloride or phtalates, which have questionable effects on people and the environment. They maintain a company garden so their 25 employees can afford to eat local organic produce. They sew on a thoughtful tag showing where and when the cotton was harvested.
Almost 40 years ago, based on her experiences in southern France, Alice Waters launched a local food movement in Berkeley, California. Henry and Sineath believe the same kind of movement can happen with cotton. Like William E. Baynard and cotton from the Sea Islands, they believe we’ll pay a little bit more to know where and who it came from.
Above, a ‘Dirt to Shirt in 750 Miles’ T-shirt from TS Designs. Below, the state flag of South Carolina celebrates the role of palmetto trees in the Revolutionary War battle of Sullivan’s Island on 28 June 1776.
