Tempest in a tee-shirt shop
glo 4life was founded by Damian and Michelle Vaughn-Jones, a pair of graphic designers who "we want to have more fun and we want to make a difference" and also "so that we will have something we can pass on to [our son], something that has given back as much as it has taken out". They make a good product by all accounts - I've only seen it online, not in person, but the people vouching for it have pretty good ethical sense. With such a good product, why can't they break into the North American market? Well, the shirts are expensive. At £20-£
22.5 and £12.5 for blanks, by North American standards anyhow, they just plain are. If Damian and Michelle want to go west, there's an easy solution: outsource. I know someone who'll do it cheap, as illustrated below.
My Canadian publisher had t-shirts made up for a comic strip character from a magazine I edit. The shirts cost $7
wholesale, which included having two different (and original, designed specifically for the product) images hand-silkscreened onto cotton shirts. To get the $7 price we had to do runs of 100 of each. Obviously they weren't fair trade or organic or anything like that. But as I mentioned, MEC has high quality, very durable organic Indian cotton shirts for $12 each (which is a little under half what glo 4life charges for their plain shirts), so even if we couldn't get a wholesale price, we could have made organic comic book shirts for $15 each at most, and with the same markup of $13, sold our shirts for $28. While the shirts were sort of a side business, not our main focus, at the same time, my publisher felt $13 a shirt was a very worthwhile profit. (I forget how it got split with the cartoonist but I assure you I personally didn't get any of it.) People were absolutely willing to pay $20, but my publisher - an experienced saleswoman - had a strong sense that people in this area wouldn't pay much more than that.
If we could sell organic, high-quality, hand-screened shirts for $28 and have about half of that be profit, it seems fair to kvetch a bit that glo 4life charges the equivalent to $40. Don't get me wrong, I'm delighted that they can make a living doing work like that. It makes me think I'm in the wrong country! The more I write for HippyShopper, the more astounded I am by how far ahead Europe is from North America, despite that North America theoretically has a technological edge. Canada is extremely resistant to small businesses - it is considered tacky to have ambition of any kind. Which is undoubtedly also related to how our pollution record is so appalling - per capita, we are dirtier than dirty Americans in many categories. True environmentalism in Canada is almost a social faux pas, since it constitutes ambition.
I also repeat my previous observation that glo 4life is DEFINITELY buying sustainable fair-trade shirts and that I am not sure about MEC's practices, aside from that they are "generally good folks" - their stores are straw bale, they sell stuff in bulk with reduced packaging, they're a co-op, etc. I couldn't find the phrase 'fair trade' on MEC's t-shirt page but they do have a very articulate policy on sourcing sustainable products.
But if their stuff is not fair trade, then basically, not everybody can afford fair trade organic clothes for daily wear. I certainly can't. And while I appreciate that glo 4life's shirts are 'fashion', which is usually not a practical thing pricewise, it did get me thinking - which I didn't articulate very clearly - about whether it was more ethical to have one fair trade shirt made from organic cotton with a custom design made by a niche business, or three organic shirts from a chain co-op. And if cash is tight, I gotta say, go for the three shirts. I'm sure some people find this idea horrifying, but pragmatically, organic is more important than fair trade. Unfair trade only hurts people. Non-organic hurts the planet. We can make more people. We've only got one planet. (How grim is it that this is a choice we actually have to make?)
Hey though - if there really is strong niche growth in the UK, maybe outsourcing to Canada really is a good solution. The province where I live has a lot of unemployed craftsmen types who'd be delighted to do high-quality bespoke work. You give us the recipes and we'll bake the cake over here for distribution over here. Let's do lunch. -- [GT]
wow - sounds like your beating up on glo4life - I'm a big fan of theirs, what they stand for, how they do it and the excellent designs they produce! like katherine above I've bought from them (more than once!) - no I haven't bags full of cash - but they are an excellent T-shirt with cool designs, and what price do we put on the planet?
if I want blanks, or mediocre designs, then yes I can pay anything from £7.99 + for organic T-shirts in the UK - but I don't! I want quality and design and the reassurance that I'm buying from an ethical company and supporting a small company rather than a huge high-street conglomorete.
anyway - here in the UK, glo4life T-shirts are a good price (for quality/fashion organic T-shirts) - glo4life mens are £22.50, womens £20.00 - they are in fact better priced than Howies (who Hippyshopper big up - come on, give glo4life a chance!) who are a far bigger outfit than glo4life! and then there's another dozen or so UK brands who seem to follow Howies' prices of £25.00.
so let's leave it at that - give glo4life a try - you won't be disappointed...and let's just say that organic cotton T-shirt prices aren't the only difference between the UK and the US/Canada!
Posted by: Christian | May 11, 2006 10:01 AM