Subscribe to RSS.
Become a Fan on Facebook.
Follow Top 10 US Green/ Yoga/ Buddhist/ Boulder Twitter.
Subscribe to Free Weekly E-Newsletter.
American Apparel Doesn’t Get Enough Credit. Eileen Fisher, Patagonia, Nau, other progressive leaders are often Made In China.
by Waylon Lewis, elephantjournal.com on Jul 28, 2008
It’s called Vertical Integration. By directly controlling all or as many as possible aspects of your own product—from sourcing to manufacture to distribution to retail—you save big bucks. Folks criticize AA because of the immorality of it’s whacky founder’s voracious, very public sexual appetites. But said same founder has built a big factory in downtown LA where garment workers toil in a solar-powered English-teaching well-paying environmentally-responsible environment.
And no one criticizes Eileen Fisher, the progressive woman-owned company, with its serene models posing on serene beaches or Patagonia with its gritty iconclastic integrity and openness re: its manufacture process for not going Made in USA. And that no one includes myself, until this morning, pre-coffee, I sat moodily reading the New Yorker wondering for the umpteenth morning in a row why certain great companies support the hell out of elephant, our little indie rag, and some good give a Shiite about such grassroots endeavors.
And so I said to myself, Self, you gotta give AA their due. They’re one of the pioneers (even if 15 years after Patagonia) in getting sustainable organic cotton out there (conventional chemicallish cotton, which you’re likely wearing right now, is in its manufacture one of the world’s greatest toxin producers).
Time to make a cuppa (organic, fair-trade Green Mountain) coffee (from me old high school home state of VT.).
