We’ve had several conversations with potential customers lately who prefer to do business with the screenprinter in their town because that printer is local.

While we’re all about local business, the problem is that the vast majority of local printers just perform the last step locally. The cotton of the shirts they print may have been grown and ginned in the US, but chances are that all the other steps of the process – spinning, knitting, finishing, cutting, and sewing – were all done overseas.

Take, for instance, an organization that needs shirts in Asheville (about 200 miles west of us). There are t-shirt printers located in Asheville, all of whom are 200 miles closer to the customer than we are, but the best case scenario is that these printers are using American Apparel shirts. AA shirts are made in LA, which means they travel over 2,300 miles to reach the printer (not to mention AA shirts use Pakistani cotton).

That’s roughly analogous to driving down to your local Wendy’s for a nice local burger. Sure it was cooked locally, but the beef and other ingredients came from who-knows-where.

Our Cotton of the Carolinas t-shirts are made, dirt to shirt, right here in North Carolina. While we might be 200 miles away from that customer in Asheville, the shirts travel fewer than 750 miles in their journey from farm to printed product. Tack on the 200 miles from Burlington to Asheville, and you still have a product that’s traveled less than half as much as the best possible product from an Asheville printer.

And our shirts help support over 700 NC jobs in the process. That local printer might employ 5 people in Asheville, but its shirts are grown, ginned, and spun over 7,000 miles away and knit, finished, cut, and sewn over 2,000 miles away. CotC shirts are farmed, ginned, spun, knit, finished, cut, sewn, printed, and dyed within 300 miles of Asheville.

In fact, if you’re located within 500 miles of TS Designs, you would be hard-pressed to find a lower transportation footprint or greater nearby job impact in a shirt from any of your local printers.

This isn’t to say that these local printers are doing anything wrong; most don’t have the resources or connections to custom-make their own locally-produced apparel lines. And the fact is, there are a lot of people out there who don’t give a lick about whether a t-shirt travels 200 or 20,000 miles. But if you’re in the Southeast and low transportation footprint and local jobs are important to you, look no further than TS Designs and Cotton of the Carolinas for your custom printed t-shirts.

In May, Eric Henry, along with t-shirt maker Brian Morrell and cotton farmer Ronnie Burleson, gave a presentation on Cotton of the Carolinas.

The presentation was held at the BALLE Conference (Business Alliance for Local Living Economies) in Charleston, SC to an audience of over 300 owners and leaders of businesses all promoting locally-sourced products and services.

Here’s the video of the highlights of the presentation. Stay tuned for the full version coming soon!

Thanks to BALLE for the opportunity to talk about how Cotton of the Carolinas is challenging the status quo in the apparel industry.

Thanks also to Hungry Mind Recordings for the original video footage of the presentation! Other recordings from the conference are available on their website.

Good morning, I am Eric Henry, President of TS Designs based in Burlington, NC.

Since NAFTA we have lost over 100,000 textile and apparel jobs in North Carolina.

At TS Designs we want to be a different company, a company based on a triple bottom line of People, Planet and Profit. We print t-shirts, 90% of them are domestically made and 60% are made in North Carolina.

North Carolina is the 4th largest grower of cotton in the US and we export 50% of that cotton, so last year we launched a new brand, Cotton of the Carolinas. The Cotton of the Carolinas shirt is grown, made, and sold entirely in North Carolina. Our t-shirts impacts 700 jobs in North Carolina at 6 different companies. We go from dirt to shirt in 750 miles when an average t-shirt can travel 17,000 miles!

It is the only apparel line that is completely transparent for the consumer all the way to the farmer. When you get one of our shirts you can connect directly to Ronnie Burleson, the cotton farmer, and the other 5 companies that are involved in making this t-shirt.

Our t-shirts do cost more, but hopefully one thing that we have learned from this record unemployment in a jobless recovery is that there is more than just low price.

For more information about Cotton of the Carolinas, go to the website. cottonofthecarolinas.com

In an effort to help our customers differentiate Cotton of the Carolinas products from conventional shirts, we have created marketing materials for retailers selling CotC shirts. If you sell or distribute Cotton of the Carolinas shirts, please click on the links to download these materials and use them as you see fit.

This is a 8.5×11 sheet that profiles Ronnie, our cotton farmer.

This is a 1/3 page pamphlet that shows people how to track their shirt that can be cut into 3 pamphlets per page.

The Harvest ‘09 Tour was a great success! Thanks to everyone who came out to see Ronnie’s farm and hear about our plan to bring consumers back to the farmer of their clothing and everyone in-between.

Check out this video by the NC farm bureau to see a bit of footage of the tour; we have our own video on its way!

Wes Morgan of Rolling Hills Gin was kind enough to send us some early photos of the Cotton of the Carolinas Harvest ‘09 up-and-coming crop. The photos were taken at Ronnie Burleson’s (Wes’ uncle) farm over in Richfield, NC.

According to Wes, so far this year’s crop is right on track. Now we just need a hot damp summer, which in North Carolina is a pretty good bet!

Great Outdoor Provisions, a Raleigh-based outdoor clothing and equipment retailer and long-time sustainability partner of TS Designs, is now offering Cotton of the Carolinas t-shirts in all of their retail outlets. To see GOP’s own blog post about this exciting new offering, click here.

If you’re in the area, drop by one of Great Outdoor’s several NC locations and pick up a 100% local t-shirt today!

Today TS Designs officially announced Cotton of the Carolinas, an innovative new program that will grow, make, and sell t-shirts in the Carolinas, during the first CotC Stakeholder Meeting.

The meeting was a great success, thanks to the stakeholders, press, and interested parties involved.

Check out the following links for more info:
Press Release
White Paper