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.

The folks at Peacehaven Community Farm in Guilford County recently put in a yurt from Blue Ridge Yurts. They are testing the yurt to determine how to best use their land with as light an impact as possible. Some of the future uses for the yurt that they are considering include meeting or office spaces and storage uses.

Our friends at the Abundance Foundation recently completed their “Office of the Future,” a fossil fuel-free workspace. The office runs off of a 510 watt solar array, a 30 watt solar air heater, and they plan on putting in a solar air conditioner for the summer. It was made out of local materials and they also used soy spray insulation and low VOC paints. In the photo above, they are sporting their new red TS Designs shirts on a snowy afternoon in front of their office in Pittsboro, NC.

TS Designs is proud to help sponsor Vote for Land 2009, a $3000 grant program put together by our friends over at Great Outdoor Provisions to aid in the protection of the lands, water, and wildlife of North Carolina.

This year’s winner is the North Carolina Coastal Land Trust. Coastal Land Trust works with the state and other organizations to permanently protect Masonboro Island, the largest undisturbed barrier island along the southern part of North Carolina’s coast and host to a vast array of wildlife.

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

Mebtec is a computer and electronics collection and dismantling center located in Mebane, NC. Their facility handles the dismantling and sorting of donated computers and other electronics into their base components (e.g. plastic casings, circuit boards, metal pieces, etc.), then ships those components off to various companies, many located in NC, to be recycled. [...]