LightningFast.com - T-Shirts That Save Lives

A mission statement from Steve Savides at LightningFast.com:-

“When you buy a T-shirt, what do you get? A bit of warmth? A bit of cool? How about real change? When you buy Lightning Fast clothing, you’re helping transform communities. That’s because we channel 50% of our profits into projects that are proven in helping children and families escape a cycle of poverty. At Lightning Fast, we’re about combining the love of cool with the love of change. It’s a virtuous circle. You get great design on organic, fairly traded clothes. And people from Romania to Swaziland to South Africa, UK, are given a hand to build sustainable lives.” Read more

T-Shirt Designers - Clean up your act with FairWear!

In case you are a t-shirt designer, run a t-shirt store or label, or indeed create or sell any kind of clothing, you might be interested in the Fairwear Foundation who focus on ensuring that the garment industry finally cleans up its act and directly influences the rights of workers for all their suppliers and manufacturers. If you regularly order t-shirts from international suppliers and manufacturers it maybe worth reading on and seeing what pressure you can apply!

Since the late 90’s The Netherlands have been campaigning for ‘clean clothes’, i.e clothing created ethically and with fair workers’ rights no matter the source. FWF regularly inspect source suppliers across the world, including human rights’ hotspots such as India, Indonesia and Romania.

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Three Cheers for Eco Gear!

I’ve featured ecological t-shirt sites at Buy Tees before, but Canadian-based Eco-Gear.ca has to be the most ethical and ecologically aware t-shirt manufacturer and printer in the world. I was going to wait until I’d collated a few more sources for organic t-shirt suppliers/printers because I’ve had a few requests for more lists, but I couldn’t let this wait.

Here’s a quick rundown of Ecogear’s amazing ethical and environmental credentials:

- recycled materials in pre-consumer cotton clippings and recycled water bottles( 65% cotton and 35% recycled PET )
- least water and energy needed to produce the fabric
- no bleach or dyes used. Their colours are from the first life cotton clippings.
- no land use for agriculture or need for deforestation
- for their printing processes, instead of being back end conscious and filtering all wastes, they are front end conscious and only use dyes that are either organic or water based.No PVC, pthalates or APEOs.

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Contrary To Rumours - I Am Still Alive! The Axis of T-Shirts, SEO, and Social Bookmarking.

Yes, turn your back on your blog for just a day or two and suddenly your inbox is filled with e-commiserations tentatively asking ‘where the hell is the beef Paul’?

I’ll tell you where the beef is, it’s creeping up behind you and aiming to actually form a real network around you, before you’ve even had a chance to close that browser page. Exaggerations aside, I am in the midst of building a few more t-shirt-related sites to pique your interest and eventually trap you in my Axis of T-Shirts - where no t-shirt creative or fanatic may ever escape alive. Read more

Social Conscience T-Shirt Competition @ DistrictCotton.com

Submit to Your Social Conscience - Submit Your Eco Tee!

I was immersed in a “PHP programming hell” of my own making, desperately trying to install a directory script for TshirtPrinter.org* , when a very welcome distraction arrived in my inbox from Brett Novick of DistrictCotton.com. Brett wanted me to bring everyone’s attention to the latest round of their Ethical T-Shirt Design Competition - The theme is “Big City”, and it will benefit a very worthy cause, the charity “Brooklyn’s Trees Not Trash.” You can vote for any of the designs here or if you’d like to submit a t-shirt (read the guidelines first buddy!), you can email them here. This May/June the contest will benefit Trees Not Trash in Bushwick (or East Williamsburg) - Submissions are accepted until June 20.

The Prize is $300 cash, plus a $100 gift certificate to DC, plus $250 every time they reprint the shirt. Read more

Fair Trade Eco T-Shirts - a designers’ dilemma

There’s a moral obligation for all t-shirt designers to try and pressure the industry, alongside the consumer, to practice business more ethically. This for me is a completely different argument to judging the conditions of the Third World from a First World perspective. Here the only people who we can blame are the t-shirt printers and textile industries of the West, which is fine and dandy with me! Read more