When he answers his phone, Eric Henry, president and co-owner of TS Designs in Burlington, North Carolina, is outside fretting about grasshoppers chomping their way through the employee vegetable garden. “We’ve tried screen mesh and now we’re thinking of getting guineas because they eat a lot of bugs,” says Henry, who takes a sustainable approach to pretty much everything at the 33-year-old custom T-shirt printer. Now, Henry has raised the sustainability bar even higher with his “dirt-to-shirt” venture.
Unlike most screen printers, who use a chemical-laden material called plastisol, TS Designs formulated a “super low-impact” water-based ink for its printing process, making it more eco-friendly. For years, the company has sold a line of organic tees and shirts made from recycled cotton scraps and soda bottles. And at home, the 18-employee company is powered by a host of energy-saving measures, including wind and solar, and maintains a biodiesel co-op.
The “Cotton of the Carolinas” dirt-to-shirt initiative sources everything from cotton to cutting to manufacturing in this state that saw its once-vital textile business move overseas. “Complete transparency of the supply chain is totally unheard of in our industry, beyond country of origin,” says Henry. On the website, visitors can click on a harvest year and see where the shirts were farmed, ginned, spun, knit, finished, cut, sewn, printed and dyed.
So far, North Carolina produces no organic cotton. Henry wants to change that. “It’s all about building demand. We’re still not anywhere close to the sales volumes of our original organic T-shirt. We need to grow up to 150,000 shirts and then we can be a legitimate stakeholder in a cotton farm. Everybody knows when we launched this that the end game was getting organic cotton in North Carolina.”
