Looking for Tips on Clothing Connections

Even though the goal of this project was not to necessarily change my buying habits, but simply to make better (far better) informed purchases, a few months in I'm realizing how naive it was to think that making these connections was as as easy as wanting it. I've switched to almost exclusively locally grown produce and hardly any meat (because I cook for myself all the time now, and I basically just don't know how to cook meat). I buy all of my toiletries from the Coop, which means I have no need for corner bodegas and delis (with the exception of an occasional six-pack of Brooklyn Lager) or drug stores (with the exception of medicines, I'm not naive enough to think big pharma is going to welcome me into their factories and I can't wait a year for health care). And any new furniture or stuff for my apartment I build or reuse things I already have. Which I guess goes the same for clothing...

I started this project in early spring, when jeans and boots were fine everyday. It's now the apex of summer and I'm still wearing the boots. It's not okay. I've been chopping up old pants (including, yes, a pair of old jeans) to make a new crop of shorts for myself, but I haven't been so handy with "making" new shoes. And speaking of pants, between switching to a virtually vegetarian organic diet (and simultaneously taking up bicycling and swimming at the local Y) I've lost 15 pounds and none of my clothes fit me anymore.

I am looking for any tips or suggestions anyone might have for making connections within shoe/sneaker companies or clothing companies where I might buy myself a few new pairs of jeans (and maybe shorts!).

New England Visits: The Farmers

The greatest “winging it” aspect of the trip was the plan to visit a farm or farms that supply produce to the Park Slope Food Coop. After experiencing reluctance (or outright refusal) to welcome visitors, the Coop wasn’t comfortable suggesting any of their farms. But they do list their suppliers on their website and with some creative internet stalking, I was able to track down the address of about a half dozen farms that were in southern Vermont and along the Hudson River Valley in New York. We crossed our fingers and started driving.

Our first attempt was the Harlow Brother’s Organic Produce Farm and Farmstand in Westminster, VT. We would learn later that the key was the farmstand, where they were at least set up to receive the public in some capacity. With some friendly greetings, we were introduced to Abby who, without much hesitation, offered us coffee and sat with us to chat. She admitted that she wasn’t psyched to hear that there were “two guys visiting from New York who wanted to talk to someone about the farm”, but when she saw we had no agenda or pretension she warmly and enthusiastically took us out on to the farm in her dusty pickup (with a screwdriver in the ignition). Abby was about our age, and had been a Vermont farm girl all her life. In fact, she and the other farm workers all live on or right near the farm’s land. The work eventually took it’s toll and she ruptured three discs in her back a few years ago and realized a career change was necessary. She just finished nursing school at a nearby college and will soon split her time between the farm and a local hospital. It seems unfortunate, as farming is clearly her passion.

She showed us the freshly planted herbs, giant heads of cabbage and yellow squash, rows of developing corn, and a field of flowers that they grow to maintain their cut-flower business catering primarily to the local wedding industry. Abby also explained to us Vermont’s exchange partnership with Jamaica. Ten Jamaican men come to live and work on their farm for the summer and fall months every year, and then return to their families in the winter. The program stipulates the men’s wages, which actually meant wages across the farm were raised when they began involvement with the program.

She then offered us a dip in their water hole, which was pretty idyllic, before sending us on our way with a bag of bright greens and soil-covered beets straight from the ground.

It was an extremely lucky first stop, as the other farms we dropped by were actually people’s homes and I didn’t have the gall to walk up and knock on their front door. As Joe said, the mission is to forge a connection with people, not piss them off.

New England Visits: The Environmentalist Chemist

After saying goodbye to our Tom’s of Maine tour guide Cindy, with about a dozen complimentary toothpaste tubes tucked in our bags, we hit the road again for Burlington, VT. I had connected with Jay LeDuc, Senior Vice President of Operations at Seventh Generation, by phone a few months ago. He had then offered to show me around should I ever be in town. When I emailed him to take him up on the offer, he quickly wrote back letting me know he had made appointments for me with several members of the administration. What I didn’t know at the time was that of 300,000 customers, Joe and I were the first two to ever ask to come to their headquarters and meet the people who work there.

Seventh Generation’s products are made in their “Manufacturing Partners” factories, so we were headed to their administrative headquarters located on the second and third floors of an office building overlooking the Burlington coast of Lake Champlain. I was a bit discouraged by the corporate-ness of the building, but completely and pleasantly surprised by the comfortable, welcoming vibe of the Seventh Generation’s wing. The lobby is adorned with photos of their founder participating in civil disobedience rallies in D.C., and the Design of Dissent on the waiting room table. They have separate compost and recycling bins in the bathrooms, and not a suit and tie in sight.



We were greeted by Martin Wolf, Director of Product/Environmental Technology who showed us around and then sat us in a conference room. It was clear he wasn’t really sure what this “meeting” he had been scheduled for was all about, but when he figured out we were just customers who where there for a visit, he smiled and chatted with us for over an hour. He told us all about his environmental research consulting firm, living in Boston, and coming to work for Seventh Generation seven years ago. As the company's lead chemist, he has been responsible for designing the formulas for every cleaning product they make. A Brooklyn native, it took him a few years to appreciate the slow, easy pace of Burlington, but now embraces his bike ride to work along the lake and the socially and environmentally responsible company he works for.

Two anecdotes stood out. When we were joined by Penney Tudor, Director of Quality Assurance, they told us about the company’s various criteria for forging partnerships with manufacturers. Though all were rigorous and progressive, the most surprising was the inclusion of an evaluation of how factory workers’ salaries and benefits compare to those of the plants administration.

And my favorite reality-check from Martin: he had just returned from a conference discussing Sustainability in Manufacturing. He and many other speakers focused on environmental impact, recycling and reuse, and social responsibility such as the evaluation I just mentioned. Then a rep from Lockheed Martin took the stage. They have 100 workers on their production line, and have been making great strides at lowering their injury rate to below 400 incidents a year. In weapons manufacturing, apparently, sustainability just means keeping your employees alive.

New England Visits: The Factory Workers

It’s been a week since my New England road trip and I’m just now getting around to posting about it. Partially because the rest of my life was sitting here waiting for me to catch up after being out of town, and partially because this is starting to feel more and more like just another part of my life, something that I do, and less like a crazy adventure. Though, really, when I sit back and think about it, it’s exactly both of those things.

Aspects of this excursion were planned months in advance, and some parts were completely fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants. We started by driving the 5 and half hours to southern Maine after work on Wednesday, pulling off Route 1 in The Yorks, a coastal town about an hour away from our morning appointment at the Tom’s of Maine factory in Sanford. I had scheduled myself in for the first tour of the season, 9:30 am Thursday morning. Tours of the factory only run through the summer months as they are hosted by Cindy, a first grade school teacher. She greeted us outside in the ‘herb garden’ where they grow examples of the types of herbs used to flavor their toothpastes and scent their deodorants. She then took us on an hour-long eye-opening tour of what can only be compared to the manufacturing process of Mr. Willy Wonka.

We started at the giant blenders that mix thousands of gallons of toothpaste, which is then shot through tubes along the ceiling into the room next door where six line-workers aid the laser-guided conveyor belts. Every two hours, workers shift to a new spot on the line to avoid fatigue, either right there on the toothpaste area or over onto the deodorant line. Rube Goldberg would be proud as deodorant sticks are skimmed by hair dryers (no joke, four hair dryers are perfectly positioned to blow off bubbles before the sticks are cooled and solidified) and bright orange discs which hold the sticks uprights are plucked off, carried high into the air, and roll thirty feet far above workers heads back to the start of the line.

We talked with a few of the workers, including John who has worked in the mixing room for 18 years. When he started, they were in a smaller facility in Kenebunk that was destroyed in a fire in 2004. As a rookie he was assigned the task of lifting and emptying 50lb bags of chalk into the mixers day in and out. Back then every ingredient was measured by hand and added individually. Now, massive scales and computers do most of the measuring but that hasn’t precluded getting their hands dirty. Despite hairnets, beard nets, aprons, eye goggles, and gloves, John’s family and friends can still make out what flavor he worked with that day. Nothing like going to the bank and having the teller pronounce, “Hi John, you guys mixing fennel today?”

We also spent time with the folks working on the floss packaging. Floss is the only product not made in the factory, but it is packaged and shipped there. This process is handled by a local community group home for adults with mental disabilities. We met Margaret, who is also blind, who folds together the tiny boxes, inserts the product info sheets and floss so they face the right way, and passes them to others who box and crate them for shipping. She and her housemates are right there in the middle of all the action, between the toothpaste line and the deodorant conveyor belts, all day three days a week for the past three years.

It was the first time I had ever seen how a factory works since I stopped watching Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood 25 years ago. Though it’s just another day for the folks who work there, it’s sort of wondrous to an outsider.