Eucalyptus Magazine / November-December 2011 / Righteous Ready-to-Wear

Righteous Ready-to-Wear

Clothing manufacturers do good

Dozens of stores in the San Francisco Bay Area sell environmentally friendly clothing, but most consumers know very little about where it comes from or how it is manufactured. Today’s eco-friendly garments can be made of peace silk, recycled polyester, hemp, bamboo, organic cotton, or recycled “finds” from the local Goodwill store. Your purchase of eco-friendly clothing instead of garments sold by traditional manufacturers may help to support not just green living and a more sustainable earth, but also international social justice.

Amour Vert
With two sewing factories in San Francisco and a cutting factory in Oakland, Amour Vert (French for “love green”) manufactures clothing made from peace silk. In traditional silk manufacturing, silk worms are killed, but with peace silk, the worms are kept alive.

The company was launched by Linda Balti and Christoph Frehsee in April 2010, and Balti says that business is booming.

“We are above projections and expectations… Now more than ever, you’ll see big name brands going for the eco-movement,” she says. “Everyone is doing their part... It’s the future.”

Amour Vert uses only low-impact or vegetable dyes for coloring its silk pieces. The company also makes clothing out of organic cotton, which is grown without using pesticides or herbicides; and bamboo, which grows in the wild without fertilizers, pesticides, or irrigation.

The French-born Balti divides her time between production and design, which is done by hand. “We sketch everything,” she says. “It’s a very old-fashioned way, but also very efficient. We have a pattern maker in Oakland who integrates the sketch into an actual pattern.”

Her husband Frehsee, who is from Germany, handles the operations side of the business. He earned an MBA from Stanford and is working toward a master’s degree in environment and resources. The company was started after Frehsee and Balti quit their jobs in 2009 and went on a tour around the world. While traveling, Balti read an article about how most clothing is made.

“I was shocked,” she says. “I didn’t know about the pesticides and insecticides. At that point, I didn’t want to buy regular clothing anymore.”

Balti saw a void in the market. Affordable, environmentally friendly clothing was nearly impossible to find, so she and Frehsee decided to make their own.

Amour Vert’s clothes, which range in price from $20 to $180, are sold at boutiques throughout the country. They can be purchased locally at Gitane in Palo Alto; Pacific Trading Company and Eco Goods in Santa Cruz; and Two Birds, Heritage Row, and Bryan Lee in San Francisco.

Balti says that working in the fashion industry is challenging and fun. “We see so much potential to shake it up a little bit,” she says. “We are sustainable and we are beautiful,” she says. “That’s a good mix to talk about.”

Greenlight Apparel
Greenlight Apparel produces running clothing made from recycled polyester and organic cotton. Sonny Aulakh, Greenlight’s founder and CEO, says that runners make ideal customers because people who participate in sports tend to be environmentally conscious. A smaller percentage of Greenlight’s business comes from producing other types of casual and active wear, including T-shirts, polo shirts, and customized “logo” clothing for corporations.

According to Aulakh, Greenlight manufactures its products in Asia because its cutting-edge textiles originate there. One of the company’s goals is to have its production facilities as close as possible to where its fabric, hardware, and fixtures originate, in order to reduce the environmental impact of shipping.

Aulakh, who is from India, came to the United States at age 18. After attending engineering school at Sacramento State University, he landed a job at Cisco that took him to Africa, Asia, and South America. But he didn’t see himself working in technology his whole life, so he enrolled in the MBA program at the University of California at Davis, where he participated in a class project that wound up being the launch of Greenlight.

Aulakh and four other students visited a number of sports apparel manufacturers in South Asia who employed underage children to work in their sweatshops. Many of the children were younger than 8 years old and worked longer than 12 hours a day. In addition to harsh working conditions, the children were exposed to large amounts of insecticides and pesticides. Moved by their plight, the students came up with a business plan, entered it into a competition at the University of California at Berkeley, and won. They founded Greenlight in 2007 with the goal of ending illegal child labor in the sports apparel industry and offering educational opportunities to children in South Asia, Africa, and South America.

Greenlight donates 10 percent of each sale to humanitarian charities, enabling the company to have an impact on hundreds of underprivileged children. Additionally, with every $50 in sales, Greenlight donates solar lanterns to families in rural areas of Africa and India, who were previously using kerosene lamps to light their homes. Burning kerosene is more toxic to the lungs that cigarette smoking.

At Greenlight’s two factories in India and Vietnam, both of which are certified by Fair Trade USA, workers receive paid vacation days, health insurance, and access to much better working conditions than they would have otherwise, Aulakh says.

Once the clothes are made, they are shipped to the U.S. The company’s sales have grown more than 400 percent since its beginnings in 2008. Aulakh expects business to continue to grow because people are more conscious of their buying decisions and there is a greater demand for recycled polyester.

Aulakh believes that eco-friendly clothing will become the norm. “Consumers are going to demand it,” he says. “Big retailers are going to start honing in on it.”

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More Eco-Fashion

Marky Designs
Marketa “Marky” Briceno loves to recycle, so it’s not surprising that she runs an environmentally friendly clothing business, Marky Designs, out of her San Jose home. Briceno buys clothes at Goodwill stores and then makes new clothes by mixing and matching fabrics from her purchases. “I love to sew and put different designs together, using different material,” she says.

The mother of a three-year-old daughter, Briceno makes clothes for the younger set: newborns to five-year-olds. Her girls’ dresses are her most popular sellers, but she also makes

children’s T-shirts and sweatshirts. Each piece of clothing is made by hand and one of a kind.

The rewards of her work are in seeing people wear her clothes, while the challenges are trying to be a mother while also running her business, says Briceno. “I’m just trying to grow the business,” she says. “I’m just trying to grow it little by little, (and) see what happens.”

Briceno, who is from the Czech Republic, credits her 90-year-old grandmother, who was a fashion designer in Prague, for getting her interested in fashion. Her designs are available at YogaSource, Babycoo, and Automobuild in Los Gatos, or online at www.markydesigns.webs.com.

No Enemy
In 2001, Paul Cheatham founded No Enemy, a Santa Cruz-based company that makes men’s, women’s, and children’s clothing out of hemp and 100 percent organic cotton. No Enemy’s products include shirts, pants, hoodies, and accessories.

Hemp and organic cotton are much more environmentally friendly than other clothing fabrics. No pesticides are used to grow them, and their manufacturing process requires less energy and less contaminating chemicals than other clothing fabrics. No Enemy creates colorful designs on its apparel by using PVC-free inks from Bay Area facilities.

“Hemp is the most comfortable, durable, and environmentally friendly fabric,” says Cheatham. “It’s also more breathable than cotton and handles moisture better than cotton.”

Cheatham, 32, launched No Enemy during his senior year of college. While enrolled in a class titled, “The Sociology of Violence, War, and Peace,” he watched a documentary about a man who was abusive to his wife. He remembered thinking to himself: “This guy is the enemy.”

“I started the company to spread a positive visual image,” Cheatham says. “It wasn’t about clothing; it was the concept of No Enemy and how to capture that concept. That was the whole foundation.”

Good Gear
Connecticut-based Good Gear makes athletic clothing such as running shorts and T-shirts from earth-friendly, breathable bamboo. Owner Torin Lee says, “I like the idea of being a pioneer in the ‘eco-activewear’ movement, as I call it… We are making an innovative, eco-friendly product line. We source raw materials from the best places possible, taking advantage of global markets while partnering with U.S. manufacturers and designers to help other small businesses grow.”

Bamboo is a sustainable resource, Lee says. “The environmental benefits of bamboo clothing are just as important as style and comfort, and they far exceed the eco-utility of synthetic textiles. Bamboo [is] quick to grow and does not require fertilizers or pesticides. It requires very little water and can survive drought conditions as well as flooding.”

The manufacturing of synthetic fabrics, on the other hand, takes a huge environmental toll. “Just like making sausage, you don’t want to know how the synthetics are made. They are as far away from being eco-friendly as conceivable,” Lee says.

Bamboo fabric offers advantages for athletes who want lightweight, moisture-wicking clothing, Lee says. “We will match our cloth’s performance with any synthetic. And because of its anti-microbial ability, it doesn’t retain odor like many synthetics.”