Eh. Okay, I tried to be funny.
Guiding truths for my closet, adopted today. 9/8/7 (cool date!)
A) Buying organic, free trade things and throwing out all my perfectly good clothes does not make me a better consumer, it makes me worse. Therefore I will keep everything in my closet until it 1) doesn’t fit 2) is worn out 3) I hate it so much I would go out naked instead.
B) My retail dollars count and send a message.
C) I will have a gameplan for what I buy. (Another post, another day.)
D) At least 50% of the items of clothing I buy in the next 365 days will be organic and free trade. (They seem to go hand in hand but I’m having a bit of trouble finding information on websites promoting their product as free trade – which you think they’d be screaming from the mountaintops – however I’ve found a couple of retailers who seem to have good ethics and free trade is part of their mission, so I will trust that they have done the research (which could always bite me in the ass.))
Links to either actual companies, or quick and dirty lists of many companies. This was a pretty preliminary search so if you find something fishy, please, please post in the comments, if you find something awesome, please, please post in the comments.
http://www.stewartbrown.com/ (I drool here)
http://www.harmonyart.com (fabric)
http://www.nearseanaturals.com/ (fabric and yarn)
http://www.hannaandersson.com/ (unsure about fair trade, I’m just being suspicious really, they seem to be a good company)
http://www.birchclothing.com/merch.asp
2 Comments
Red
You may also want to check out http://www.thehungersite.com and its affiliates (breast cancer site, animal rescue, rainforest, etc.).
They have some clothes, lots of free trade jewelry, and some free trade food as well (I’ve given their free trade chocolate before as a gift & it’s been a big hit).
They also have ads linking to organic clothing — especially on the rainforest page.
Mom Unplugged
Great links! I couldn’t get the “Ralper” link to load for some reason. Probably either a problem with me or a temporary server down on their end.
I frequently buy from Hanna Andersson and their clothes are wonderful (go for the sales if you can though). They last forever too. I don’t know about the “free trade” though. Why don’t you email them?
Thanks for stopping by my blog. True that my “Unplugged Birthday Party” leaves less crap to clear up off the floor (and there is EVEN LESS after my big clear-out today!). We still seem to have a lot of stuff everywhere though. Big sigh.
Now that I might have found a system for minimizing Birthday Excess, Christmas is next on the list. As you mentioned, why do people insist on sending stuff when you say you need nothing? That happens to us too.
I like your blog!