Fair Indigo Blog

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Sparking Joy is all the rage. People across the country are decluttering and simplifying their lives thanks to the Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo. Having moved a dozen times in my adult life, I fully support the idea of owning less. That's where good design comes in.

The world grows a LOT of cotton. 57 billion pounds a year. The best cotton - Pima - is 2% of the total. Organic Pima cotton? Yes, 0.0005%. We're talking 5 bushels out of every million! And that's where we play. Most of Fair Indigo's fabrics are made with Organic Pima cotton.

Last fall we made the decision to eliminate all hang tags on our men's and women's garments. It was an easy decision to make - reduce paper and plastic waste? Save labor time at our production facility attaching said hang tags? Done and done.

We've made the decision to discontinue our Organic All-Cotton Fleece for now - a sad decision indeed. Our fleece is rare - besides being made from super-soft-and-strong organic Pima cotton, it's made from ONLY super-soft-and-strong organic Pima cotton. Almost all fleece on the market today is made from part or all synthetic fibers. The final product has been beautiful, soft, and warm jackets and dresses. 

CHANGE. There may be no more hopeful word in the English language. The last days of the year are often spent reflecting on what change we’d like to create in our own lives.

I have vivid and fond memories of decorating the Christmas tree as a little girl. Ours was never one of those perfectly choreographed trees, with precisely spaced and color-coordinated ornaments perched among garland and ribbon. No, ours was one of those mish-mash trees, decorated with a motley, genre-crossing selection of ornaments.

Here at Fair Indigo we are counting down the days. In t-minus 60 (ish), we’ll start shipping orders from a new warehouse. Today orders are shipped from dozens of Amazon fulfillment centers around the country.

More than once, I heard a passersby say something to the effect, “wow, that’s so soft, but I just don’t like the idea of baby alpacas being sheared.”After politely correcting this misconception, it was clear we needed to do some educating on what baby alpaca actually is and is not.

In the world of fabric dyes there are 2 types – natural and synthetic. Natural dyes use items found in nature, such as minerals, roots, berries, bark, leaves, and wood to alter the color of fabric and yarns. At first blush, it would seem using natural dyes would be a natural extension of using organic cotton, which we use in the vast majority of our products. So why don’t we use natural dyes in our clothing?

Let’s talk plastic bags. They are a necessary evil in the world of clothing manufacturing – protecting your garment between our production facility in Peru to your doorstep. We’ve spent years searching for a solution that is a little gentler on the environment, and here it is!

French fries, German potato salad, Irish potato soup, Bengal potatoes. An international starch powerhouse, the humble potato is actually native to Peru, was domesticated there over 10,000 years ago, and was only introduced to Europe after the “discovery” of the Americas in the fifteenth century.

Every time I open my News app, Facebook, or, (why do i still?) Twitter, I find myself almost squinting one eye shut to avoid the latest evidence the world is spiraling toward oblivion. While we can’t bury our heads in the sand to bad news or real struggles, sometimes it helps to take a step back and realize that across the arc of human history, the world is actually getting better in many ways.

In our early years, Fair Indigo worked with several small-ish suppliers all over the world and in the US. We were country-agnostic. As long as you could produce quality products and pay and treat your workers well, we wanted to work with you. The universe of fair trade + clothing + quality was pretty small, however.

A new California startup has a novel idea to reduce waste and help families save money at the same time. It’s sort of a re-imagination of the hand-me-down kids clothing model many of us remember from our childhood.

Earth Day 2018 will “focus on fundamentally changing human attitude and behavior about plastics and catalyzing a significant reduction in plastic pollution” according to organizers at earthday.org.

Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. It's a helpful little mantra for those trying to use and waste less. It's time to add a 4th R word - Repair.   Over the past...

Every returning trip strengthens relationships, widens smiles and drives us to continue working to make the clothing business a little kinder. Here are a couple highlights from their trip.