Greater>Than Clothing

This is the first in a series of posts on the broad topic of “sustainability”.

From the beginning, I have thought of Greater>Than as a kind of laboratory. I’m interested in different ideas about how to structure a business, but I have never been in a position to implement them myself. Further, it seems unlikely that I will ever have license to be truly radical within the context of my day job.

As in most larger companies, greater responsibility seems to coincide with increasing conservatism. I’m not sure which side is causal, but they are definitely directly correlated. So, Greater>Than is a chance for us to try things out, and while it isn’t exactly risk-free since we have invested some significant effort into the project, it isn’t the basis of our livelihoods (at least not yet).

photo credit: shearforce

One of the most buzzed-about concepts in business today is sustainability. When oil companies are making commercials touting their environmental sensitivity, I think we can safely say the concept has reached a critical mass. Consumers are leading the charge. As the general public becomes more convinced of threats such as global warning, they start looking for ways to mitigate their contribution to the problem. More and more, consumers will choose “greener” products if given an opportunity.

Many companies have responded by flooding the marketplace with products that claim to be less harmful to produce, use or dispose of than their predecessors. While greater attention on the issue is a positive development on the whole, there are to my mind at least two major flaws with these early efforts to consume more sustainably.

First, given the American tendency to use “what we buy” as a proxy for “how we live” and even “who we are”, we may have found ourselves a path to getting the small things “right” at the expense of the larger picture. There is a peculiar symbiosis between American consumers and the products that we buy that allows us to construct our public and private personas in part through the products we choose. The ramifications of this relationship are far-reaching, but it’s most germane to this topic in that it explains why adjusting our consumer choices is the most efficient way to start to feel like we’re making a difference. Buy some recycled paper towels, some natural detergent, maybe even a Prius, and you become a full-fledged eco-warrior.

You might even begin to look down on people who haven’t made the same efforts that you have (here, as in many, many other areas, South Park provides the sharpest satire, showing us that despite reducing smog the Prius leads to dangerous levels of smug). My point here is not simply to point out that some people are a bit hypocritical in their greenness (I’m not free from guilt here myself), but to suggest that real change may require asking tougher questions of ourselves than whether we are willing to switch to CF bulbs. In fact, it’s not hard to imagine that a few years from now we’ll look back on our attempts to buy our way out of this mess and realize how stunningly hubristic it all was. We might even find that “sustainable consumption” is an oxymoron.

Second, the total environmental impact of a consumer product can be surprisingly difficult to determine, let alone mitigate. Many companies have garnered negative press for their “greenwashing” - the marketing of “green” products whose environmental claims are unsubstantiated or falsified - and these companies deserve all the blame they receive for their cynical and greedy response to what is so far the defining issue of the century.

However, the thornier and potentially more intractable problem may be the difficulty that even the most well-meaning companies have had as they have begun to unravel the complex web of factors that determines whether their products are part of the problem or part of the solution. Michael Specter’s recent New Yorker article, “Big Foot“, provides some great background on this issue, and is highly recommended.

photo credit: shearforce

So what’s the point of all this exposition? Well, this is the context in which we are launching a business, and in the midst of all this confusion we are trying to define what “sustainability” means to us. What are the characteristics of a sustainable t-shirt company? What makes a t-shirt itself “sustainable”? We need a theory cohesive enough to guide us as we lay the foundation of our little enterprise.

I’m going to use a few blog posts to try to get some of the specific issues facing us out in the open, if only as a starting point to the discussion. We hope to have an ongoing dialog with our customers on these topics in order to keep our business practices in line with their expectations. As a consumer, I don’t like the idea that the companies who produce the items I buy would take shortcuts or make other decisions I couldn’t live with myself, and I want to maintain that attitude as a producer of products.

If you want to start the feedback loop now, let us know what sustainability means to you in the comments.

Side note: I used a great new WordPress plug-in called Photo Dropper to find these cool vintage t-shirt photos on Flickr and pop them straight into this post. I think they capture the mood of t-shirt sustainability quite nicely. The tool even gives appropriate credit to the photographer, shearforce. Rockin’.

Another side note: You can now watch every episode of South Park ever online, including the “Smug Cloud” episode I referenced above. Enjoy.