“Fair Trade Certified” Clothing Now Availble in United States

As a part of a two-year pilot test, Fair Trade USA will make a full range of “Fair Trade Certified“ clothing available to consumers in the United States. “Ethical fashion is about more than just protecting the environment. It’s about people, and ‘fair’ is just a knock-off without third-party certification to deliver the proof,” says Heather Franzese, the company’s senior manager of apparel and linens.

According to the company (formerly TransFair USA), the following sustainable products are available from brands working with best-in-class Fair Trade manufacturing facilities and cooperatives in Costa Rica, India and Liberia:

• Liberty & Justice (San Francisco) is made by the Liberian Women’s Sewing Project, which creates sustainable jobs for women’s sewing cooperatives and provides workforce development training as well as health and education programs.
• Good and Fair Clothing (Austin, TX) is a new fashion brand that strives to create clothes that are both good to the earth and fair to people.
• HAE Now (El Sobrante, CA), which stands for Humans, Animals and Environment Now, offers organic t-shirts and other blanks for wholesale, promotional printing and private label needs. All their products are made with organic cotton from the Chetna project, a farmer-owned collective in India.
• Maggie’s Organics (Ypsilanti, MI) is one of the oldest eco-apparel companies in the United States. Bena Burda, its founder, has been involved with the Fair Trade Certified Apparel and Linens Pilot since 2005, when Fair Trade USA first began to explore the sector.
• Tompkins Point Apparel (Wyckoff, NJ), a Fair Trade and organic clothing brand that creates classic American menswear, donates 25 percent of its profits to education and economic development projects in the communities from which the company sources its products.