All of our T-shirts, including the annual Piedmont Farm Tour tee, are printed in Burlington at TSDesigns. TSDesigns has worked to revive the North Carolina textile industry, creating a local supply chain for T-shirts. By not shipping cotton to China to be made into a tee, the transportation footprint can be reduced from 17,000 to 900 miles.
As always, the Farm Tour tees are made with organic cotton. Because organic cotton is not currently grown in our state, the tees are made from cotton grown in Texas. This results in a footprint of about 5000 miles (still much less than shipping to China!).
TSDesigns supply chain is completely transparent. You can use the shirt’s thread colors on their website, http://whereyourclothing.com/, to see the road the shirt traveled from dirt to shirt
Here’s the path of this year’s Piedmont Farm Tour shirts:
- The cotton was grown on seven farms in northern Texas.
- It was ginned (removing the seeds) at four gins.
- Then it was shipped to a yarn spinner in Graniteville, SC.
- The cotton yarn was knit into fabric in Troy, NC.
- The fabric is finished in Lincolnton, NC.
- Industries of the Blind cuts and sews the fabric into T-shirts in Greensboro.
- And, TSDesigns prints and dyes the tees in Burlington.