TS Designs

“In our view, to go outside of your market for a product or service that your market can provide is not sustainable.”

“The bottom line is that the big companies didn’t care about Rehance,” says Henry. “So we went from a hundred employees to fourteen. We creatively destroyed ourselves and came back as a new business.”

“We decided to build our success by simultaneously looking after people, the planet, and profits. Everything we do now is focused on triple bottom line. This gives us a vision that we feel will allow us to survive in the global textile market.”

TS Designs

Reinventing the T-Shirt

as a student at North Carolina State, Eric Henry was already hawking t-shirts. His buddy Tom Sineath, who had a small company called TS Designs, handled the screenprinting. Business was booming—so good, in fact, that Henry elected to leave school and become a stockholder in TS Designs. The year was 1978. Over the next decade and a half they grew a successful small business, screenprinting t-shirts for industry heavyweights like Nike.

In 1992, with business still booming, Henry remembers attending his first conference on NAFTA. “Chuck Hayes from Burlington Industries was talking about all of these great benefits for the textile industry. We just didn’t get it. We didn’t have an interest in becoming the low cost producer. So we went back and said ‘let’s develop a technology that we control that has greater value.’ In 1996 they approached Sam Moore of the Burlington Chemical Company, a personal friend, to help them develop an environmentally friendly alternative to conventional screen- printing, which uses “plastisol” inks containing polyvinyl chloride (PVC).

TS Designs spent a quarter million dollars, as did Burlington Chemical, to develop not only a water-based ink, but a completely different approach to putting a design on a t-shirt. The process is called Rehance, and the result was a dramatic reduction in environmental impact while creating a higher perceived value for the garment.

The Rehance process involves printing water-based ink on a Prepared-For-Dye (PFD) garment before it is dyed. Instead of laying on top of the garment like a traditional plastisol screenprint, the water-based ink print goes into the fabric itself and changes how the dye will react to it when the garment is dyed. The print will either resist or enhance the dye to create a different color from the unprinted portion of the garment. In addition to the environmental advantages, the process results in a completely breathable t-shirt—there’s no plastic feel on the printed surface. In fact, the printed surface can even be ironed. The print lasts longer, prolonging the useful life of the t-shirt. And because these t-shirts are garment dyed (most t-shirts are piece dyed), they will not shrink. (Although they do not use natural dyes, TS Designs claims to use the lowest impact reactive dyes available on the market today.)

These impressive advancements not withstanding, the response in the marketplace was less than enthusiastic. “The bottom line is that the big companies didn’t care about Rehance,” says Henry. “So we went from a hundred employees to fourteen. We creatively destroyed ourselves and came back as a new business.”

TS Designs had always worked to minimize environmental impacts and to provide well for their employees, but during this period of “creative destruction”, Henry and Sineath were introduced to the concept of the triple bottom line. “We decided to build our success by simultaneously looking after people, the planet, and profits. Everything we do now is focused on triple bottom line. This gives us a vision that we feel will allow us to survive in the global textile market, although we’ll never be the lowest cost producer. So while NAFTA has devastated the textile industry, we’ve established a position and direction that will allow us to stay around.”

All t-shirts stocked by TS Designs are organic cotton and made either in the U.S. or by a cooperative in Nicaragua the company has been working with for years. That said, as a nod to the reality of the marketplace, TS Designs will now special order conventional cotton t-shirts made offshore if the customer desires, although it is labeled on the order form as the “least sustainable” option.

“In our view, to go outside of your market for a product or service that your market can provide is not sustainable. Ideally, we’d like to go from organic cotton grown in North Carolina to a finished shirt in North Carolina. Ultimately, we think that’s a big part of what sustainability is. The textile industry has been devastated, but the infrastructure is still in place. The ginning, knitting, printing and dyeing can all be done in North Carolina.”

While the Rehance story is impressive, perhaps what best distinguishes TS Designs is the comprehensive nature of their approach to minimizing chemical, energy, and material inputs and outputs, and to limit water usage facility wide. Sineath and Henry treat their headquarters in Burlington, North Carolina as a laboratory, seemingly missing no opportunity to express their commitment to sustainability. A solar array provides a portion of their electricity needs. A gray water system supplies water to the toilets, so purified water doesn’t get flushed down the drain. They’ve installed a waterless urinal. There is an organic co-op garden on the property, and the landscaping has been designed using the principles of permaculture. Henry’s latest endeavor is a small batch biodiesel processor at the TS Designs facility, where he converts waste vegetable oil from local eateries like Zack’s Hot Dogs and Hursey’s BBQ into biodiesel. Henry’s car runs on veggie power, and he’s even organized a local biodiesel cooperative.

“I believe it’s important to demonstrate sustainable practices, not just talk about them,” he says.

Not surprisingly, Henry and Sineath have been showered with awards and praise for their efforts on behalf of the environment. Most recently, in November of 2004, TS Designs was presented with the Green Business Leader Award from Co-op America at the second annual Green Business Conference in San Francisco. The award recognizes TS Designs’ work to “create a greener world by using fair and sustainable methods.”

Now with 30 employees, the company looks to the future with a pragmatic optimism.

“We have to succeed,” says Henry. “If we don’t, people will conclude the only model that works is the Wal-Mart model.”

(For more information on TS Designs, visit them at booth #1933, or go to www.tsdesigns.com. Eric Henry can be reached by phone at 336/229-6426, ext. 201, or via e-mail at eric@tsdesigns.com.)

How much does sustainability cost?

At TS Designs, the goal is to make a garment that meets all current organic apparel standards, is produced in a socially responsible and transparent manner, and is of the highest quality possible in order to compete against the other extreme of the apparel industry, which utilizes conventional cotton, offshore, low-cost labor and unsound printing techniques. A conventional cotton t-shirt produced overseas and printed with plastisol ink goes for about $4.00. An organic cotton t-shirt produced domestically using the Rehance process costs about $9. (Both examples are for three colors on a dyed t-shirt.)

What’s the matter with plastisol?

The U. S. screenprinting industry uses an estimated 1.5 million gallons of plastisol ink every year, and between 30 and 50 percent of that ink contains PVCs. PVC (polyvinyl chloride)—often referred to as “‘vinyl”—is one of the most versatile of the plastic materials and yet most hazardous for the environment, both during production and disposal. Dioxins, one of the most toxic chemicals and potent carcinogens known to science, are created and released during the production of PVC, contributing to a variety of environmental problems. (From the TS Designs website.)