I’m back again to answer your questions:

1. Here’s why we have chosen to make Inhabitat T-shirts: it is a fun (and doable) design/creative project for us, it supports our brand and gets people thinking about our website, and finally, we do hope to make some money off of these T-shirts in the future when we can produce the shirts in big enough bulk that we can lower the overhead production costs of creating them. We are working on that right now.

2. We’re not glossing over the fact that water-based inks have their own issues and nasty chemicals in them. But we still stand by the fact that they are better than plastisol, and right now there is no better alternative in printing, (except perhaps embroidery – which is physically impossible for us to do right now in terms of labor costs)

3. We’d love to do an eco lamp in the future! However an eco-lamp is a lot more complicated and difficult (and energy intensitve, and requires a lot more nasty chemicals) than a T-shirt. Baby steps, baby steps.. we are working on more complicated projects like this. We also have a publication to run, so its hard to find time for industrial design and product engineering on the side.

4. As far as I know, T-shirts rarely ever end up in landfill…. The Salvation Army or Goodwill, yes, but landfill? Who ever throws T-shirts away? I’ve never thrown out a piece of clothing in my life and can’t think of anyone I know who has. It is so easy to donate and recycle old clothes that this idea seems rather preposterous to me. We assume and hope that anyone who orders our T-shirts is not planning on throwing them out in the trash.

Thanks for reading and commenting-

Jill

I wonder why you guys have chosen to produce a t-shirt that is not supporting inhabitat (money-wise).

The product/arch posts are great on this site, keep up the good work but the details or glossing over the fact that water-based inks as toxic should not be written an environmentally friendly. Why don’t you guys come up with a cool eco lamp (just an example) as you seem to be experts in this field :) and shy away from producing something the world and landfills are filled with – T-Shirts!

Every time we do a post on our T-shirts we get someone commenting on the price, so let me explain… and I hope that when I am done, you willl realize why these cost what they do – and you will see that these are very reasonably priced considering the quality of the materials and laborious production process.

Because of sweatshop labor and globalization, people have now come to expect that a typical T-shirt costs $20. However, You need to understand that when you spend $10 on a T-shirt at Walmart or Target – or $20-$30 at the Gap, the reason that that T-shirt is so cheap is because it is produced by sweatshirt labor in China, using the cheapest and lowest quality materials, under unregulated conditions. The cotton is not organic, nor is it grown in America, the pieces are mass produced using toxic inks.

If you try to use the highest level of quality in a T-shirt such as we have: using organic, American grown cotton – using garments produced in America, and printed by hand in a small shop, using water-based dyes (which are hard to get and hard to work with), the costs are very high. It actually costs us about $30 per piece to produce these shirts, and the extra $10 is to cover shipping.

We are making almost no profit off of these shirts, and honestly $40 is not at all unusual for a handmade organic cotton T-shirt. Compare our shirts to Loomstate or Alabama Chanin, or Stewart & Brown, or another ‘Eco line’ and you will see what I am talking about. You get what you pay for.

Thanks for reading…

-Jill

We will probably print a black version of this shirt next, so keep your eyes out for it. Sorry Jac – probably no red anytime soon – that just doesn’t fit with our green serene aesthetic right now.

To Greenmarketing-

This design was the second place winner of the T-shirt design competition – the whole process of how we arrived this design was very transparent, and you can see how it all happened online. Although there is a similar concept perhaps between this and the Mission Playground lungs shirt, the graphic is totally different, and our design is more meant to represent tree ROOTS than an anatomical drawing of human lungs. And, you can’t trademark an idea. That is why we picked this as a winner – we prefer the subtley and the multiple interpretations of this design to an overt drawing of lungs on a shirt. We actually had several submissions to our 2007 T-shirt design competition that looked EXACTLY like the Mission Playground design: anatomical drawings of lungs, and we didn’t like the obviousness. We much prefer this subtle design which is open to multiple interpretations, and that is why we selected Jonathan Sabutis’ well executed design.

Interesting to note though..

-Jill

Also – water-based inks are kinder to the environment than PVC inks but they are NOT environmentally friendly!