Fair Indigo now works with 25 factories across the globe; some specialize in skirts, others in sweaters. Bass says Fair Indigo's business model of selling directly to customers, through catalogs, the Internet, and its own boutiques, as opposed to selling through national retailers, keeps overhead low enough that it can afford to pay workers at its factories more. Because Fair Indigo is a private firm, Bass will not release sales figures, but he says the company is on track to turn a profit within four years, a time frame analysts say is in line for new apparel companies, fair trade or not.

Defining fair trade has been one of the challenges for companies like Fair Indigo that want to go mainstream with a concept many still see as existing only in the margins. At its most basic, the term indicates that the people who create the product are paid a living wage and have decent working conditions. Some expand that definition to include having the right to unionize and access to health care. Others, including the Fair Trade Federation in Washington, D.C., limit it to apply only to workers in developing nations. Often those who support fair trade also support the use of organics and other green initiatives, concerns that are tangential to fair trade, which is all about the labor practices.

"There's this perception of fair-trade clothing being made out of hemp, but that's not the case," says Patti Freeman Evans, a senior retail-industry analyst for New York-based JupiterResearch. "Bill certainly makes the business case for stylish, reasonably priced, competitive fair-trade apparel."

Concerning coffee - the unequivocal fair-trade success story - the process is simpler because coffee (like cocoa) is a commodity. Growers can be paid a fair market price for their goods, one that can be applied universally. The Specialty Coffee Association of America estimates that in 2006, 3.3 percent of coffee sales in the United States were fair trade (TransFair USA calculates this at a retail value of $730 million), thanks to support from megaplayers such as McDonald's. Two years before that, those figures were 1.7 percent and $369 million.