Clothing is more complicated because it is not a commodity.
Everyone, from the cotton growers to the factory workers who hem
the pant legs, needs to be paid a living wage, and the cost of the
end product differs, based on a number of subjective criteria such
as designer labels. So far, there hasn't been a McDonald's
equivalent in fair-trade apparel. If a company like the Gap decided
to convert all its factories to fair trade, the category of
fair-trade apparel would certainly get a boost. But Evans says that
at present, there are not enough fair-trade factories to handle
that kind of volume.
It's impossible to pinpoint the exact value of all fair-trade
products, partly because there is no U.S. certification of
fair-trade apparel. But estimates of the domestic nonagricultural
fair-trade market range from $200 million to $225 million.
"I feel the U.S. is slow to start but will move at a faster pace to
bring fair trade to scale," says Stacey Edgar,
president of Global
Girlfriend, a
Colorado firm that sells fair-trade goods made by
disadvantaged women. Edgar became aware of fair-trade issues after
her mother-in-law, the former first lady of
Illinois, told her
about the working conditions she'd seen when traveling to
developing countries.
Bass estimates that in the next decade, 10 to 15 percent of apparel
sales in the
United States will be from fair-trade clothing. And
Fair Indigo has competitors who are helping to move sales in that
direction.
U2 rock-star-turned-activist Bono launched Edun in 2005,
with an emphasis on high-fashion fair-trade clothing made
primarily in
Africa. Edun hawks more fashion-forward (and
expensive) togs than Fair Indigo, with $200 jeans sold at the likes
of
Fred Segal and Nordstrom. And Los Angeles-based American
Apparel, while not technically considered a fair-trade purveyor
because its T-shirts are made in the United States, has a
no-sweatshop stance that helped it reach revenues of $250 million
in 2005, just two years after opening its first store. Publicly
traded Gaiam sells fair-trade clothing as part of its overall
eco-lifestyle catalog. (Gaiam's 2006 revenues were $219 million,
but clothing sales were not broken down separately.)