Ethics
A shirt that says PATIENCE should not have a story we'd be impatient to explain. So this page is the boring kind of ethics: named facilities, certificate numbers, dates we checked them, and links so you can check again.
Our policy
- No child labor, full stop — verified, not assumed. Every blank vendor must meet at least two of: Fair Trade Certified™ or Fair Wear Foundation, facility-level current WRAP certification, OEKO-TEX Standard 100 (print chemistry), or a published facility list with public audit summaries. Meeting a standard is not enough; it must be findable in the certifying body's own registry.
- Radical-ish disclosure. For every SKU we publish its tier-1 (cut & sew) and tier-2 (fabric/knit) facilities, named. If we can't name them, we don't sell the blank.
- Excluded origins. We do not source cotton from regions with state-sponsored forced labor. Explicitly: no cotton grown in China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, and none from Turkmenistan or Uzbekistan, at any tier of our disclosed chain. (More on where this honestly stands, below.)
- Annual third-party audits, current certificates on file, before any SKU goes live: signed vendor agreement + current audit certificate + factory-list link. No exceptions for convenience.
- Printed in the US. Printing is done domestically — shorter QA loops, and you can actually call the shop.
- Print-on-demand is a testing channel, not a supply chain. Limited novelty drops (you'll meet them) may run through POD blanks that meet the same certification bar. The Core line stays on our audited blanks.
Where every vendor stands — checked 2026-10-16
Our verification method: we checked the certifier's database, not the vendor's marketing page. WRAP facility register, Fair Wear brand records, GOTS global-trace-base, Fair Labor Association accreditation files, Fair Trade USA partner listings. Anything we couldn't match in a registry is marked UNVERIFIED — and a UNVERIFIED item never appears as "certified" in anything we print or post.
Bella+Canvas — our primary blanks (the 3001 Unisex you're buying)
| Claim | What the registry says | Status |
|---|---|---|
| WRAP-certified facilities | All 10 named facilities match WRAP's public register as "certified": North Las Vegas NV (exp. 2027-06-04), Montebello CA (exp. 2028-01-02), Commerce CA (exp. 2026-10-27 — renewal window; re-verifying before it counts), plus five in Nicaragua and one in Honduras, each with current expiry dates on file | VERIFIED — current (one near-expiry flagged) |
| Fair Labor Association accreditation | FLA's own records: accreditation awarded 2024-10-23 after multi-year review; the full public assessment covers 8 owned + 2 contract factories, 3 countries, ~7,100 workers | VERIFIED — current |
| Published factory list | FLA-required list, last updated 2026-06-23: named tier-1/tier-2 facilities with addresses and headcounts | VERIFIED — current |
| Cotton origins | Disclosed chain runs through US gins and mills (Parkdale Mills NC, Bentex, Style Knits), India, and Central America — no Chinese fiber origin appears anywhere in the disclosure; ~20M lbs of US cotton bought annually per their impact report | VERIFIED by disclosure |
Stanley/Stella — our organic line
| Claim | What the registry says | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Fair Wear Foundation | Member since 2011; membership valid to 2028-09-01; Brand Performance Check score 84 with the 2025 report published 2026-03-31 on Fair Wear's portal | VERIFIED — current |
| GOTS organic | Two licenses in the GOTS database: Stanley and Stella SA (GOTS-17686, valid to 2027-06-24) and Stanley Stella INC, Irvine CA (GOTS-20354, to 2027-08-18) | VERIFIED — current |
| Factory disclosure | Named CMT factories with per-factory Fair Wear audit dates in published annual reports; 100% of production locations on Fair Wear's transparency portal | VERIFIED |
| Cotton traceability | GOTS chain-of-custody back to smallholder farms in India and direct-to-farm partnerships in Tanzania; no Xinjiang cotton appears in any disclosure | VERIFIED by traceability |
| OEKO-TEX product claims | No license numbers published to check | UNVERIFIED — we don't repeat it |
Considered and not launched with
- Pact — real Fair Trade and GOTS credentials at the brand level, verified; but they publish no factory list, and unverifiable transparency fails our bar #2. Held as backup.
- AS Colour — we could not verify a single §5 criterion: factories listed without names, WRAP tiers that were retired in March 2026, cotton on mass-balance (not physically traceable). Nothing personal — a virtue brand can't print "verified" over anonymous claims. Not in our line.
What's still open (we'd rather admit it than bury it)
- The XUAR/Turkmenistan sentence. None of our vendors publishes that exact written exclusion — their disclosed chains make exposure implausible, but implausible isn't a contract. We are adding it as a written clause with each vendor; until each one is signed, our claim is precisely this: no such origin appears anywhere in the disclosed supply chains we verified.
- Certificate currency. Certifications expire — WRAP ended its Gold/Platinum tiers in March 2026 (any vendor page still touting "Gold WRAP" is stale, and we treat that as an audit flag). This table has a check date for a reason; we re-run it quarterly and the date updates.
- Fair Trade facility-level certificates for our backup vendor are login-gated at the certifier — brand partnership verified, per-facility papers UNVERIFIED from public data.
Registry links for every row above live in our sourcing audit, kept in the same repo as this page. The point isn't that we passed. The point is that you can check.