Since NAFTA we have lost over 100,000 textile and apparel jobs in North Carolina.

At TS Designs we want to be a different company, a company based on a triple bottom line of People, Planet and Profit.  We print t-shirts, 90% of them are domestically made and 60% are made in North Carolina.

North Carolina is the 4th largest grower of cotton in the US and we export 50% of that cotton, so last year we launched a new brand, Cotton of the Carolinas.  The Cotton of the Carolinas shirt is grown, made, and sold entirely in North Carolina. Our t-shirts impacts 700 jobs in North Carolina at 6 different companies.  We go from dirt to shirt in 750 miles when an average t-shirt can travel 17,000 miles!

It is the only apparel line that is completely transparent for the consumer all the way to the farmer. When you get one of our shirts you can connect directly to Ronnie Burleson, the cotton farmer, and the other 5 companies that are involved in making this t-shirt.

Our t-shirts do cost more, but hopefully one thing that we have learned from this record unemployment in a jobless recovery is that there is more than just low price.

For more information about Cotton of the Carolinas, go to the website. cottonofthecarolinas.com

TSD lost the hoop house during a recent windstorm (see photo above), but that opened the door to bring in chickens.  Ben Wright from Peacehaven Community Garden and Will Hooker, head of the Permaculture program at NC State, will help with the chicken endeavor.   The plan is to start with about six chickens, which will be allowed to graze in the fallow rolls of the garden, contained in a fence, within the fenced garden.

Tom is working on updates to our greenhouse (see photo above), which should be complete by the end of January.  After taking a refresher course at the fall conference of Carolina Farm Stewardship in Black Mountain, Eric is planning to dive into heirloom tomatoes this year.  Partnering with Weston Monroe from Peacehaven, they will start the seeds next month in the greenhouse.

There will also be other changes in the garden this year, including improvements to the watering system, putting in individually controlled soaker hoses for each row.  The deer fence will also be improved. Last year there were continuous issues with sections coming down, deer never got into the garden, but it is just a matter of time if the problem is not corrected.  It should be a bumper crop at TSD this summer, come by and have lunch with us!

This is a 8.5×11 sheet that profiles Ronnie, our cotton farmer.

This is a 1/3 page pamphlet that shows people how to track their shirt that can be cut into 3 pamphlets per page.

Our friends at the Abundance Foundation recently completed their “Office of the Future,” a fossil fuel-free workspace.  The office runs off of a 510 watt solar array, a 30 watt solar air heater, and they plan on putting in a solar air conditioner for the summer. It was made out of local materials and they also used soy spray insulation and low VOC paints.  In the photo above, they are sporting their new red TS Designs shirts on a snowy afternoon in front of their office in Pittsboro, NC.

The Downtown Burlington co-op grocery took several hundred pounds of scraps and packed them into the open side of a rolling partition wall, then covered the side with chicken wire to hold the scraps in.  The wall is now sound absorbent, drastically improving the acoustic quality of the building.

Eric is standing between Chuck Swoboda, CEO of Cree, and Katy Ansardi of Sustainable North Carolina after accepting his award.

Check out this video by the NC farm bureau to see a bit of footage of the tour; we have our own video on its way!

Tom has been working with 19 students from Professor Will Hooker’s Permaculture Design Studio class at NCSU to develop a landscaping plan for TS Designs. This plan will include a conversion of our landscape to more edible plants like nut and fruit trees, berries, grapes, etc. So far we have built 3 trellises and planted pecan trees, magnolia, choctaw, pawnee, kiwi, and much more. In the photo above, the students are hanging up their designs to be critiqued. Stay tuned for updates on how everything is growing.

Ever since Tom and I started the company we have offered our employees healthcare. We pay for 50% of the individual’s cost and as the years have gone by and rates have increased so have the number of employees who have had to drop out.

We’re getting squeezed from a couple directions. First, we are a very small group; less than 20 people compared to the 100+ employees we had before NAFTA. Second, we are an older group with some serious pre-existing conditions – even a COBRA ex-employee that has health issues in the family is hurting our rate. It looks like we will be staying with Blue Cross & Blue Shield North Carolina, the largest in our state.

BCBSNC is a nonprofit healthcare company but is making so much money on their plans they paid their CEO, Bob Greczyn, almost $4 million last year, a $750,000 raise from the year before. They are planning an 11% rate increase this year. Why not give that excess back to their customers?

I would have no problem with his compensation if this were a competitive market, but in the US healthcare is not competitive. We need to remove the exemption from anti-trust laws the healthcare companies enjoy. Traditional market competition ideals do not apply to an industry that bases its decisions on risk pooling. In our system, the goal of profit-driven healthcare companies is not to provide healthcare, but to deny as many claims as possible to maximize profit. As economist Paul Krugman wrote, “The most successful companies are those that do the best job of denying coverage to those who need it most.”

Unless something is done, healthcare at TS Designs, and thousands of other small businesses, will become a casualty. And we’ll all share in those losses since the health issues will not go away. The number of uninsured will rise, bankruptcies due to healthcare will increase, and healthcare costs themselves will continue to creep higher and higher.

We need a public option to bring competition to the healthcare industry. The healthcare industry and their lobbyists clearly have the bucks to compete with it.