Loose Leaf Notes

~ The following originally appeared in the December 2009 issue of Natural Awakenings of Southwest Virginia.
What happens when two socially conscious people with backgrounds in business meet at a clothing trade show, fall in love, and pool their talents? The answer is Green Label Organic Sustainable Threads, George and Rain Lipson’s family run business that wholesales and retails 100% organic cotton clothing with a message.
George is a self-described “long time T-shirt designer who has always wanted to change the world.” His wife Rain, an organic gardener and environmentalist, ran a Meadows of Dan bakery and craft shop in the late 1980’s and early 90’s. While Rain was in Floyd working in retail, as an owner and an employee, George was designing and marketing rock-and-roll T-Shirts for a California merchandising company.
Today the couple employs two full-time and various part-time employees at their West Oxford Street warehouse and outlet store, which is within walking distance of downtown Floyd. From the warehouse, they ship their organic cotton T-shirts and tops imprinted with messages such as Support Local, Save What’s Left, and Live Simply to 500 stores around the country, including to national chains such as Whole Foods and REI, and to military PX stores throughout the world.
Rain explains their preference for organic cotton. “It takes approximately 1/3 of a pound of pesticides, herbicides, and defoliants to grow enough cotton to make just one conventional cotton T-shirt.” Being organic is important, but it’s just the icing on the cake, George says. “A T-shirt has to look good, and have a message you feel good about wearing.”
People feel good about wearing Green Label Organic shirts for another reason. “For every person who loves our message, there is another who compliments us on how our shirts feel,” says George. The low impact dyed shirts, processed within 200 miles of Floyd, are made of ring spun organic cotton, which gives them a super soft feel.
When the Lipson’s launched their business nearly 5 years ago, only hard core environmentalists were interested in organic cotton clothing. George’s friends in the clothing business were initially concerned about the possibility of his success, based on past failures of organic cotton lines in the industry. But the Lipson’s felt that the tide was turning green. “We set out to take organic cotton from plain, vanilla, and boring, to colorful, affordable and fun,” Rain emphasizes. One look around their outlet store reveals a rainbow of T-shirt colors, ranging from eggplant, poppy, and navy to bluebird blue, green moss, and brick red.
“Our mainstay of design ideas–99.9% of the time–come from George,” Rain notes. For George, who at one time considered a career as a writer, a T-shirt is an empty canvas waiting for an artful message. He relishes any challenge to condense a message into to an image and a few words. For instance, his Hummer design features a Hummer vehicle captioned with ‘Bummer.’ “The Hummer is a symbol of conspicuous consumption, a lack of care for the environment and for each other,” George remarks. Other designs include a guitar paired with the words Organic Rocks and a buzzing honey beehive that says Respect Labor.
Interest in Green Label Organic’s creatively designed shirts for men women and children has been growing alongside the global movement to “go green.” Keeping their local clientele, online customers (greenlabel.com), tourists, travelers off interstate 81, and their wholesale markets supplied in shirts keeps the Lipsons working overtime. “Green is not a fad. It’s a way of life, a lifestyle that more and more people are embracing everyday,” Rain says. ~ Colleen Redman