OUR PRODUCTION

Pansy cotton is grown in Texas in organic cotton fields free from conventional chemicals, pesticides and fertilizers. Sometimes you may find a little bit of the plant still in the fabric. We like to think of this as a souvenir from the farm.

After being picked, it is ginned and packed into bales where it is certified organic by the Texas Department of Agriculture, which requires strict adherence to the same organic standards outlined by the USDA that all organic food grown in the US is required to meet. It is then trucked to North Carolina where it is cleaned, spun, then knit into our beautiful organic cotton fabrics.

After the fabric is finished, it is rolled up and shipped to a small family operated factory in San Leandro. From there we carry it off the truck and start the process of turning the fabric into garments. The cutter rolls out the fabric in stacks of around 50 layers. He hand draws a marker from the pattern pieces to make sure that there is no fabric wasted every time. When he cuts bigger items of clothing like pants and robes we use any extra fabric to make scrunchies! Even the tiniest bits of fabric remnants we take and use to stuff furniture at home.

At the factory, the workers sew all of the pieces together with organic cotton thread and natural cotton/rubber elastic. The factory we work with is licensed with the California Department of Industrial Relations and follows all of California’s labor and safety standards. All their workers are paid at least the minimum wage in California which is currently $15.50/hour (+ any overtime). When the pieces are done being sewn we pick them up from the factory and bring to our studio to get sorted into reusable dye bags.

We garment dye all of our pieces after they are sewn which allows us to keep extra undyed stock in our studio and dye things as we need them so we don’t have excess or unwanted pieces. We only dye the exact amount that we need. After we sort the pieces into dye bags we drop them off at the dye factory in Novato where they are dyed with non-toxic fiber-reactive dyes in the whole Pansy rainbow. Everything is dyed in small batches which is why there can be slight variation in the shades of each color! The dye factory follows all of California’s strict environmental, labor and safety regulations.

After the garments are dyed we drive them back to the studio to do quality control and sort into all the bins in our studio ready to be shipped to you!

**One piece of our garments that isn’t on the map is our thread! We currently use organic cotton thread made in India. We have been unable to source domestic organic cotton thread so we had to decide whether to use imported organic cotton thread or domestic conventional cotton thread and we decided to use organic. We would love to create organic cotton thread that is grown and spun in the US someday!