Apparel brand Indian Terrain has launched a line of T-shirts, eight each in men’s and boy’s wear, which will carry the Fairtrade stamp, a first for a high-street clothes retailer. Fairtrade is a seal of sustainability in the end-to-end production process of a product, ranging from agri goods to crafts.
To get this seal, companies are required to pay sustainable prices (which must never fall lower than the market price). Fairtrade believes this addresses the injustices of conventional trade, which tends to discriminate against the poorest, weakest producers.
For a burgeoning group of consumers who now shop their values, the seal is an easy way to identify a brand’s production practices. In the T-shirts launched by Indian Terrain, its provenance is known from the cotton fields in Surendar Nagar in Gujarat to the mills that spin the yarn, to the fabric-maker as well.
By March next, Indian Terrain expects to launch a range of shirts with the Fairtrade stamp, says Joint MD, Vidyuth Rajagopal. The products stamped such will be at a 10 per cent premium to other products, a small price to pay to follow sustainable practices, he says. In two to three years’ time, the brand expects at least 50 per cent of apparel in its stores to come from sustainable sources.
