Green kids
Posted: Friday, February 1st, 2008
I work at Wild Child on Monroe St. and we carry a lot of unique clothing items for children. First of all, the owners, Bill and Renee West, started the store over 20 years because they couldn’t find 100% cotton clothing for their kids. So they found USA made vendors for cotton clothing and started dyeing them with their own custom colors. They are still garment dyeing their clothing to this day and people love it; the clothes are cute, durable, colorful, USA made, and you can’t get them anywhere else. Wild Child hopes to switch to organic cotton someday for their clothing, but in the meantime they are carrying other companies’ organic kid’s clothes. They carry a local company called Re-New Baby that uses organic cotton tops and bottoms and appliques recycled fabric animal shapes to them. Re-New Baby also creates felted wool dresses and jumpers from thrift wool sweaters. They are all very cute and the customers can’t get enough of it. We are actually due for a new shipment soon.
Other companies we carry are Happy Green Bee, Under the Nile, Blue Canoe, Kiwi Industries, and some others but I forget the names. Organic clothing is becoming more affordable, but mostly because these USA companies are outsourcing to China and India. Many people still don’t want to pay $20 for a baby t-shirt, but some people understand the importance of supporting organics.
We also carry some fair trade lines such as Global Mamas and Indigenous. We have a lot of customers that only want to buy USA made, fair trade, or organic and we hope their enthusiasm for it spreads to others.