Playing Fair

Many factories they approached balked at the idea. “They’d tell us, ‘If we pay these workers more, we’ll have to pay others more, and what if they don’t deserve it?’” Bass laments. “Some would agree, but we’d find out the extra money was going to the factory owners.”

In addition to finding appropriate vendors to heed its standards, Fair Indigo’s biggest challenge was to implement a business model that allowed for a greater cost of goods structure. Many of the factories Fair Indigo sources from — in countries such as Peru, Costa Rica, Uruguay, China, Macau, India, Spain and the United States — are cooperatives, owned jointly by the workers themselves. This enables the workers to be paid better, while eliminating the costs of paying owners and keeping the bottom lines up and the material costs to the cataloger down.