We’ve got used to camel, merino, bamboo and hemp as additions to textiles and organic cotton has become a commonplace choice for uniforms where companies are committed to environmental progress, but the newest addition to the clothing market is Yak!

The reasoning behind the idea is that wool from yaks, particularly Tibetan Plateau yaks is warmer than lambs wool and softer than cashmere, making it an ideal for sports clothing and outdoor enthusiasts.

The company behind the launch is a consortium of Beijing-based entrepreneurs including a former British Army officer and an American aid worker, and their promotional activity included kitting out Kwame Nkrumah-Acheampong, (aka the Snow Leopard) who is the first Ghanaian to compete in the Winter Olympics. He wore their fleeces and winter tops throughout the contest.

The company, called Khunu, hopes that the Snow Leopard will be as durable as their products and is donating 2% of the profits back to the yak-herders in the hope that this promotional activity will also garner publicity.

McDonald’s will be replacing the uniforms for all of its 85,000 employees. Just three years after Bruce Oldfield redesigned the McDonald’s workplace clothing line, Wayne Hemingway has been handed the job.

Wayne who? Better known as one of the founders of Red or Dead, Hemingway is going to produce a 100% closed loop uniform. That means that clothing will be collected when worn out or outgrown, recycled into new clothing and issued again to staff.

The high sustainability workwear is a step forward for Hemingway who’s been making recycled items out of the old uniforms and textiles of big firms like the Royal Mail.

If closed loop clothing seems a step too far for your firm, organic garments like high quality cotton T-shirts and polo-shirts are proving to be a popular choice with businesses that wish to demonstrate their commitment to sustainability while offering their employees a comfortable, durable uniform that can be printed or embroidered and looks great.

Organic cotton is about as eco-friendly as promotional clothing can get – and that’s good news for companies that need to have uniforms or promotional gear that stands up to the scrutiny of the media. Charities and businesses often choose to use organic cotton T-shirts to publicise their activities, to avoid the risk of being challenged by the press about their ‘green credentials’. It’s no good saying you’re committed to fair trade if the promotional items you give away have been made using child labour or resources that impoverish the community in which they originate.

There’s another advantage to buying organic in PR terms. It gives the wearer of the T-shirt a double boost: they get to make a positive environmental statement by what they wear, and they feel a positive emotional response because the organisation is acting in line with their personal belief system.

This makes organic promotional clothing a brilliant prospect for environmentally or socially aware organisations and allows them to print or embroider their message on organic ‘blanks’ with perfect confidence that they won’t be tripped up at the press conference by an investigative reporter with an axe to grind.

Dublin might always have been green, but it’s green in a very specific way for the next week or so – ‘Fashion Evolution’, set up by the Re-dress collective. Celebrating ethical fashion, Re-dress is inviting ordinary shoppers and fashionistas to ‘re-dress’ sustainability, ethics and environmental issues in the clothing and apparel sector.

For many businesses, purchasing ethical clothing is central to their mission statement. Concerns such as Fair Trade, environmental protection and supply chain have driven many companies to review their uniform choices and avoid reputational issues by investing in organic and fair-trade clothing.

In addition, new forms of business reporting focus increasingly on value and less on cost – this means that the reputation of companies who exploit third world labour or pollute ecosystems by using damaging processes to create promotional clothing, are devalued.

The alternative, promotional organic clothing, markets a brand in an ethical and effective way – it tells a good story about a company and means there is no dirt to be found, no matter how deep a journalist digs. Today, organic cotton T-shirts demonstrate a company’s green credentials without costing more than the standard issue version.

There’s a fantastic range of ways to celebrate and commemorate family events with printed clothing:

1.    One increasingly common way of marking the arrival of a new baby, now that fewer people are christening their children in church, is to hold a naming day. Often this combines a family reunion with a party for the baby, and can be held outdoors. T-shirts are often printed for the family members, bearing the baby’s name and date of birth and speeches are made, toasts drunk and the new arrival is celebrated with music and laughter.
2.    Another big hit with the parents of little ones is the way that party bags are being replaced by a piece of commemorative clothing such as a printed organic baby T-shirt which is given to guests at the end of a birthday party. For older children, a printed baseball cap is a popular leaving gift.
3.    T-shirts are also becoming popular as wedding clothing – gifts for bridesmaids, ushers, and ring-bearers are often now personalised printed garments with bearing their name and their role in the wedding as well as the date of the celebration. And of course stag and hen night T-shirts have become an institution in the UK.

The good news is that the weak pound has caused a surge in export orders, meaning that the manufacturing sector in January saw its swiftest growth for  a decade and a half according to the PMI (Purchasing Managers’ Index) but while that may mean a quicker lift out of recession, there are still tough decisions to be made in business.

As everybody tries to limit spending, whilst wooing new customers or trying to persuade existing ones to increase their order books, corporate gifts and promotional items can play a substantial role in helping create an atmosphere of growth and hope. There are three steps to creating a cost-effective promotional scheme:

1.    Be sure about the target audience – you need to identify the right people (CEOs or purchasing managers? Mid-level decision-makers or top level executives?) and then choose a promotional item that meets their daily needs. High level executives will not use promotional pens but might see value in a top quality printed bag bearing your company details, while frontline staff will use all the pens you can supply them with but giving them bags would be an over-investment that probably wouldn’t bring enough return on your expenditure to be worthwhile.

2.    Refine the message you wish to project – and bear in mind that this isn’t just the slogan you use, but the medium that carries it: an organic fair-trade T-shirt tells a story about your company’s values and aspirations even before you label it with a message. Baseball caps convey speed and youth, so if you’re in the business of fast service, giving embroidered baseball caps as promotional gifts could be an excellent idea.

3.    Set your ROI and measurement systems – how will you know

•    Who received your promotional item?
•    What use they made of it?
•    Whether it converted into a new or enhanced income stream?

As green-based companies move further into the mainstream, giving good value to customers and staff is becoming vital to sustainable good business. Just labelling any business eco-friendly no longer works and has become known as green-washing.

Green business runs deeper than the products or services you offer. It involves behind-the-scenes environmental responsibility including issues like energy conservation, waste control and green purchasing. Big business is changing fast and smaller companies are being challenged on their supply chain.  This can include issues such as providing an environmentally sourced uniform for staff, using recycled stationery and ensuring that promotional materials such as custom-designed T-shirts and posters are sustainably sourced.

If you are starting your green programme from scratch you can learn from eco-entrepreneurs like Ben Jerry’s ice cream or Innocent smoothies. These are companies that have created huge corporate success by focusing on every aspect of their green bottom line such as using cleaning and catering companies that pay fair wages and use environmentally-friendly products, giving staff loans to buy bicycles to communte to work and working with taxi companies with electric cars, and clothing companies using organic and fair-trade fabrics.

There’s no need to make changes that are not commercially justifiable – improving your green bottom line should also improve your business success.

In a recession it can seem bad business to direct any of your marketing spend towards children, when adults are the ones with what little money there is around, but in fact, marketing to children can bring a big return on investment if you do it ethically and sensitively. Promotional clothing can be a big hit with kids if you get it right.

Why aim at children?

•    Kids love having something of their own, and this will create brand loyalty when they are old enough to spend their own money – okay that’s long-term planning but why not?
•    Children use pester power to influence adults – when you see kids eating a meal in a certain fast food restaurant this half term you can bet their glum parents would rather be somewhere else, but the free toy in the meal box won the child over and the whining child won the parents over …

What to do to get youth marketing right

•    Don’t try to impress young people with your up-to-dateness. It’s really hard to pick out something truly trendy, so plain white T-shirts with an attractive slogan or logo might say ‘modern’ to you but ‘retro’ to a twelve-year-old. Just choose the best design you can and let the kids call it what they will, you want them to wear it, and if they like it, they will.
•    Make sure your garments are ethical – many young people are very aware of fair-trade and organic concerns so don’t give them a chance to reject you or your brand on the basis of your T-shirt choice.
•    Think seasonally – for younger children, parents choose clothing, so a sun-hat or baseball cap in summer or a warm hat in winter can mean your brand is displayed every schoolday as the grown-up makes sure the child is protected from the sun or winter cold.
•    Bags are a great idea too, as most girls and an increasing number of boys will now carry a tote bag to school or college.

Wearing a team or group T-shirt has a lot of advantages when undertaking some kind of community activity:

1.    It allows group members to identify each other easily and to form relationships if they don’t already know each other
2.    Group leaders can spot their team easily and organise them, which is especially important in outdoor settings
3.    Printed T-shirts build a sense of community in a group of people and allow them to recognise that they share values and interests
4.   Promotional clothing like a T-shirt with a slogan gets your community group message out to the public like almost nothing else can.

But you need to do some research and planning before investing in printed T-shirts for a community group or team.

•    Not all T-shirts are the same – when obtaining quotes for the work, make sure you have similar brands and weights of T-shirt in the quotations or you won’t be comparing like with like.
•    Check for extra charges – sometimes you have to pay a supplier extra to have more than one location (place where the T-shirt is printed, eg front and back or front and sleeve) and some suppliers aren’t scrupulous about telling you that those locations will incur an extra fee.
•    If your T-shirts are to be given away, remember that white blanks are always cheapest and that T-shirts used as gifts or prizes don’t have to cost the earth.
•    Make sure you can get a range of sizes to suit the members of your community group – not everybody is a ‘medium’ and it destroys group cohesion if one person isn’t wearing the team T-shirt because you didn’t get large or small enough ones printed.
•    Let your team personalise their T-shirts a little – teenagers in particular love to cut off sleeves or wear badges and will often end a group task by writing or drawing on each other’s T-shirts – view it as a compliment and don’t get heavy handed with them.

Just about everybody is now ‘back-to-school’. After the trauma of the ‘kitting out’ where sulky or terrified children are kitted out with school uniform items, with or without their cooperation, comes the next stage – the losing, destroying or rejecting the clothing that has cost so much time, money and tears.

One way to help your child through this stage, and to help the planet too, is to educate them about organic clothing and get them involved in thinking about how their clothing is made, why a uniform is worn and how they can benefit the environment by choosing organic options for themselves and maybe even getting a school-wide campaign going to support the wearing of organic cotton items such as organic T-shirts for PE or performing groups like school bands who can be outfitted in organic cotton clothing in a very cost-effective fashion.

Online retailers are now a great way to outfit children in eco-friendly clothing for a very reasonable price.  Knowing that their clothing is benefiting the planet can often help children, especially fashion-conscious ones, become reconciled to a uniform they hate because if they are teased by their friends about wearing the school issue uniform, such as white polo-shirt and navy trousers, they can say ‘Well okay, it’s not stylish, but it is organic and that means it’s preventing the use of pesticides, and stopping people in the developing world being exposed to toxic chemicals.’

Looked at in this way, a plain white T-shirt becomes a statement about caring for the planet and can remove a lot of the stigma that children feel if they don’t have the most up to date fashions, because they can assert that they are choosing to toe the line with organic clothing items for ethical reasons and that anybody who tries to tease them for it is simply showing their own selfishness and lack of care about the world in general.

For the environmentally conscious child, this can become a major issue in accepting the role of uniform as a sustainable way of not wasting clothing or going to unnecessary expense to attend school, and that can give the ‘green child’ a real boost in getting back into the school routine. And it can stop the loss and damage to school items that would otherwise be dropped, cut, abandoned or otherwise rejected.