This is a guest post by John Simonetta, owner of ProformaGreen, an eco-friendly promotional items consultancy. John’s blogs are designed to keep us up to date on the “greening” of his industry.
The Verve line of organic cotton promotional t-shirts from Vantage Apparel seems to be going for the title of most green t-shirt available.
Like many other organic shirts in the promotional items industry Vantage starts with a non-bleached t-shirt made from organic cotton (i.e. no pesticides or petroleum fertilizers used to grow the cotton). At this point the shirt is similar to other organic shirts, like the AnvilOrganic line from Anvil Knit Wear (which by the way does come in different colors than just “natural”).
What Vantage does to go for the Gold … er Green is that Vantage offers an in-house printing method for their shirts that uses 100% vegetable based dyes and does not use the films or screens traditionally used in screen printing.
The process is new and makes the shirts a little pricey (for cost comparison ProformaGreen will run 500 organic cotton shirts with one color imprint, one location for $5-6 per unit. A Verve printed with organic dyes might run as high as $12) however the effect is very nice and very low impact. Plus the price is sure to fall as production is increased.
The other neat trick of these shirts is that multiple colors in a logo no longer matter to pricing. The method used by Vantage is good for 50 shirts, 5000 shirts or just 1 shirt. Regardless of the size of the run or colors in the art there is only one standard setup fee, because there are no old fashion screens or films to impact cost.
Take a look at these items on the Vantage website at www.vantageapparel.com. If you have any questions or would like more information please contact us at www.proformagreen.com.
Adventures in Green Marketing 
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