Inspired by last year's UB Green Week, brothers Christopher and Timothy Reagen launched a business that offers an alternative to cotton T-shirts, a suspected contributor to pollution.
The pair now owns a quickly expanding organic clothing business called Artifex T-shirts.
"People don't know that something as silly as a T-shirt can cause so much damage to our earth but it does," said Christopher, a UB alumnus. "Every purchase of an organic rather than non-organic T-shirt is less chemicals polluting our earth." According to Christopher, one-third of a pound of pesticides and chemical fertilizers go into harvesting enough cotton to make a single T-shirt.
After realizing that producing affordable organic cotton T-shirts could make a huge dent in pollution, Christopher decided to put his Web site building and networking skills to use, and recruited his brother Timothy to create T-shirt designs. They spent all of last summer building up the business from their parents' basement in Syracuse.
"We realized there was a niche in the market and that people were becoming more conscious consumers," said Timothy, a sophomore architecture major. "We wanted to become a clothing line that was representative of the whole green movement." Timothy's T-shirt designs are printed on organic clothing purchased from Econscious, a company that is also sweatshop-free.
All Artifex T-shirts are environmentally themed, though the "windmill" design is most popular. For every purchased windmill T-shirt, Christopher and Timothy donate $3 to Native energy, an organization that runs wind farms in South Dakota. These wind farms serve as carbon offsets. The small donation is enough to offset 500 pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, according to Christopher.
"What's cool about a T-shirt company is that it's feasible because there is so little overhead except the silk screen press," Timothy said.
Modern Pop Culture Apparel and Art, located in Syracuse, recently picked up the Artifex line, though the brothers are reinvesting the little profit they make.
"We're trying to make a difference and that would be a little harder if we were in it to make a profit," Christopher said. "I wanted the experience of starting my own business and it seemed only natural to do something good for the environment."
While some students may be wary of buying organic clothing because of its reputation of being expensive, Artifex makes affordable organic clothing available on its Web site. T-shirts are usually $20 but in an attempt to make room for the summer line, all T-shirts are 25 percent off while hoodies are 50 percent off until March 15.
Christopher encourages students to be conscious consumers.
"We're working on our summer line right now. We plan to integrate more with charitable donations," Christopher said. "For those less ambitious, the easiest way to make a difference is with your dollar."
