“The Nike Email Exchange (NEE)“ An email exchange between student Jonah Peretti and the Nike Corporation. The full email exchange was posted online on shey.net. Screengrab above. Read the whole exchange here.
Student Jonah Peretti experiments with Nike’s offer to customise its shoes with words you type into its ID website. Most people would add their name or their team’s name but he wants to add the word ‘sweatshop’ to a pair of running shoes. He wants to do this so that he can ‘remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes’. Nike say no. Peretti replies, arguing it’s OK. They say no. He replies again, saying he hasn’t breached their ID guidelines. They say no again. They just won’t let him do it. So he forwards the conversation to friends by email. They forward it to friends, who forward it to their friends, who …. It’s posted on a website called shey.net (above) and, within six weeks, millions have read it. Next, he’s invited onto national US TV to debate sweatshops with a Nike executive. This is one of the most iconic examples of viral online trade justice activism that happens 3 years before facebook is founded. It’s also an iconic example of the activist tactic of ‘culture jamming’ – turning a brand’s values and identity against itself. Peretti didn’t consider himself (or what he did) to be ‘activist’, he was just messing around with the opportunity that Nike gave its customer to personalise their shoes. What he did became known as the ‘Nike Email Exchange’ (or NEE) and was a important part of a swarm of public criticisms of Nike’s record on labour rights – including Indonesian Nike factory worker Cicih Sukaesih’s North American speaking tour [see our page here] – that cemented its sweatshop reputation in the late 1990s and 2000s. It’s also an iconic example in trade justice activism research. Peretti gave researchers Dietlind Stolle and Michele Micheletti the email addresses of everyone to whom he sent the email string, and everyone who replied to it. They got in touch to ask them about the impacts that it had had on them as citizens and consumers. The publications that emerged from this helped establish a significant body of scholarship on what’s called ‘political consumerism’. After becoming a public figure through the NEE, Peretti continued to experiment with viral online media before setting up Buzzfeed in 2006.
Page reference: Edward Jennings, Alex Hargreaves, Matt Goddard, Amy Joslin, Millie Whittington & Charles Bell (2024) The Nike Email Exchange (NEE). followthethings.com/the-nike-email-exchange-nee.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
It’s amazing what you can find out when you’re sitting at a computer, surfing – doing ‘detective work’, using corporate, NGO and news websites, blogs, photo and video-sharing websites and online encyclopaedias. So much information! Where to start? How to narrow it down? Start with the evidence – yes, keywords, right, on those things. Look closely: ‘Made in …’ or ‘Assembled in …’, company names, brands, lists of ingredients – printed on these things, their labels, their packaging – somewhere. OK, open browser: ‘www.google.com’. Search: ‘Marks & Spencer’ and ‘socks’. There are 49,500 hits including a manufacturer’s website, Delta Galil …; a BBC news story: ‘King of socks leaves the UK’ …; a PR Newswire story: ‘Delta Galil addresses discount request from Marks and Spencer’ …; interesting: ‘Jews for Justice in Palestine’ …. What would they have to say about my socks? An article in Red Pepper …: what’s that saying? That fairtrade cotton in M&S’s new sock range is great for farmers in India, but not for anyone else involved in their production, distribution or sale. Right: agriculture, economic restructuring, international politics, boycotts, shifting production, trade justice. In my M&S socks, with my feet, comforting them, protecting them: what geographies are these? My sock geographies…
Source: Ian Cook, James Evans, Helen Griffiths, Lucy Mayblin, Becky Payne & David Roberts (2007, 81-2: on followthethings.com here).
Resources for researchers
On this page, we share some guidance on how you can become a commodity detective in order to find out who makes your stuff.
CEO Ian began to follow things after a frustrating couple of years attempting to teach students about the ‘Lands and peoples of the non-Western world’ in the late 1980s (see FAQs). If only there was some work that could connect their lives to those of the ‘lands and peoples’ we were studying! In the early 2000s, his students were doing this work for themselves, following some simple desk-based research guidelines. Some of their work – following socks, mirrors, medicine, money and more – is published here on followthethings.com.
CEO Ian has refined these ‘follow it yourself’ guidelines though 25 years teaching the ‘Geographies of material culture’ module at the Universities of Birmingham and Exeter in the UK (from 2000-2025: see Angus et al 2000, Cook et al 2007) and through developing education resources with the Fashion Revolution movement, including its online ‘Who made my clothes?’ course (from 2017-2018: see Cook, Jones & Cox 2017-2018). He and his students have published some of this detective work in academic journals, teacher-facing journals, and on the followthethings.com ‘back office’ blog.
This approach is based on the conviction that when students find out who makes things that matter to them, this learning becomes more meaningful and memorable to them, and can lead to conversations about responsible and ethical consumption. But it’s important to do this work with a sensitivity a) to income inequalities among a group of students in a classroom which can uncomfortably be exposed, b) to the diversity of students’ personal connections the people and places mentioned on ‘made in’ labels because detective work can generate stereotypical – often ‘white saviour’ – narratives involving ‘us’ (consumers) and ‘them’ (producers) (see Siddiqi 2009; Tosin-Talabi 2021), and c) to making students feel solely responsible for any trade injustices they find in their things, when so many other supply chain actors – e.g. corporations to governments to labour unions – are equally, if not more, responsible for them.
[C]alls on solidarity in the global North invite the ‘reader / consumer / activist’ to ‘feel smugly superior’ (Siddiqi 2009, 158) by virtue of their position on the global fashion supply chain, somewhat undoing the solidarity initially invoked. This script offers an appeal to consumers about a way to make shopping matter and falls prey to the neoliberal tendency to address complex structural injustice with individual personal action … [It] essentializes garment workers into passive victims … while highlighting the ‘conscience’ of the consumer (Horton & Street 2021 p.891 talking about Fashion Revolution’s ‘Who made my clothes?’ campaign).
Below we provide a) the two best inspirations we have found for ‘following it yourself’ to act as a spark for this work, b) two ‘follow it yourself’ detective work guides that we developed for our ‘Geographies of material culture’ courses and ‘Who made my clothes?’ courses, and c) two ways that you can use followthethings.com as a source of case studies and qualitative data for essays and dissertations.
a) inspirations
Handprint: a short film encouraging fashion consumers to think about the supply chain workers who help them to get dressed every morning (see our page on this example here)
A pig in a hundred pieces: why artist Christien Meindertsma is fascinated about where things come from and how she finds out (we’ll add a page on her PIG05049 book ASAP).
b) how to ‘follow it yourself’
Who made my stuff?
2025 x Universities of Birmingham & Exeter Written by Ian Cook et al.
Commodity Detective ‘how to?’ advice | No subject specialism
Tim Angus, James Evans, Ian Cook et al (2001) A manifesto for cyborg pedagogy?International research in geographical & environmental education 10(2), p.195-201
Ian Cook, James Evans, Helen Griffiths, Lucy Mayblin, Rebecca Payne & David Roberts (2007a) ‘Made in…?’ appreciating the everyday geographies of connected lives. Teaching geography Summer, p.80-3
Kathleen Horton & Paige Street (2021) This hashtag is just my style: popular feminism & digital fashion activism. Continuum: journal of media & cultural studies 35(6), p.883–896
+2 sources
Dina Siddiqi (2009) Do Bangladeshi Factory Workers Need Saving? Sisterhood In The Post-Sweatshop Era. Feminist review 91(91), p.154–174
Header: man putting on a compression sock sitting on the bed (https://stock.adobe.com/uk/images/man-putting-on-a-compression-sock-sitting-on-the-bed/572668068?prev_url=detail) by into (Adobe Stock)
“Who made my clothes?“ A ‘follow it yourself’ detective work task originally written for learners taking Fashion Revolution’s / University of Exeter’s ‘Who made my clothes?’ free online course starting in 2017 . Introductory video embedded above. Course outline available on the Futurelearn website here (course no longer available). Course instagram feed here and twitter feed here. Search for learners’ blog posts here.
In the summers of 2017 and 2018, we ran a free online course called ‘Who made my clothes?’ with and for the Fashion Revolution movement. 16,000 people from all over the world, many with experience working in the industry, joined us for three weeks to Be Curious (week 1), Find Out (week 2), and Do Something (week 3). We’re hoping the course will run again but, in the meantime, wanted to share some of its content: the parts where we showed how fashion’s supply chains work and the places and lives they connect (via an excellent webdoc series from NPR which is featured on our site here) and then how you can do this research yourselves, with your own clothes, to create your own personal answers to the question ‘Who made my clothes?’ You can try this for yourself, set it for your class to do, whatever you like. It starts with each person choosing an item of clothing that’s special to them, one they wear every day, one they know nothing about. The mystery helps. Follow our advice… and see what you can find, and how you can creatively express and share these findings. This task will in volve a lot of educated guesswork, but you can always get in touch with the brands to see if you’ve got it right! We’ll add some of our learners’ posts along the way so you can see what’s possible.
Page reference: Ian Cook, Verity Jones & Kellie Cox (2025) Who made my clothes? followthethings.com/who-made-my-clothes.shtml (last accessed <add date here>)
We are designers, academics, writers, business leaders, policymakers, brands, retailers, marketers, producers, makers, workers, trade unions and fashion lovers. We are the industry and we are the public. We are world citizens. We are you.
Ditty et al (2018) How to be a fashion revolutionary p.11
Here at followthethings.com, we don’t want to place the blame for trade injustice only on ‘the consumer’ who is guilty for buying the wrong stuff. That’s the most common response to the work that we feature on our site, even if that work explicitly says the opposite. For trade justice activism to be effective, it needs to involve all kinds of pressure being put on corporations, industries and governments from inside and out, from all supply chain actors, from anywhere and everywhere. Whatever you do for work, in your studies and in your spare time, there’s a way to get involved.
We will add more resources in due course, but our recommended starting point is Fashion Revolution’s (2018) How to be a fashion revolutionary. What it says fits the ethos of our site, hand in glove.
Source
Sarah Ditty, Ian Cook, Laura Hunter, Futerra, Tamsin Blanchard (2018) How to be a fashion revolutionary (2nd ed.) Ashbourne: Fashion Revolution
“Tangled Routes: Women, Work And Globalization On The Tomato Trail“ An academic book written by Deborah Barndt published by Rowman & Littlefield 2007 second edition Google Books preview embedded above. Search online to buy a copy here.
In 1994, preparing to do some undergraduate teaching, Environmental Studies professor Deborah Barndt finds a popular educational tool called A whirlwind tour of economic integration with your guide, Tomasita the tomato. She thinks this fictional tomato is the perfect etrée for her students’ understanding of cross-border trade – in this case from Mexico to Canada – and the often confusing complexities of globalisation – including messy relations between corporate power, genetically modified seeds, pesticides, stolen indigenous land, exploited peasant labour and environmental racism. What follows is a 5 year feminist participatory research project – called the Tomasita Project – which connects the lives of tomato growers, truckers, checkout workers and other supply chain workers living and working in Mexico and Canada. What she discovers and tries to convey is the clash between a ‘globalisation from above’ – the uniform, genetically-engineered, neoliberal, NAFTA-friendly tomato trade – and ‘globalisation from below’ – grass roots social justice projects working across borders and producing alternative foods. As Tomasita explained when Barndt first saw her story, the tomato is an iconic crop in the Americas. A brilliant one to follow, loading with meanings. It was native to South America, was first domesticated in Mexico, is central to the diets in Mexico, the USA and Canada, can be grown (at least seasonally) in all three countries, and was ‘one of the winners for Mexico in the NAFTA reshuffle’ (Barndt 2002a, p.82). What readers value the most is her book’s ‘feminist act’ that makes visible women workers in the global food system, and the way that it brings feminist theories into understandings of international trade. We researched this book early in its life (in 2011) and are keen to return to it to flesh out this page one day. This is an early, innovative, important and inspiring example of ‘follow the thing’ scholar-activism.
Page reference: Robert Conor Burke (2024) Tangled Routes: Women, Work And Globalization On The Tomato Trail. followthethings.com/tangled-routes-women-work-and-globalization-on-the-tomato-trail.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“iPhone 3G – Already With Pictures! (aka ‘iPhone Girl’)“ Three photos of an anonymous iPhone factory worker found on a new iPhone and posted on the MacRumors forum by markm49uk. MacRumors post screengrabbed and shown above. See the original post (and comments) here.
markm49uk has just bought a new iPhone 3G. He’s carefully unboxed and unwrapped it. He turns it on. Checks the photos. And find that it’s come pre-loaded with three images. It’s a young Chinese woman, seeming working on an iPhone production line. She’s smiling, making peace signs with her hands. She looks happy. markm49uk is curious. He posts the photos on MacRumors to see if anyone else has found fun photos like these on their new iPhones. Nobody else seems to have, but his post ignites an international ‘whodunnit?’ that starts in MacRumor comments and spreads far far beyond as forum members re-post the photos and markm49uk’s questions elsewhere. Who is this person? Where does she work? Will she get in trouble for this? Is she working in one of the Apple factories in China where workers have been committing suicide because of the working conditions? Why does she look so happy? Is she an Apple (or Foxconn – their manufacturer) plant? Is she just smiling because she’s having her photo taken? Why is someone taking her photograph with the phone that markm49uk bought? Are they testing its? Are all smartphones tested like this? Why weren’t these photos erased? What did markm49uk do with those photos? Did he keep them on his phone? Other people downloaded one to add to their phone’s home screen. To acknowledge the labour that went into their phone. They said it was partly her phone too because she helped to make it. So she should be visible. We, and so many others who came across these photos, love this example. It’s inspired other Apple activism because of its surprising warmth and humanity. Part of the reason it went viral is that it was a mystery for people to solve. There were so many unanswered questions! Another reason is because so many commenters thought this was an accident. All of the other worker ‘message in a bottle‘ examples on followthethings.com imagine a consumer receiving their message and hopefully doing what they ask them to do. But this example has no explicit message. Nobody seems to know what this young woman – and the person who took her photos – is trying to say. All of the tactics buttons we’ve chosen above are based on an assumption that the work we feature is a) activism and b) deliberate. But what if it’s just a few fun photos that one workmate took of another and forgot to delete? Why would such a simple accident cause such a stir? Why would it cause so many people to talk about trade injustice in Apple’s supply chains? We think it’s simple. Apple’s press at the time was all about worker suicides in its Chinese factories. But this worker seemed to be happy. How could that be possible, even in the few moments it takes to snap a few phone pictures? For many, these photos show something different. The discussions are fascinating.
Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) iPhone 3G – Already With Pictures! (aka ‘iPhone Girl’). followthethings.com/iphone-3g-already-with-pictures-aka-iphone-girl.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“Maquilapolis (City Of Factories)“ A participatory documentary film in Spanish with Spanish or English subtitles directed by Vicky Funari & Sergio de la Torre, with music by Pauline Oliveros with the Nortec Collective & John Blue for the Independent Television Service & CineMamás Film. Trailer and pay-per-view stream embedded above. Search online for other streaming options here. Read the film transcript in English & Spanish here.
Carmen Duràn and Lourdes Lujàn work in Tijuana, the ‘city of factories’, on the Mexico-US border. They work in factories on the hill making televisions and other COMMODITIES for brands like Panasonic and Sony. These multinationals treat this city as a garbage can that their workers have to live in. How can they fight back, claim their rights, their humanity? They take part in a participatory filmmaking project with directors Vicky Funari and Sergio de la Torre. The directors have been working with a local collective of ‘promontoras’ including Carmen and Lourdes for years. They have planned this project together for years. There’s been some filmmaking training and the promontoras take camcorders into the places where they live and work. The films they make are full of personality and a close attachment to place. They document life from these factory workers’ perspective. They document the ways in which these multinationals treat them as workers – especially when they leave – and how they treat the place where they live – as a dump for industrial waste that ruins their environment and threatens their health. They document their campaigns to clean up toxic industrial waste. In the process audiences get to know Carmen and Lourdes, to empathise with them. But the film also contains some surprising and beautiful creative scenes – often made in place of the footage that’s impossible to take inside the factory – that look like performance art. They want to show the intimate, bodily connection between the labour they perform, the commodities you buy (or are treated with in hospital) and the brands that you may be familiar with. And there’s some specially commissioned film music, made with a local music collective and featuring sounds from the factories. This is a gem of a film for anyone interested in trade justice activism. This is the film – with caveats – that these Mexican factory workers wanted to make and to show to the world. It’s one of the most intimate place-based examples featured on our site. And it was shown, deliberately, to audiences of workers either side of the US-Mexico border. Seeing empowered women like themselves struggling, resisting was an inspiration to many other women. And when the film hit the film festival circle, and there were panel screenings, the promontoras were there, answering questions alongside the directors.
Page reference: Rosie Buller, Melanie Bonner, Rebecca Lyons, Georgie Little, Tilman Schulzklinger & Jennifer Hart (2020) Maquilapolis (City Of Factories). followthethings.com/maquilapolis-city-of-factories.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“Inside Job“ A documentary film directed by Charles Ferguson, produced by Charles Ferguson, Audrey Marrs & Jeffrey Lurie & narrated by Matt Damon for Mongrel Media & Sony Pictures Classic. Official trailer embedded above. Search online to watch the full movie here.
In the wake of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, filmmaker Charles Ferguson sets out to find out how and by whom it was caused. This involves understanding and explaining complex financial instruments (like sub-prime mortgages and collateralised debt obligations), the governance of international finance and its deregulation (and its consequences), eye-watering banking losses (over $20 trillion), the organisations and individuals responsible for this happening (in financial services, government, academia) and the people plunged into poverty and homelessness after defaulting on their mortgages. The complexity is explained clearly in the film by narrator Matt Damon. And by the talking heads who Ferguson recruits to talk about what happened, their role in it, how they see their responsibilities, why so much public money was spent bailing them out, and why none of them went to jail. For many audience members, it’s shocking to see executives explaining how business works on camera. The logics and passions that drive their work, and the values that they express, can seem removed from the world, callous and dehumanising. But the experts who come out of this film looking worst are the academic economists. One of the biggest impacts of this film is the way that it encourages university business schools to look more closely at their ethics. Who are economists working for, and how responsible is their education of new generations of economists if their ideas remain unchanged after the Crisis? This is another example showing how important and how difficult it is to ‘follow the money’. But like any following study, it’s also about the ways that responsibility – in this case, for a colossal economic injustice – is understood, shared, taken. And where it isn’t. The solution sees obvious to many – regulation! But it’s not happening. If one film was going to cause a revolution, one commentor states, it would be this one. And this is just a taster page for this film. We’ll add much more detail later…
Page reference: Dom Ebbetts, Dave Simpson, Michael Brent, Mickey Franklin, Tommy Sadler & Charlie Timms (2024) Inside Job (taster). followthethings.com/inside-job.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
“Chrysal; Or, The Adventures Of A Guinea“ A 4 volume fictional book series by Charles Johnstone, the first two of which were originally published by T. Becket. An 1821 version of Volume 1 is embedded in full above. Click here to read Volume 2, here to read Volume 3 and here to read Volume 4.
Here at followthethings.com we’re keen to appreciate the historical depth of our genre. Up until quite recently, we had traced everything back to Karl Marx’s chapter on the commodity (and commodity fetishism) in Capital Volume 1 which was first published in the 1860s. David Harvey’s teachings about Capital, and his appeals for geographers and otherS to get behind the veil of the commodity and tell the story of human reproduction were what encouraged us to do this work back in the day. But when you ask what inspired Marx, what literature was well known in his day, what had been written before, this impulse to know whose lives are connected by commodities goes back to the 1700s, to the birth of global capitalism (via empire), and to a genre of cheap and unglamourous ‘novels of circulation’. These make sense of this confusing, emerging world from the perspective of the commodities which were becoming part of its expanding consumer culture. There are dozens and dozens of these novels which we could choose to feature on our site, but the first one we want to add is this one – not least because it seems to have been one of the most popular and influential, but also because it’s about money – a commodity (and means of exchange) that academics have found more difficult to follow than most. This story is narrated by a gold guinea coin, starting from its mining in Peru and talking about its life connecting and witnessing the lives of a variety of people who earn, spend and steal it in different places. Because people aren’t careful what they do and say when a coin is covertly spying on them, the tales this coin tells – to an alchemist it meets at the end of volume one, who writes them down because coins can’t write – are scandalous. Some of the people whose lives are included were famous at the time, others were not. This book is both a scandalous exposé of the lives of famous people of the time and an ethical and moral tale about the emerging economic relations of capitalism and empire. It was inventive, eccentric and a huge popular hit. What would a commodity tell you about its life if it could talk? Here’s your answer! Commodities who can speak for themselves are very much part of trade justice activism today. There are lots of our examples on our site, but here’s one of the earliest. What can today’s activists learn from this? Here’s a taster. We’ll return to this later and add some more depth and detail.
Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2024) Chrysal; Or, The Adventures Of A Guinea (taster page). followthethings.com/chrysal-or-the-adventures-of-a-guinea.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)
