Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt

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Fashion

The National Public Radio show, Planet Money, recently published a multimedia site titled ‘Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt’, which tracks the production process of a T-shirt across the globe, from cotton growers in the South, to manufacturers in Colombia, to the consumers. The site offers personal stories of key people involved in the process, and involves the physical distribution and tracking of the cotton T-shirts (Source: Reihs 2015, p.17 link).

The seven-month process culminated in a multi-media package combining video, text, and information graphics to tell the story of how people around the world all have a hand in producing one simple piece of clothing (Source: McAdams 2014, p.198).

[T]hey didn’t start off with the T-shirt.  They started off with, how do we explain globalization (Source: Schneider, 2014, np link)

In addition to combining photography, radio, video and infographics, the project [was] a form of participatory journalism, relying on the participation of consumers to carry the project through to the end. The audience, as consumers, could participate in buying a t-shirt as part of the reporting process, contributing to the tracking of t-shirt purchases. The site design further encourages participation through comments and interactivity ((Source: Reihs 2015, p.17 link).

[W]e wanted to participate in the global economy. And we’re going to actually follow our T-shirt as it is made around the world. We were inspired in part by the fabulous book, ‘The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy’ by Pietra Rivoli, which tells this story, in beautiful detail, how every T-shirt you own is touched by dozens, hundreds, thousands of hands in nearly every continent as it’s made (Source: NPR 2013, np link).

In April 2013, the Planet Money team of journalists launched a Kickstarter campaign … to fund a reporting project about the industry. People could pledge $25 to get a T-Shirt, and Planet Money would report every step of the T-shirt’s production, starting in the cotton fields of Mississippi. Backers put up $590,807. Ten reporters covered the story, some of them to Indonesia, Bangladesh, and Columbia along with the cotton as it became cloth and, finally, 25,000 T-Shirts (Source: McAdams 2014, p.198).

The Planet Money t-shirt design features a squirrel hoisting a martini glass, a reference to the phrase ‘animal spirits’ made famous by economist John Maynard Keynes. In the 1930s, Keynes wrote that most of our decisions ‘can only be taken as the result of animal spirits — a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.’ As Planet Money’s own David Kestenbaum put it recently: ‘Keynes’s idea was that there’s more to the markets than just numbers, there are people and emotions making decisions. And to the extent that we are finding the human element in the very dry subject of economics, it’s actually perfect for us’ (Source: Macleod 2013, np link).

We wanted to see the hidden world behind clothes sold in this country, so we decided to make a T-shirt. We wanted to make an ordinary shirt like the vast majority of the shirts sold in this country  – not organic cotton, not hand-sewn in the United States (Source: NPR in Gulnaz 2015, np link).

For us watching them at home, surrounded by the fabrics we purchased in a store, putting faces to the materials we use every day is an exercise in extreme humility (Source: Dries 2013: link).

This is sad … i wish i was rich so i can help people that have it harder than the people in my country. well anyone that has it too hard honestly. being born at a certain part of the world is not their fault … and some times its hard getting out of that position. i wish the ‘1%’ would help them, but its not up to them. its sad (Source: Kom Bucha 2014, np link).

Is it possible that Bangladesh is just a cheaper place to live, hence the ‘lower’ wages? I know some places in Indonesia where you can get what is considered a mansion here in the USA for only around $100,000 (Source: TheInvisibleCactus 2014, np link).

Got my shirt over a week ago. Wore it this week to a doctor’s appointment. The doctor made a comment about the martini toting squirrel. Told him what it was. ‘Oh, yeah. I’ve been listening to that this week on NPR.’ I said ‘Well this is the tee that created the stories you’re hearing’ (Source: Laura 2013, np link).

The Planet Money T-shirt Project [is p]ossibly the most well-known story we’ve done (Source: NPR 2018, np link).

Nice exposure.. That’s when something wrong is changed  (Source: Jason M 2014: link)

I feel that this definitely raised awareness of the product (Source: Weiss 2014, np link).

Planet Money’s journey to the world of T-shirt creation shows this wall is actually not too difficult to pass through, which makes you wonder why we don’t see this kind of reporting from businesses. Why don’t 99.9 percent of companies have a websites like the one Planet Money created for every major product they sell? Is there a reason that companies that truly believe in transparency and responsibility won’t meet this bar (Source: Godelnik 2013, np link)?