Home
Our Premium Lightweight Unisex Tee | The story of the PLUT
Modern Look with an Old-Fashioned Attention to Detail
The most popular shirt we carry is made to be a crowd pleaser. Dan's been in the game of apparel for 30 years and has a strict checklist any shirt has to pass before going into production. Among the most important things is comfort and how the article actually drapes on the body.
The key to proper wear begins even before the designer cuts their first pattern. It all starts with raw materials. In this case, it's cotton. American, long staple cotton that's cleaned, combed, loomed, and dyed to create the near-perfect canvas for shirts.
Once the correct fabric is found, the right cut is required. Today the best construction is a side-seamed top. That's where a shirt is created by cutting two large pieces that follow the natural human form and sewing them together on the flanks instead of a tubular construction used in lower-quality designs. While more expensive to produce, and taking more production steps, the shirts wear dramatically better, hold up longer, and make you look better. Big, small, short, or tall, modern cuts accentuate everyone's positives.
Our most popular shirt also has to look good on men and women. It just makes things easier on everyone. This isn't to say that we don't have specific cuts to offer for both. But a crowd-pleaser like the PLUT needs the sort of universality that puts a smile on everyone's face. 
NO SWEATSHOPS/PLATINUM WRAP CERTIFICATION
Doing things the right way is important. Our manufacturing partners along with our facilities in the U.S. and internationally are no-sweat-shop, and humane. Our shirts are manufactured under a Platinum W.R.A.P. certification, which is the highest level of certification possible. Platinum certifications are awarded to facilities that have demonstrated full compliance with WRAP's 12 Principles for 3 consecutive certification audits. Platinum facilities must successfully pass every audit with no corrective actions or observations and maintain continuous certification with no gaps between certification periods.
What Principles Does the WRAP Certification Include?
- Human resources management
- Health and safety standards
- Environmental and eco-friendly practices
- Legal compliance including import/export, customs compliance and security standards
Where is this style dyed, cut, and sewn?
While we do offer all sorts of made in the USA apparel, our PLUT is a story that stretches across North America and Central America. It all starts with the best possible material. In this case, cotton.
- Clean Combed Cotton: The PLUT cotton combs out 2.5x more impurities than standard ring spun cotton. That means softer, longer-lasting, incredible looking tees.
- Long Staple Cotton: This makes for less stray fibers and a tight-knit print surface. Long staple cotton yields extraordinary long, silky fibers, and is known for its superior strength and uniformity. Long staple cotton is the best for weaving high quality bed linen fabrics.
- Eco-Dyed: Our fabric is dyed using 7x less water and eco-friendly dyes. That's a lot. Pair that with our eco-printing decoration methods, and we're about as green as you can possibly get.
The massive looms the cotton is woven on create beautiful textiles that are eco-dyed, and then cut to exact specifications right there on site in a facility that makes more garments in the United States than any other clothing manufacturer. Right in Los Angeles. Then they're packed up and shipped out to one of the Platinum WRAP-certified facilities in Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras where they are sewn. Then they're shipped back to the states to our production warehouse for printing, embroidering, and shipping to you doorstep.
Why not do it all here in the states? We're working on it. Much of our athletic clothing, prints, and housewear lines are made in the USA already, and we're adding more items all the time. The truth is that in the ultra-competitive industry of apparel US production at scale is nearly impossible right now. Add to that an environment of erratic supply chains, inflation, neoliberal corporativist trade agreements and pandemic lockdown policies, and we have ourselves an environment toxic to domestic production.
That said, we're proud of the level of domestic production we can do and look to expand by leaps and bounds moving forward as always.