California Apparel News

Adrienne Catone, owner, operator and jack-of-all-trades of FaeriesDance.com organic clothing company, knows exactly when that big flashing lightbulb went off over her head. She was trekking through the Congo in search of silverback gorillas while on a six-month hiatus from her job working on military aircraft as an aerospace engineer for Rockwell International. “The experience was just completely overwhelming for me,” Catone recalls. “I had never been with animals in their natural habitat before, and all of a sudden all these emotions came out. I suddenly really wanted to not destroy these things I was seeing—the animals, the environment.” It took a bit of time, and a second six-month sabbatical from tooling up military satellites, for Catone to make the leap of faith. In 2004, “I made the commitment to open a sustainable business,” she says. She wrote down a list of 20 possibilities, sat on them for a few months, and then one pretty much picked her. As she began transforming her lifestyle and looking for earth-friendly clothing sources, “I was shocked,” she says, “to find how hard it was to find something besides T-shirts. I mean, what do you wear to work?” That was the trigger. “I decided to create a store that I wanted to shop at and have all the things I wanted to find that I couldn’t find.”FaeriesDance.com started on a shoestring in 2005 with a mere 60 products and Catone doing most of the website technical work herself. Today, she still writes almost all the code for her site, but she now has more than 700 items and a fiercely loyal following. Thanks to the votes of many of her 7,000 or so regular customers, FaeriesDance.com, for the second straight year, is one of 10 nominees for Green America’s People’s Choice Award and the only clothing company to make the list this year.

Green America, started in 1982, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting environmental sustainability as well as social justice by way of the pocketbook, educating and informing consumers so they will spend their money with socially and ecologically responsible businesses. Making it onto Green America’s now 5,000-member National Green Pages business registry—which means a company has successfully passed Green America’s rigorous screening process to gain its Seal of Approval—opens up a world of like-minded customers to a business.Early on, Catone sought and received Green America’s blessing. “For my customers’ benefit, I wanted to be certified,” she says, but these standards are ones Catone holds as well. To pass FaeriesDance.com muster, a product must not simply be organic and chemical-free but also be a certified product of fair trade or monitoring by an organization such as Global Organic Textile Standards, which ensures a product is made according to fair labor practices. That trifecta rules out a lot of products, but things have gotten easier, Catone says, as consumer awareness has grown. “There is so much bigger demand on the consumer side now, and with demand has come more variety,” she explains.

A great example of this is in the area of intimates. When Catone first started, “It took me about three years before I found really nice lingerie,” she recalls. Today, the site’s daily listing of Top Ten products in demand is dominated by “the whole lingerie section. Be Green panties, French and Italian bras, men’s underwear, they just fly.” Tops also are no longer limited to baggy T-shirts. Catone searches far and wide for her inventory. “I am finding things everywhere,” she says, adding, “but you have to forage a bit to make everyone happy,” particularly when it comes to price. She will bring in less expensive items from overseas as long as she can verify they are up to her standards. Green America will announce its People’s Choice winner Nov. 12 at the San Francisco Green Festival (the Los Angeles edition takes place Oct. 29–30). One-click voting is done online, but Catone isn’t dusting off the trophy shelf just yet. “We’re still a little too small to actually win,” she laughs. “My customers are enthusiastic, but there aren’t enough of them.”

A move from the South Bay to larger digs in Oregon in 2012 hopefully coincides with “a lot more expansion.” Until then, it’s an honor, as they say, just to be nominated. “Even during the voting, we got so many e-mails saying, ’We love your company, we voted for you,’” says Catone. “It made my day.”—Carol A. Crotta