There’s nothing quite as lovely as a crisp new set of bedsheets. But most of know very little about where the cotton in those sheets was grown, ginned, woven, and dyed. And given how much suffering and slave labor exists in the cotton supply chain, what you discover might give you nightmares.
Boll & Branch, a direct-to-consumer bedding brand, wants you to sleep soundly on its sheets. Today, it launches Origin Track, which allows you to trace the journey of any item it sells, from raw material to finished product. Customers can input the product’s “lot number” to learn about the farms and factories that made each item. The service illustrates that Boll & Branch’s products are made ethically, but it is also designed to start a broader conversation about why traceability in the cotton supply chain is important.
Going To The Source
Scott Tannen co-founded Boll & Branch with his wife Missy a decade ago using their savings as startup capital. They became profitable in their second year, and now generate revenue of more than $200 million annually. The company has more than 200 employees, and expects to have eight stores by the end of this year. Last year, they manufactured more than a million sheet sets.
The Tannens launched the brand precisely because they felt there wasn’t enough transparency in the world of bedding. Back in 2013, the Rana Plaza factory in Bangladesh collapsed, killing 1,128 people, and sending ripples around the world. That was around the time the Tannens wanted to upgrade to king-sized sheets, but they couldn’t get straight answers from brands about where their factories were located or whether the cotton was organic.
As a serial entrepreneur, Tannen felt there was an opportunity to launch a bedding company focused on ethical sourcing. So the Tannens flew to India in search of organic cotton farms and Fair Trade mills and factories. “We had no background in this industry at all, so I was relying on Google searches,” says Tannen. “I figured that even if this startup idea didn’t go anywhere, I could just write a book about what I learned.”
But that trip proved productive. They discovered a co-op of a hundred small cotton farms in rural northeastern India called Chetna Organic. It had a reputation for eco-friendly practices, including watering crops with rainfall and using natural alternatives to pesticides. It also worked with tribal farmers to increase their yields and improve their quality of life, and supported nearby mills to turn raw cotton into fabric.
The Tannens partnered with Chetna to produce its first batch of sheets, and continues to work closely with the farm. As Boll & Branch has grown exponentially, Chetna has grown too. It has expanded its workforce from 836 to 13,170 farmers, and last year, it produced 20 million pounds of cotton.
These days, Boll & Branch’s product range includes sheets, towels and furniture. It now has more than 80 suppliers around the world, including Turkey, Portugal, and Vietnam. The Tannens are still personally involved with sourcing. But they also rely on third party certifications, including Fair Trade and the Global Organic Textile Standard.
“Early on, we got in the habit of getting full documentation from each of our partners,” Tannen says. “If there’s a factory we really want to partner with that is not certified, we work with them to get this certification. We know each factory owner by name.”
Farm-to-Sheet Traceability
Most brands don’t have this level of insight into their supply chains. Some find middlemen who will manage the process. Others partner with factories that will source cotton on their behalf. And while brands are required to label their sheets, saying where they were manufactured, the brands themselves may not know where the cotton was sourced or milled.
Boll & Branch stands out for knowing each step of the process. And Tannen believes this is one reason that the brand has thrived. While some consumers gravitate towards Boll & Branch for its classic, minimal aesthetic, others like its commitment to organic cotton and worker’s rights.
The new tool from Boll & Branch lets customers input any product’s lot number into a website to see the item’s supply chain. “We had already been keeping these records,” Tannen says. “Now we’re just compiling them for customers to see.”
In one example, a set of sheets begins in Odisha, in Northeast India, where the cotton is farmed and ginned. The cotton travels down the West coast of India until it reaches Tamil Nadu, where it is dyed in a family-run dying facility that employs 6,000 workers, the majority of whom are women. The final product is then cut and sewn in a female-founded, family-owned factory Madurai, which is also in Tamil Nadu. “We try to keep the process as local as possible, to reduce the amount of travel,” Tannen says.
Tannen says two sets of sheets, even within the same collection, may have completely different origins. Boll & Branch is now making so many sheets that it cannot rely on a single farm or factory to make each product.
It’s unclear exactly how many customers will be interested in tracking their sheets. Many people don’t have the time, or interest, to go into this level of depth when it comes to understanding the source of their products. But Tannen believes it is incumbent on the brand to create a fun, immersive experience so customers are intrigued to learn more. “We’ve invested a lot in storytelling, so customers can feel connected to the people who made their sheets,” Tannen says. “We have plenty of pictures from our own visits to these places.”
More broadly, he hopes that this sparks interest among consumers to learn more about where their products are made. And that traceability becomes more common in the textile industry. “We don’t get sustainability without traceability,” says Tannen. “We can’t fix our supply chains unless we know where our products are made.”
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