100% Recycled

In spring of 2008 former professional race car driver Joe Fox, turned a bar insult into a name for his future clothing company, Dirtball Fashion. “A good friend of mine, Wayne Coble, had a girl call him a Dirtball one night,” he said. Jokingly, Coble slapped the oh-so-charming phrase on a few hats and distributed them to friends, including Fox. According to Fox, his “Dirtball” hat was quite the conversation piece. “People kept asking me about the hat, and one day, I said, ‘This is my new apparel company.’”

Fox, a North Carolina native, embarked on a new mission: US-made, eco-friendly apparel.

His analysis of the Southeast’s dismal employment figures helped him realize the importance of using in-house manufacturing practices in his business. In hopes of reviving North Carolina’s depleting economy, Fox set up shop in his home state.

At the time of his company’s launch, the South was facing one of the worst droughts in its history, and a North Carolina wild fire caused air quality warning levels to escalate to code purple, the highest level of concern on the scale of particle pollution. Instead of adding to his area’s pollution problems, Fox said he wanted to create a solution.

Fox describes Dirtball Fashion’s environmental and economic impact in his interview below:

What impact does your company have on the environment?
Our impact is pretty substantial. For every 100,000 t-shirts we produce we keep:
700,000 bottle out of landfills
400 tons of carbon emissions out of the air
500 barrels of oil saved
Five manufacturing jobs
Just imagine what we could do if produced one million garments annually. What an impact! Every customer both retail and wholesale can have an effect on the economy and the environment - points that get overlooked far too often.

What aspects of your company are eco-friendly?

First, one hundred percent of our soft goods have eco-friendly content. All of our fabrics are eco-friendly but some of our trims are not, as the eco-option in some instances has to come from overseas. In that case we revert to U.S.-sourced materials. The second aspect is our supply chain. Of the 15 mills in our supply chain, eleven are within 100 miles of our headquarters. The total distance our t-shirts travel from yarn to finished goods is 140 miles and average distance of 360 miles total travel distance across our product range.  Now think about goods coming from overseas or from Central America; China to North Carolina is 8,300 miles; India to North Carolina is 7,700 miles and Honduras to North Carolina is 1,600 miles. Even if we changed our distribution to California, the average of the three would still be about 5,700 miles. That is a big footprint, approximately 15 times larger than ours.

Which retailers carry your brand?
Right now we are in several independent shops in North Carolina with the majority of our sales coming from online and our contract manufacturing business which is growing very quickly. We are in sales mode right now and working on some distribution as well as multi-chain placement.

What are your company’s goals for the future?
Short term we want to continue growing our brand, our sales, sales force and our contract manufacturing, as well as work on some private equity placement and larger distribution channels.  Mid-term, we want to vertically integrate into a rehabilitated mill that generates power form solar, geo-thermal, hydro and fuel cell. It will be LEEDS certified and operate under ISO 14000 guidelines, in other words a 100% green factory. Finally, long term we want to take Dirtball public.