Alta Gracia
Promoting a Fair Wage Apparel Brand
The Challenge: Alta Gracia, owned by Knights Apparel, a leading supplier of branded athletic apparel for sports teams and universities, is a new apparel brand sold at college bookstores all over the United States. It is the first apparel brand to pay its workers a “living wage,” enough so that the people who make the t-shirts, sweatshirts and hoodies, and their families can lift themselves out of poverty. The start-up company, named for the town of Villa Altagracia in the Dominican Republic where the factory is located, had no advertising budget and therefore had to rely exclusively on traditional and social media, as well as in-store signs and clothing tags to promote itself to the university community.
Our Approach: Fenton believed that if students, faculty and alumni understood that buying Alta Gracia apparel would make life changing improvements for the workers who sewed the clothing, they would support it. We also believed that the best messengers for this message, directly at the point of purchase and with media, were the workers themselves. We designed signs and clothing hangtags featuring close up photos of individual workers and brief quotations from them explaining what the purchase of Alta Gracia apparel meant for their lives.
Progress, Accelerated: We took our story first to the New York Times and got a 2,000-word story with photos on the front page of the Sunday Business Section (July 18, 2010). This story generated requests for interviews with CEO, Joe Bozich and COO/President, Donnie hodge by online websites and bloggers, an enthusiastic blog post from Time magazine’s Joe Klein, and sign-ups at the Alta Gracia web page. The New York Times article then caught the attention of Huffington Post’s editors, who made Knight’s/Alta Gracia’s CEO, Joe Bozich, a nominee for their “100 Game Changers” contest. Fenton mobilized voters via Facebook and e-mail, helping Bozich win in the “style” division for which he was honored at a gala event in New York City. We also pitched the Alta Gracia story to campus media at the 300+ colleges and universities whose bookstores carry the brand and received uniformly enthusiastic news and editorial coverage and commentary.
While the project has only just begun with the current academic year, preliminary results have been strong. Duke University’s bookstore director reports, for example, that Alta Gracia has had very strong sales, particularly for a new brand. This is especially important for Alta Gracia since Duke’s bookstore ordered the largest amount of Alta Gracia apparel and sells all of the most popular brands with which Alta Gracia has to compete. Other schools report similar results.
