Wearing Coal : Profits Mined From T-Shirts Dyed With Local Products

There’s a lot of coal in them there hills, and a hairdresser and a deli owner found that an old wringer washing machine can turn the black rock into a hip line of T-shirts.

“I just went outside and got some coal and put it in a pot to boil,” hairstylist Sandra White said. “I got some of my husband’s T-shirts and threw them in the pot. They came out a perfect black. My husband thought I had lost my mind.”

Black Gold Creations, as White’s business is called, has struck a vein in T-shirt sales as it mines the latest trend in casual tops. Entrepreneurs from all over are selling T-shirts dyed from nature’s goodness.

In Hawaii, shirts are dyed with Kona coffee and red volcanic soil. In Georgia, they’re using Vidalia onions, peanut skins and kudzu vines.

“I had read a lot of articles on coal, and I wear a lot of T-shirts,” White said. “It just came to me one day to dye a T-shirt with coal.”

White teamed up with sister-in-law Linda Knowles--co-owner of an amusement machine company and a delicatessen--to make the T-shirts and sweatshirts in Bluefield, about 80 miles south of Charleston.

White said she has nearly doubled her initial investment of $3,000 in less than six months and has sold about 2,000 T-shirts and sweatshirts at $21.95 for T-shirts and $34.86 for sweatshirts.

“Natural dye processes sound good. They have a ring to them that sells,” said Nolan Etters, a professor at the University of Georgia’s Textiles, Merchandising and Interiors Department in Athens, Ga.

The shirts, solid back, smell like most new unwashed clothing. They are now mass-dyed and come with a tiny bag of coal and the story of the rock, used mostly by energy plants.

“Three hundred million years ago, coal was being formed,” it reads. “Coal is pure energy, and was known in the Appalachian fields as ‘Black Gold.’ The unique coloration of this garment is produced by genuine, pure Appalachian coal. Legend has it that the coal’s energy is transferred to the wearer of this shirt.”

Mary Belle Rowe of Bluefield bought 36 shirts for family and friends.

“When I first saw them, I thought, ‘How unique, how different,’ ” Rowe said. “I bought one for each male member of our family. When I gave it to my son for Christmas, he joked, ‘It’s probably just a bag of coal.’ Was he surprised when he opened the gift and found a bag of real coal.”

Other companies are doing the same with other parts of nature.

Crazy Shirts, based in Aiea, Hawaii, uses the island’s famous Kona coffee as a dye.

“The shirts become a warm tan color and smell like coffee,” said Louann McNulty, merchandising manager.

The shirts are printed with various coffee logos and are sold in 50 stores and through the company’s mail-order catalog.

The red volcanic soil found on the island of Kauai gives Red Dirt Shirts and Red Lava Shirts an orange-red color, said Terry Benedict, whose Sacramento-based Island Wear Clothing makes Red Lava Shirts.

“The soil has a high-staining quality to it because of the iron oxide in it. It stains like rust and turns everything red,” he said.

The Red Dirt Shirt gave Robert Crisp in Atlanta the idea for a rust-colored shirt dyed with Georgia red clay.

Crisp’s American Imprints followed the dirt shirt with a pale yellow-tan one dyed with Vidalia onion skins, a brownish-purple shirt dyed from peanut skins and a green shirt made with kudzu, a prolific vine found throughout the South.

“We just added a new peach shirt,” Crisp said. “It’s made with a juice concentrate that we get from a cannery.”

Using natural dyes is not new. Ancient Egypt had brilliant dyes made mostly from berries and plants. Synthetic dyes have only been used since the early 1900s, Etters said.

White and Knowles started out like the old days last winter, hauling boiling water from an upstairs kitchen to an old-fashioned wringer washer. They now sell T-shirts and sweatshirts in gift shops and on their own Web page.

The result is a “comfortable, loose-fitting shirt,” said Chet Rhodes of Nashville, who received the shirt as a gift.

White hopes to add other coal-dyed apparel to the Black Gold line and market the products as environmentally friendly.

“We want to do a hat and eventually a jacket,” she said. “We’re just getting started.”