Breeder’s Confident That Public Will Cotton to Her Nature-Colored Cloth

Like the early settlers who endured searing heat and deadly rattlesnakes crossing the Arizona desert, Sally Fox has learned it’s not easy being a pioneer.

As an entomologist and aspiring cotton breeder working in California’s San Joaquin Valley in the late 1980s, Fox created a stir in the textile industry by developing a variety of naturally colored cotton that could be machine-spun. Traditional white-cotton growers had ignored the colored variety, which dates to 2700 BC, because its fibers were so short and coarse they could be spun only by hand.

Fox’s cotton, in hues of brown and green that deepen in color with each washing, needed neither the toxic dyes nor bleaches used in production of white cotton. The colored cotton also is naturally resistant to pests and can be grown without chemicals.

Fox planted a few hundred acres, formed her own company, Fox’s Natural Cotton Colours Inc., and within a few years was racking up $10 million in worldwide sales of her FoxFibre cotton. Levi Strauss, Jockey, Land’s End and L.L. Bean bought the soft cotton for jeans and jackets, underwear, shirts and sweaters.

“When Levi’s introduced their natural line, all this took off,” Fox said, gesturing toward shelves of sheets, towels and other products in varying shades of coyote brown and Palo Verde green at her company’s headquarters in this small tourist town northwest of Phoenix.

But like a cheap shirt, the fit didn’t last for long.

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Fox lost her biggest customer when Levi’s dropped the natural-cotton jeans wear line. She says the popularity of her cotton posed a threat to sales of the company’s traditional dyed blue jeans. A Levi’s spokesman declined to comment.

Land’s End and L.L. Bean also dropped the line after problems receiving orders from mills that spun Fox’s cotton, some of which closed their doors in a textile industry slump. Other mills considered her cotton a novelty item and refused to handle it. And competitors pushing lower-priced imitations emerged from India and Israel to take a bite out of Fox’s business.

Last year, Natural Cotton Colours’ sales dwindled to $1.2 million. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in December when farmers who grew cotton for Fox sued for back payment, and a dispute arose over storage fees for $8 million worth of stockpiled cotton she couldn’t sell. The company listed $8.8 million in assets and debts of $6 million.

Fox is confident that her company, which continues to do business while reorganizing in bankruptcy, will recapture its status as leader of the fledgling colored-cotton industry. The field is mostly Fox and a few California growers.

“I think there’s something really different about these colors than the dyed version of these colors,” she said. “I think people sense it and feel it and they’re very comfortable with it. As we become better known, and the environmental benefits become better known, demand will increase.”

Fox moved her company from California to Arizona in 1993 after the powerful San Joaquin Valley Cotton Board refused to allow her to plant more colored cotton acres, fearing it would contaminate white cotton.

Fox says she still feels pressure from California cotton growers, who she says have used their clout to persuade mills to reject her colored cotton.

“They see colored cotton as a major threat to their livelihoods,” she said. “They’ve hurt us, and that’s why we’re in this spot we’re in now. But I don’t think they’ve got us.”

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Norman Clark, president of the San Joaquin Valley Cotton Board, said it’s no secret that the growers he represents want to stamp out colored cotton entirely because of contamination fears. Cotton growers in the San Joaquin Valley recently voted to ban colored-cotton production, although the outcome of the referendum is being challenged in court.

“Everywhere it’s been grown, they’ve had some level of contamination,” Clark said, whether the contamination occurred in the field or during the cotton’s processing.

Fox, however, says contamination fears are greatly exaggerated and that white and colored cotton can coexist if fields are kept far enough apart.

Fox’s fascination with cotton dates to her childhood in Menlo Park, when she learned to spin it at a Renaissance festival.

“I was an avid spinner at age 12,” she said. “I used to pull cotton out of the top of medicine and vitamin bottles and spin it. On the bus in high school I’d spin. I’d groom our Samoyeds and spin and knit the hair, which is very bright white, into sweaters and a tie for my dad.”

But Fox, 41, never saw a cotton plant until she was 24 and earning a master’s degree in integrated pest management at UC Riverside. A few years later, while working for cotton breeder Bob Dennett in Davis, Calif., Fox spotted a bag of brown cotton seeds.

“I said what’s going on, why isn’t anyone improving this fiber so it can be more easily spun? He said there’s no market for it. I said, ‘Why isn’t anyone making a market for it?’ He handed me this sack of seed and said, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ ”

Being a woman in the male-dominated cotton industry hasn’t been easy for Fox, says Wally Hofmann, an agronomist and vice president of Natural Cotton Colours.

“The cotton-farming industry is a good-old-boy network,” he said. “I don’t think it’s helped at all that she was a female trying to rock the boat. On the textile processing end, on the other hand, she has a lot of respect.”

Fox still has some big-name accounts. Jockey uses her cotton in a line of men’s briefs; Ikea sells furniture coverings; and Fieldcrest-Cannon makes sheets and blankets.

Her business is prospering in Europe, where customers like the environment-friendly nature of organically grown colored cotton. Several European armies march in long underwear made from Fox’s cotton and marketed by a Swedish company.

Her clients also include companies that make clothes for people who are sensitive to dyes and chemicals like formaldehyde that are found in commercially colored clothing.

“What Sally offers us is not a product, it’s a whole way of thinking,” said Suellen Fisher Henney of San Francisco. Her company, Fisher Henney Naturals, sells clothes via mail-order for chemically sensitive women like herself.

“Not growing cotton with herbicides, not using dyes that pollute our water table--it’s a phenomenal idea that my environmentally conscious customers like,” she said.

Bankruptcy has made Fox realize she must pay more attention to the financial side of the business. She is considering opening up the company to investors and hiring a chief executive to oversee day-to-day operations so she can devote more time to research and developing better cotton strains and colors.

“My life is the plants and the design,” she said. “It’s not how to make a new industry into an established industry. We’re going to find someone who can do that.”