Design Responsibility: Freeset Tees

I'm so excited to find out that InterVaristy will be able to use Freeset brand T-shirts for our New Student Outreach this year. Part of being a responsible designer--or a justice-minded producer in any vocation-- is thinking not just about the what your design communicates, but the means of it's production. The small responsibility we have in deciding the materials we use is a opportunity to do business with those who act justly in an unjust world.

Freeset is a T-shirt factory and print-shop that employs women who escaped from sexual exploitation and slavery. Located in Sonagacchi, the largest, most infamous sex district in Kolkata, India, Freeset provides a first paying job to people who, though they are set free, have been abandoned by their families and shunned by society. Freeset is a community that trains, encourages, and fairly compensates these women, giving them a new way to live.

Freeset Employees

We used Freeset's Tees for Urbana 09, but had trouble using them for less foreseeable purposes. They didn't have an American distributor, so we would have to wait 6 months for Tees to ship by boat, and then pay international tariffs that kept being billed months afterward. Good luck telling a chapter of students "we sold out, just wait 6 months" for their start-of-school outreach campaign T-shirts. Its hard to get them to order them without the need for rush shipping sometimes.

This year I asked that we check with Freeset again, and they now have a distributor, a volunteer! Praise God for the people in the unseen roles, the administrative and sometimes thankless jobs, who make the work successful and good business possible. Freeset can be more profitable than ever, and InterVarsity students can be proud to wear their T-shirts, knowing that at least in this small decision, we are being just. Check out Freeset >>

Freeset also changed two of their standard colors to Grey and Navy-- the two colors I happened to spec for our new NSO designs!