The Travels of a T-Shirt in the Global Economy

The civic leaders of Fort Lauderdale have laid new paint over much of the city in recent years. The stoned surfers and rowdy college students are less visible now, pushed away from the beach with its new cafes and high-end hotels. The college students of the 1970s are parents now, and they have money to spend. The city bends toward the money like a palm tree, polishing, sweeping, painting. Yet, like tourist destinations everywhere, a scratch on the shiny paint reveals a bit of the tawdry underneath. Though the city fathers might prefer art galleries, it is T-shirt shops that line the beach because that is what people want to buy.

A large bin of T-shirts sat near the exit of a Walgreen’s drugstore near the beach. The bin was positioned to catch shoppers on the way out, and it worked: Nearly everyone who walked by pawed through the bin, if only for a minute. The bin was full of hundreds of T-shirts, each priced at $5.99, or two for $10. All were printed with some Floridian theme, seashells, bright fish, or palm trees.

I reached in and pulled out a shirt. It was white and printed with a flamboyant red parrot, the word “Florida” scripted beneath. I went to the checkout line, and then stepped out into the sun and looked at the shirt through the wrapper.

“You’re it,” I thought.

Back in Washington, I took the T-shirt out of the poly bag and looked at the label. “Sherry Manufacturing,” it said, and underneath, “Made in China.” I typed “Sherry Manufacturing” into my search engine. A few minutes later, I had reached Gary Sandler, Sherry’s president, on the telephone. “Sure,” he said. “Come on down. We don’t get many visitors from Washington.”

Sherry Manufacturing Company is located in Miami’s original industrial district, a bleak landscape of factories and warehouses not far from the airport. Gary Sandler is Florida-tanned and friendly, with a healthy skepticism about college professors. He is completely without pretension, but clearly proud of what he and his family have built. On the wall of his office are pictures of his children and his sales force.

Gary’s father, Quentin, formed Sherry Fashions just after World War II, naming the company for his eldest daughter. Quentin started out as an independent wholesaler, going shop to shop along the beachfront, selling souvenir trinkets to the store owners. He would travel to New York to buy and return to Miami to peddle his wares during the tourist season. Then, as now, people liked to shop while on vacation, especially for souvenirs. Quentin found that trinkets with a tropical theme were especially popular with the visiting Northerners.

In the 1950s, options for “wearable” souvenirs were limited, and vacationers typically brought home trinkets rather than clothing. However, Quentin found that one of his most popular items was a souvenir scarf, a small cotton square printed with a Floridian motif. The scarf, like much of the tourist kitsch of the era, was made and printed in Japan. Before long, Sherry found itself in a classic wholesaler’s predicament, with margins being squeezed between the suppliers and the retailers. In 1955, Quentin Sandler dispensed with his New York suppliers and opened his own cloth-printing shop in Miami. Sherry Fashions became Sherry Manufacturing Company.

In the mid-1970s, Gary Sandler quit college to join his father’s company, and in 1986 became president. In mid-1999, the presidency passed to the third generation when Sandler’s nephew (and Sherry’s son) assumed responsibility for day-to-day operations.

Today, Sherry is one of the largest screen printers of T-shirts in the United States. It remains a business focused on the tourist trade. In Key West, Florida, and Mount Denali, Alaska, and many tourist spots in between, as well as in Europe, Sherry has T-shirts for sale. Sherry’s artists design motifs for each tourist market, and the designs and locations are printed or embroidered on shirts in the Miami plant.

Sherry’s inventory of blank T-shirts (as well as beach towels and baseball caps) fills a two-story warehouse. The blank goods go from the warehouse to the printing machine, which resembles a Ferris wheel lying on its side. Workers slide each shirt on the flat end of a wheel spoke, which then turns and stops briefly up to 14 times. Each time the wheel stops, a different color is shot through the tiny holes in the screen. When the shirt returns to the starting point on the wheel, a worker slides it off and passes it to another worker, who lays it flat on a drying conveyor belt. The next worker picks it up from the end of the drying belt and lays it flat on a second conveyor belt, which swallows it into a tunnel and shoots it out, neatly folded, from the other end. It’s no longer underwear; it’s a souvenir.

The shirts piled up in rolling carts tempt with scenes of beaches, mountains, skyscrapers, and glaciers. Each shirt will allow someone to take a bit of a place and wear it home. A walk through the warehouse adjoining the plant is a travelogue, too, but for the more adventurous. Where the shirts are headed you need sun lotion, but where they come from you need shots.

Gary Sandler buys T-shirts from Mexico, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Bangladesh, Honduras, China, Pakistan, Botswana, India, Hong Kong, and South Korea. When I spoke with Gary again in 2008, the T-shirt business was tougher than it had been just a few years before: Competition—especially from abroad—was greater, the Miami labor market was more unpredictable, and overseas sourcing was more complicated. In addition, the economic downturn had severely affected the tourism industry, which had in turn affected Sherry’s business.

My T-shirt is from China. It likely departed Shanghai in late 1998 and arrived in the port at Miami a few weeks later. All told, the shirt cost Sandler $1.42, including 24 cents in tariffs. The shirt was one of about 25 million cotton T-shirts allowed into the United States from China under the U.S. apparel import quota system in 1998. The shirt’s journey, as we shall see, is a testimony to the power of economic forces to overcome obstacles. To arrive here, the shirt fought off the U.S. textile and apparel industries, Southern congressmen, and a system of tariffs and quotas so labyrinthine that it is hard to imagine why anyone would take the trouble. But Gary Sandler takes the trouble. Despite the best efforts of Congress, industry leaders, and lobbyists; despite the quotas, tariffs, and Chinese bureaucracy, China has the best shirts at the best price.

But China is a big place. Where, exactly, I asked Sandler, did the shirt come from? Sandler riffled through his Rolodex and pulled out a card. “Mr. Xu Zhao Min,” the card read, “Shanghai Knitwear.”

“Call him up,” said Sandler. “He’s a great guy. He’ll tell you everything.”

“Xu Zhao Min,” I tried to read aloud.

“No, no,” said Sandler. “Patrick. His American customers call him Patrick.”

Patrick Xu and his wife accepted my invitation to visit Washington during their next trip to the United States.

Patrick Xu straddles East and West, rich and poor, communism and capitalism with almost cat-like balance. He travels to the United States two or more times each year, visiting old customers and scouring for new ones, watching the Western fashions and bringing ideas back to the factories. While Patrick is happy to sell white T-shirts to established customers like Gary Sandler, he does not see much of a future in white T-shirts for Shanghai Knitwear. There is too much competition from lower-wage countries and other parts of China, and soon, he believes, his hard-won customers will be sourcing T-shirts far from Shanghai. Patrick is trying to move up the value chain into fancier goods such as sweaters.

“Come to China,” Patrick said during our first meeting in 1999. “I’ll show you everything.”

I wanted the whole story, I explained. Could he show me where the shirts were sewn? No problem. What about where the fabric is knit? Yes, of course. I pushed my luck: What about the yarn the fabric is made of? The spinning factory? Yes, he could arrange it. But this wasn’t quite the beginning. What about the cotton? To tell the life story of my shirt, I had to start at its birthplace. I knew that China was one of the world’s largest cotton producers. Could I go to the farm and see how the cotton is produced?