PACT Organic Underwear

We’re proud to announce that PACT has won a Fast Company IDEA Design Award! Well…okay, maybe we’re being modest, we actually won two: Gold in the Ecodesign category and Silver in the Personal Accessories category. >>

This Earth Day, PACT is getting dirty in our underwear. Planting trees, of course.  A whole forest actually.

To kick off the launch of our newest nonprofit partnership with Green Belt Movement, we’ve introduced a new collection and are giving away 100% of the proceeds to support the cause. During Earth Week, for each pair sold we’ll plant 20 trees in Africa. Our goal: 10,000 trees planted.

What’s Green Belt Movement? Founded in 1977 by environmentalist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Dr. Wangari Maathai, it started in Kenya as a grassroots tree-planting program to address environmental damage. Since then, it’s evolved into an international vehicle for empowering women, advocating for human rights and supporting good governance and peaceful democratic change. The result to date: they’ve planted more than 40 million trees throughout Africa. That’s a lot of trunks. >>

PACT was just shortlisted for the Brit Insurance Design of the Year.  This is a big deal, kind of like the oscars for worldwide design.  We heart our design partners Yves Behar and the whole team at fuseproject–this is a huge testament to their great work.  Read more

Considering the industry we’re in, the 9th Annual No Pants! Subway Ride was too perfect of an event to pass up.  So the PACT team – along with hundreds of other participants – headed out last Sunday to ride BART and SF Muni pants-less.  Check out some photos from the event:

Riding BART from Rockridge to Embarcadero

Taking Muni with other pants-less passengers

Walking through Castro

PACT co-Founders Jason and Jeff invite you to join them to ride BART pants-less while showing off their PACT.
We’ll be meeting at two locations:
Rockridge BART @ 1:40pm or
16th St./Mission BART @ 2:00pm
Come meet up with fellow PACT-ers at either the Rockridge or 16th St. BART station at the designated time, where we’ll all hop on BART along with hundreds of other “No Pants!” participants around the Bay.  We’ll exit at Embarcadero station and proceed to MUNI, after which you’re invited to free (yes, free!) drinks with Jason and Jeff in San Francisco.
For more information about this awesome event (which will be occurring in dozens of cities around the world from Los Angeles to Tokyo), please see http://improveverywhere.com/2010/01/04/global-no-pants-subway-ride-2010/

So last night I got into a long discussion with family and dear friends about climate change.  My wife Elizabeth spent most of December in cold Copenhagen with Wangari Maathai and the Green Belt Movement at the COP15 talks, and I spent most of the past several years developing Freedom to Roam, an initiative to help the survival of wildlife through connecting habitats.  I’ve thought quite a bit about climate change, and I think as citizens and engaged consumers, we need to understand what’s happening down the road. Please draw your own conclusions about it, but I think it’s really critical that we all know what’s going on.  These reports have informed the way that PACT has come together as a business and why we made many of the choices that we made.  Take a look at the Summary for Policy Makers, and if you feel like reading the whole thing take a look here.

Everyone should have a grandmother as supportive as mine; Mimi has been a stalwart supporter of PACT from the very beginning. She is also our biggest customer. How many other underwear companies can boast the CEO’s grandmother as their biggest customer? She gives the underwear to everyone…my brothers, cousins, her children, the people who help her at her house, her 26 godchildren, people who work at her doctor’s office, etc. etc. etc.  If you have interacted with Mimi in the past 4 months, she has probably given you PACT. In fact, she has bought over 100 pairs of PACT and every time she buys (by phone of course) she always makes sure we apply the family discount.
Mimi is also a big fan of our coverage. Whenever PACT is in a magazine or in a newspaper, she buys all the copies she can find. The coffee table is covered in PACT filled magazines.
She is such a big supporter of PACT that she even decorated her Christmas tree with PACT!

So thank you Mimi, from all of us at PACT. You’re our favorite customer and you have won the hearts of the entire PACT team. We can’t thank you enough for your support.
–Jason

Question: Is “going green” or “being green” something that we do for ourselves, our neighbors or our ego?
Fact: Hybrid cars that are designed to look like hybrids–e.g. the Prius– sell much better than vehicles with hybrid motors but traditional bodywork.  Why is this?  Are we, as environmentally consciousness consumers, purchasing a hybrid vehicle because it is more energy efficient, or are we buying a hybrid so that we can publically flaunt our green street cred?
Our motivations are probably a little of both, which is only human, we want to be recognized and given credit for our efforts.  Rather than ignore this tendency we should recognize it and use it to our advantage.  It’s fine to want to do good things and live a more eco-conscious life AND expect a little positive reinforcement for those decisions.
So how do we show off what we wear under our clothing?
Well, the first thing we should do is find out what we are putting in our pants.
Mass produced non-organic underwear is laden with oil and unnatural Frankenscience.  Those “Fruit of the Loom” have more in common with Exxon Mobile and Monsanto than they do with a basket of fresh produce.  There is oil in the fertilizer that grows the cotton, there are mutations in the genes of the plants, and unfortunately, there are barrels and barrels of oil spent in the shipping, transportation and far-flung fabrication of most of our underwear.  The plastic spears and plastic bags that seal and pierce each pair require a tremendous amount of energy and petroleum to produce.
We decided to go down the sustainable route.  After all, change starts with your underwear.  Change starts with consistency, with small choices making increasingly larger impacts.  We use and wear underwear everyday, sometimes more than one pair a day.  And yet we have– for many years– been protecting and covering our most intimate assets with a product that is far from personal.
There are many reasons to buy and wear PACT sustainable organic underwear.  The beautiful polychromatic design, the closed-loop 100-mile field to factory production facilities, the non GMO organic cotton, the generous and constant donations made to non profits from every purchase of every progressive pair…
So, now that you know why you should make a PACT to be a more responsible consumer and replace the convenient with the crucial, the wasteful with the economical… you may be wondering, how do I show other people I’ve made such a sexily sustainable choice?
Here are 5 Things You Can Do to Share Your Progressive Panties Epiphany:

1. Answer the door in your underwear
2. Go to the gym and take a generous amount of time getting dressed
3. Go shopping with friends and take them into the changing room
4. Flash people (especially people driving Priuses, they love conspicuous displays of eco-chicness)
5. Be in college.  More importantly, be on a college campus (opportunities will present themselves, trust us.)
   Now ask yourself.  What’s better for the environment, walking in sustainable, luxurious, and incredibly stylish PACT underwear or driving a Prius in said underwear?  The answer is obviously walking.  If you are in a hurry ride a bike, (riding a bike in a dress could be the 6th way to show off your new eco-undies)… If you have to drive, by all means drive a Prius.  While you are at it, do as our co-founder and CEO Jason does…PACT it all into a Prius.
   If you REALLY want to show off your commitment to the environment, drive that Prius in just your underwear in the carpool lane, with three other PACT pals, naturally.
6. 
7. Greening the Commute

We’ve teamed up with Global Green USA and launched our new butterflies print, inspired by its commitment to stem global climate change through green building. We’ve also expanded our Oceana collection by introducing two new prints: Scales and Shells.
Enjoy free shipping for the holidays and 25% off pre-orders of all 3 new prints!
Lift your spirits and rock this fun new print from PACT.

Check out all our new prints below:

Of course, these prints (and solids) come in men’s styles too: