TBT: Where Was Your Shirt Made? Eight Years Later

In April 2018, Rick Roth published Where was your shirt made? How was your shirt made? It ran five years after the Rana Plaza collapse in Savar, Bangladesh, which killed at least 1,129 garment workers and injured more than 2,000.

The piece named four companies doing it differently. Los Angeles Apparel. Bayside. AllMade. Alta Gracia. It ended with an instruction: ask questions and don’t take some BS for an answer.

Eight years later I went back to it. Then I searched the shirtboard archive to see what working shops actually said about any of this.

What happened to the four

Alta Gracia is gone. The Worker Rights Consortium, which monitored the factory, reports it operated from 2010 until 2021, when pandemic constraints forced the parent company to close the business. While running, it paid roughly 2.5 times the prevailing Dominican garment wage. It was the living-wage proof of concept. It did not survive.

Los Angeles Apparel is bigger. The company is now expanding, it signed a ten-year lease on a SoHo flagship in March 2026.

Bayside is still US-made, but the union line is narrow. Bayside describes itself as one of the few remaining vertical mills operating in the United States. It operates one union facility, Teamsters-represented, producing five styles under a separate union label.

AllMade is no longer Haiti-only. It now runs through SanMar as exclusive promotional-industry distributor, and it has added the Elcatex group in Honduras alongside LIFE S.A. in Haiti. That is a partnership, not an acquisition. The Haiti story is still real. It is no longer the only story.

What changed in Bangladesh

The Accord became the International Accord for Health and Safety in the Textile and Garment Industry, signed again in November 2023 for a three-year term. Its Bangladesh numbers as of June 30, 2026: 1,762 factories, 2.8 million workers, 245 signatory brands, 75,198 inspections completed, 288,915 safety findings, 81% average remediation.

Wages moved once. After the 2023 protests, Bangladesh set the garment minimum wage at 12,500 taka a month, effective December 1, 2023. The rate it replaced, 8,000 taka, had stood since 2018, which means it was the number in force when Rick wrote. The settlement added a 5% annual increase applied to basic pay only, with the next full wage board review scheduled for 2028. Cornell’s Global Labor Institute notes inflation running 9 to 10 percent against that 5 percent.

The Fair Labor Association found average garment wages 51.78% below the living wage estimate for Dhaka, and the new minimum still short of it.

The change Rick could not have written about

The Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act took effect June 21, 2022. Goods mined, produced or manufactured wholly or in part in Xinjiang, or by any entity on the UFLPA Entity List, are presumed made with forced labor and barred from import. To rebut that presumption an importer must show by clear and convincing evidence that no forced labor touched the chain anywhere.

Read “wholly or in part”. One bale of Xinjiang cotton upstream taints the finished garment no matter where it was cut and sewn.

Cotton is a named priority sector. On July 31, 2026, DHS added 43 companies to the Entity List effective August 3, the largest single expansion since enactment, bringing it to 187 entities across aluminum, apparel, copper, cotton and tomatoes.

CBP issued operational guidance for importers in June 2026 that requires purchase orders, bills of materials, production records, transportation records and sub-tier supplier documentation, and states plainly that affidavits, redacted records and incomplete sub-tier information are unlikely to satisfy it.

Traceability tooling followed. CBP now points importers toward isotopic testing to verify cotton origin. Next Level Apparel names Oritain, isotopic origin testing in its public compliance stack. A blanks brand naming its forced-labor testing vendor in a CEO announcement would have been unimaginable in 2018.

Made in USA is now an enforcement priority

The FTC’s Made in USA Labeling Rule took effect August 13, 2021, codifying “all or virtually all” and enabling civil penalties for the first time.

Lions Not Sheep was one of the first apparel cases under it. The company removed Made in China tags from imported clothing and replaced them with Made in USA labels. The final order, July 28, 2022, carried a monetary judgment of $211,335.

Then Executive Order 14392, signed March 13, 2026, directed the FTC to prioritize Made in America enforcement and consider rulemaking on country-of-origin verification by online marketplaces.

The blanks wall consolidated

Gildan completed its acquisition of HanesBrands on December 1, 2025. Gildan, Hanes, Comfort Colors and American Apparel are now one company. SanMar completed its acquisition of Bella+Canvas on June 30, 2026. Delta Apparel filed Chapter 11 in mid-2024 and its activewear business was liquidated.

Fruit of the Loom announced in January 2025 the closure of two unionized Honduran factories, affecting more than 3,000 workers. One of them, Jerzees Nuevo Día, was the plant a 2009 university campaign reopened as a union facility. It was the industry’s showcase remediation.

And if you want to know where an “LA brand” actually makes goods, the numbers are published. Bella+Canvas earned FLA accreditation in 2024; the assessment report lists ten Tier One factories and about 7,100 workers, seven owned factories in Nicaragua, two owned in the US, one owned in Honduras, plus two contract factories in Nicaragua.

That is more disclosure than existed in 2018.

The customer question, answered by the archive

TCT, May 2016: “The school system here requires a sweatshop free form the manufacturer has to fill out. All I have anymore is Gildan now” (t17806.18). The ethics requirement narrowed his sourcing to one brand.

ZooCity, running a US-made line in 2012: “we advertise that we are U.S.-made but you’ll find less people are willing to put their money where there mouth is on that than you might think” (t4782.18). 3Deep, 2020: “ask your customer’s to pay more for American made products and see what happens, but yet they bitch about price” (t24933.6).

Frog priced the whole argument in one post in 2022: “In the past, I had to deal with white T’s running about $1.50 for an import, $2.50 for a U.S. made version (usually from the LA area), and/or for certain political applications, I needed union made for around $3.50.” (t26369.10)

Two things are true at once. Shops know the origin question matters. They also know it costs, and that most customers will not pay it.

What to do with this

Rick’s instruction still holds. It is easier to follow now, because the paperwork exists.

Four things a shop can actually do:

1. Ask your distributor for country of origin per PO, not per style.
2. If you change necktags, know the FTC rule. “All or virtually all,” civil penalties since 2021, an explicit enforcement priority since March 2026.
3. If you import anything directly, read the CBP guidance.
4. Quote the ethical blank as its own line. Frog’s ladder is roughly $1.50 / $2.50 / $3.50. Know your version of those three numbers before the customer asks. That is the same discipline as the setup time and time tracking work, measure it, then price it.

Eight years on, the good news is that some of what Rick asked for exists.

Original: Where was your shirt made? How was your shirt made?, Rick Roth, April 24, 2018. Forum quotes drawn from theshirtboard.com archive, 20,820 threads and 187,100 posts, and matched character-for-character against their source posts. Same method as Discharge Printing: What a Decade of Shop Talk Actually Teaches and the DTF archive.