Tiny animals and plants create the earth with the message “Love Life”.  An endearing statement that reminds us everything we do – and wear – affects every living creature.

The tee is the finest organic cotton, grown and harvested at the hessnatur organic project in Burkina Faso in West Africa.  It is produced under strict social standards to protect the workers.  There are no harmful toxins or dyes in the tee, only pure love.

THIS CONTEST IS NOW CLOSED.

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If you would like to win this tee, comment below, telling us why it expresses what you feel about life or the planet or the future.  The winner will be chosen based on creativity and originality.

If you’re selected, hessnatur will email you and ship the tee to the address provided in your response email.

Contest Rules
Must be 18 years of age to enter.  Please, one entry per person.  Giveaway is available to residents of the U.S. only  If we don’t hear back from the entrant within twenty-four (24) hours, we’ll pick another winner.  No substitutions for cash. By submitting, you are agreeing to the full rules and restrictions.  Open for entries until Thursday, March 18, at 11:59 p.m. EST.

Last February I visited the hessnatur/Helvetas (the Swiss NGO) organic cotton project in Burkina Faso.  I returned in late November to learn more about the planting, growing and harvesting at this important venture.

We arrived in Ouagadougou, the capital of Burkina Faso in West Africa, and headed eastbound to the town of Fada N’Gourma. As we drove I could see the cotton plants just beginning to grow. The last month had provided perfect conditions under the West African sun.  Most of the fields I saw beside the road were conventional cotton fields. Not the organic fields that I was expecting during my visit.

After driving for two and a half hours to Fada N’Gourma we arrived at a small and simple track that led us to the organic cotton fields of the village of Fuanliedi. Here I met with the farmer Ouba. He  remembered us from our last visit and was happy to see our team again. With me were Georg Felber, the Project Manager from Helvetas, our translator, Daouda, our driver, Samba, and our videographer, Hartmut. I can’t speak or understand the local Oubas dialect (which is call Gourmantché), but Ouba communicated with his eyes, his smile and his body language.

Ouba told me – through our translator – that this year’s harvest wasn’t as good as last season’s because of the heavy rainfall in the past few weeks.  The amount of organic cotton was less than last year, but the quality of the cotton had improved. So, for him the harvest was on the plus side. In addition to organic cotton, he also grows organic peanuts and sesame – important for feeding his family and providing additional income, because peanuts and sesame can be sold at the local markets.

As the sun set, we left the organic cotton field and walked with Ouba and the other farmers to the center of the village. Here the first cleaning of the cotton took place before its journey to Ougadougou. I brought pictures from our last trip with me, also a movie that we made on that journey with Wolf Luedge, our CEO (which can be seen here on YouTube).

Everyone from the village stared with fascination at my laptop. People from the village saw themselves on the computer monitor – quite a never-before happening here in Fuanliedi!

More about my trip to Burkina Faso will follow in my next blog posts.

LOHAS company CEO’s and Founders discuss innovation in LOHAS businesss at the 2009 LOHAS Forum.

See all videos here.

“Nothing to hide, tell the truth“ – this is the tenor of the three key note speeches, held at the panel “Good Communication – Good Marketing“ during the Helvetas World Congress of Organic Cotton in Interlaken, Switzerland. If this were as simple as it sounds. There are thousands of brands worldwide- but only a fraction of them make their business, their textile chain transparent.

Transparency along the whole textile chain – this is something hessnatur stands for. Robert Cornelius from the swiss company Switcher and Simona Matt from the retail company Coop are also committed to this principle. They both join the panel with hessnatur’s CEO Wolf Lüdge.

Coop sources organic cotton for their collection from projects in India and Tanzania. Switcher offers transparent information about the whole production process. Every customer is able to see their production steps in the internet.

Wolf focused in his key note speech on 7 principles of sustainable marketing and brand communication. It’s important, he said, to stay on the beliefs of the brand, respect its roots and involve the customer. For example as we here do in the hessnatur corporate blog or with the Eco-Tee Design Contest. Also it’s the brand promise to ambition for innovations. Wolf mentioned our organic cotton growing project with Helvetas in Burkina Faso, where hessnatur supports – together with our customers – the meal  in the school cafeteria.

There was one statement during the discussion from Robin Cornelius I was thinking about. He said: “In the economy it’s not only about to grow, grow, grow.” It’ s much more about to give something economical a kind of sense, of spirit it’s necessary to be able to change things in the world with the work a company or brand is doing – just to give something a kind of sense. People and brand acting with the belief like this should not hide and be hidden. They need to get heard.

On the flight from Frankfurt to Burkina Faso, a sense of respect crept over my mind for what awaited me in one of the poorest countries in the world. Arriving in Ouagadougou, we traveled east after a short night to the cotton fields. The people here are dependent upon the “white gold”. I had many encounters on that day: with the farmers, with the international development group Helvetas,with my colleagues, and, most of all, with the children of the farmers.

Inviting me into their classrooms, my eyes naturally sought out kids of the same age as my seven year old daughter, Hannah. Our interpreter translated my questions and the answers of the children back and forth. There I stood, a 6’2″ tall businessman from Germany, feeling uncomfortable and out of place. The children seemed to feel similarly; they had respect for the man in front of them.

My thought was, “You have to wade out into the midst of that”. My digital camera helped me out. I took photos of the kids and we looked at them together.

And then it came – the same feeling that I had at my daughter’s baptism. 20 children on and around me, uninhibitedly curious and vibrantly alive. 20 children who are a part of the shared future of our world. 20 poor children, but more content and healthier than children in other parts of Africa because their parents are cotton farmers.

Despite, or perhaps even because of their poverty, the children radiate the same dignity as their parents. The dignity of human beings who can provide for themselves, and the dignity of children who are able to go to school at the beginning of their path through life, and who must not suffer from hunger.

These are the moments when I realize how much I dearly love my work, and how wonderfully unusable I have become for the common corporate “rat-race”. A T-Shirt made from organic cotton saves 63 square feet of farmland. Every year, 2.4 billion T-Shirts are manufactured. Organic cotton’s part in all this still constitutes less than 1% worldwide. There is still a lot to do.

On the flight home, I decided to bring my own children, Hannah and Vincent, with me someday.