T-shirts and Tanks

Imprinted T-shirts are in with the fashion elite. Here's how they are styling the tees.

Scores of garment workers have fallen sick this week at factories in Cambodia, including two that produce clothing for sportswear groups Puma SE and Adidas, workers and the companies said on Thursday. A total of 118 employees passed out at work on Thursday at the Shen Zhou and Daqian Textile factories in Phnom Penh, police said, another blow for an industry fraught with disputes but critical to Cambodia's economy.

Garment manufacturing earns Cambodia more than $5 billion a year in revenue and employs some 600,000 people, many of them breadwinners for impoverished families in the countryside.

American Apparel Inc. announced this week that it priced an underwritten public offering of 61,000,000 shares of its common stock at a price to the public of $0.50 per share. The company intends to use the net proceeds of the offering to fund working capital and for general corporate purposes, including its April 2014 cash interest payment on the company's senior secured notes.

What happens when your client wants a T-shirt to outshine its competition or win over a new consumer market? How do you tweak your T-shirt promotions so you are not recycling outdated ideas?

Cambodia gained unwanted attention this month when four people were shot at a garment factory outside of Phnom Penh amid a strike over higher wages. Chinese billionaire Ma Jianrong's Shenzhou International, a supplier to Nike, Uniqlo and Adidas, temporarily shut production at a facility there as a result. Cambodia's problems followed a factory building collapse in Bangladesh last year that killed hundreds.

Industrial Revolution II, a garment supplier whose backers include movie star Matt Damon, has touted its wish to balance shareholder interests and social progress. I exchanged with CEO and co-founder Rob Broggi, a former hedge fund executive

Providence, R.I.-based Teespring, a Y Combinator-backed startup that allows anyone to outsource the production and distribution costs involved with selling their own custom T-shirts, has raised $20 million in new funding in a round entirely led by Andreessen Horowitz. The funding, which closed around a month ago, will also see the firm's Lars Dalgaard joining Teespring's board.

First launched in 2012 by Brown grads Walker Williams and Evan Stites-Clayton, the idea for Teespring originally came about after Williams tried to save a local bar from shutting down by selling a "save the bar" custom T-shirt.

alphabroder, the Trevose, Pennsylvania-based apparel supplier and highest-ranked company on Promo Marketing's 2013 Top Suppliers list, announced today the acquisition of Ash City Worldwide, one of North America's leading promotional apparel manufacturers and suppliers.

Charities like Goodwill sell or give away some of the used clothes they get. But a lot of the clothes get sold, packed in bales and sent across the ocean in a container ship. The U.S. exports over a billion pounds of used clothing every year—and much of that winds up in used clothing markets in sub-Saharan Africa.

On today's show, we visit a giant used-clothing market in Nairobi, Kenya to see what happens to American clothes (including, presumably, some Planet Money T-shirts) after Americans are done with them.

Pantone chose Radiant Orchid as the color of 2014. Here are nine ways to use the floral hue in the New Year.

Employees of SanMar, a leading industry supplier of apparel and accessories, raised over $96,000 in money, clothing and goods for seven charities. SanMarathon events, hosted at each of the company's seven distribution centers around the country and corporate office, allowed employees to run, walk or cheer their way to the final donation.