A Squirrel, Six Miles of Yarn, and 25,000 T-Shirts
How one ordinary shirt turned into a story thousands of people wanted to wear.
On a clothing label, you might find the fabric and the country where a shirt was made. We wanted to know what happened before that label was sewn in.
While reading about clothes, we found a photo of a pink T-shirt with a squirrel holding a martini. Naturally, we clicked. That squirrel led us to a rather unusual reporting project.
The shirt came from Planet Money, an American podcast that explains economics through stories. The reporters wanted to know what goes into an ordinary T-shirt: where the cotton comes from, who makes the fabric, who sews it and how it reaches a wardrobe. So they decided to have one made and follow its journey. It took them years to arrange the making of an ordinary shirt. Clothing company Jockey eventually helped them make the shirts and introduced them to its suppliers.
And the squirrel? Illustrator Bob Bianchini drew an animal holding a “spirit” in a glass. It is a joke about “animal spirits,” economist John Maynard Keynes’s phrase for the feelings that influence our decisions. Look closely: the olive in the martini is an acorn. We looked up a shirt and ended up inspecting a squirrel’s drink.
How 2,000 shirts became 25,000
To pay for the shirts, Planet Money asked listeners to contribute through Kickstarter, a website that helps people fund projects. For $25, you could help make the project happen and get a shirt. The team needed to sell 2,000. It reached its $50,000 goal within 24 hours. Eventually, 20,242 people contributed $590,807, and Planet Money says it sold 25,000 shirts. Why did so many people want one?
One woman wrote about buying the pink shirt in 2013. She listened to Planet Money while running or cooking and followed the team's updates. By the time her shirt arrived, she already knew some of the people behind it. She especially remembered the two sisters who helped make it. Her post helps explain some of the excitement. After months of listening, she could finally hold a piece of the story.
The shirt had another clever detail: a scannable code on it opened the project's online journey, with photographs of the people behind it. You could wear the subject of the reporting and keep discovering where it came from.
What the reporters found along the way
At a Mississippi cotton farm, NPR heard an astonishing estimate. The farm expected to harvest 13,000 bales in 2013, enough cotton for around 9.4 million T-shirts. That figure describes the projected harvest in shirt equivalents. The reporters could not confirm that this farm supplied the cotton in their own shirts; cotton from different farms moves through the same market. NPR's 2013 reporting also showed how U.S. cotton bales were tested for qualities such as fibre length and strength. Buyers could see a kind of report card before touching the cotton.
Then came the yarn. One Planet Money shirt contained about six miles of it. The cotton was spun in Indonesia, where Jockey kept its exact yarn recipe secret. Apparently, even a plain T-shirt can have a secret formula. Yarn is cotton fibres cleaned, stretched and twisted into a long strand; knitting machines loop that strand into fabric. Six miles, folded into something that fits in one drawer.
The men’s shirts were cut and sewn in Bangladesh. Reporters met sisters Shumi and Minu there. Shumi worked on the sleeves. When they showed the sisters a finished shirt, Minu recognised the side seam she had sewn. She could point to her own work on a shirt about to travel across the world.
NPR also visited their home. Minu had bought a television with her wages and kept its empty box on a shelf because she was proud of the purchase. The sisters' earnings helped their family build a brick house and keep their younger brother in school.
The finished shirt’s journey brought another surprising number. NPR's best estimate put the men's shirt at $12.42 in 2013; international freight from Bangladesh to the United States came to about 10 cents per shirt. A shipping container made that long trip remarkably cheap.
The shirt after the story
In 2026, someone posted a photograph of a grey Planet Money shirt that their father bought for them in 2013, when they were in kindergarten. They are almost 20 now and still have it. The little squirrel is faded, but there it is.
Other owners joined the conversation. Some still wear theirs. One has moved the shirt to the “memory section” of the closet because it no longer fits. Someone remembered being asked about the shirt at least once a month. One shirt wore out years ago.
The label is still a useful place to start. This project gave us more places to look: the cotton, the yarn, a seam Minu recognised, and the person wearing the shirt years later. Planet Money's five chapters are still online, including the final one called “You.”
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