Decrease font Decrease font
Decrease font Decrease font
Enlarge font Enlarge font
Enlarge font Enlarge font

Dave Sattler '06
He started caring about sustainable farming techniques and unfair labor after living in countries affected by these practices. He says Thunderbird also trained him to care about sustainable prosperity worldwide.


Dave Sattler '06

Dave Sattler ’06 wasn’t looking for high fashion. He just wanted affordable T-shirts and jeans made without child labor — using cotton grown without toxic pesticides and fertilizers.

He started looking for organic clothing outlets as graduation approached in 2006, but everything he found came with high price tags.

“At the time, there weren’t too many options out there,” he says.

So Sattler launched his own online store in October 2007 called Sattler Clothing. The organic cotton comes from Texas and Turkey, and the clothing is produced in facilities approved by inspectors from Worldwide Responsible Apparel Production.

“We call it eco-friendly style for the masses,” Sattler says. “It’s nothing you’d see on the catwalk. But it’s what people wear everyday.”

T-shirts start at $14.87 and long-sleeved hoodies go for $44.95.

Sattler says organic cotton costs more to produce than conventional cotton, but he keeps his costs down by selling online without maintaining large inventories.

“We try to keep it pretty simple,” he says.

Sattler was born in Idaho and grew up in Pennsylvania. He currently lives with his wife in Idaho, where he provided 1,000 organic T-shirts and 100 hats for the Idaho Green Expo in May 2008.

He started caring about sustainable farming techniques and unfair labor after living in countries affected by these practices. He says Thunderbird also trained him to care about sustainable prosperity worldwide.

“We’re not in it just for the bottom line,” he says. “We’re not typical MBA graduates. We’re Thunderbird graduates.”

Sattler says a closet with four pairs of jeans and 10 T-shirts made with conventional cotton represents about 10 pounds of pesticides dumped in the ground. His clothing is made without pesticides, and a portion of his proceeds goes to a humanitarian aid organization based in Cape Verde, where he used to live off the coast of West Africa.

“We've kept over 1,000 pounds of pesticides out of the ground this year,” Sattler says. “That is something that I can write home about.”