Jews, Muslims, and Christians don't always see things eye-to-eye. But now, thanks to entrepreneurial couple Adam Neiman and Natalia Muina and their clothing company, No Sweat, the three religious groups have one small piece of common ground: T-shirts.
As history has proven time and again, Jews, Muslims, and Christians don’t always see things eye-to-eye. But now, thanks to entrepreneurial couple Adam Neiman and Natalia Muina and their clothing company, No Sweat, the three religious groups have one small piece of common ground: T-shirts.
The Boston-based couple founded No Sweat in 2003 as a sweatshop-free alternative to other clothing manufacturers. All of their factory employees are unionized, and receive regular breaks, a living wage, and benefits, unlike the majority of workers in garment factories around the world. No Sweat has produced popular t-shirts featuring an image of Rosie the Riveter, a line of sneakers, and a wide variety of other clothing items, which have found an enthusiastic audience in the US and abroad.
In December 2006, they launched their current project: a line of t-shirts produced in a Palestinian-owned garment factory in Bethlehem. “As an American Jew, the situation in the Middle East has been a heartache for as long as I’ve been alive,” says Nieman. Bringing business to the Palestinian factory was “a shot at creating good faith and good will on the ground,” he adds.
The line of organic cotton t-shirts produced at the Bethlehem factory have been sold to Christian, Muslim, and Jewish schools and camps, and have proved to be enormously popular with all three groups, though they’re not the only ones — “the anarcho-athiest hordes are wild about them too,” says Nieman. No matter what our differences, it seems, everyone can agree on a good shirt.
Want your own No Sweat clothing? Shop online at their website.