Three years ago, SansÉgal Sportswear inked a deal that thrust the small clothing manufacturer in Sandy into the movie-world limelight.
Under the contract, SansÉgal became the sole producer of hoodies, T-shirts, thermal underwear and other "official" apparel for the 2010 Sundance Film Festival.
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The contract was carried over to 2011 — and again into this year. Soon, SansÉgal designers will start work on the 2013 line of Sundance clothing.
"We love the exposure," said Joyce Walton, SansÉgal vice president of operations. "We love the exposure in our own backyard. We are a Utah corporation [helping] with a Utah festival. That’s important to us."
The clothes are made from recycled fabrics — cutting-room scraps that are gathered up, mulched into fiber, mixed with recycled polyester and spun into yarn by a U.S. company that Walton won’t identify for proprietary reasons. SansÉgal — sans égal is a French phrase that means "without equal" — has worked with the unnamed company for 12 years to develop recycled fabrics that meet its standards for apparel.
SansÉgal buys the company’s yarn and weaves it into specially designed Sundance clothing at its 75,000-square-foot plant in Sandy, where about half of the 200 employees have some exposure to the festival merchandise.
Co-branded under the Sundance and SansÉgal’s "Green Brand" names, the merchandise is for sale at the festival’s website (www.sundance.org/store) and at several festival kiosks in Park City.
Walton says the Sundance contract is a profitable but a "very small" piece of SansÉgal’s $24 million revenue last year. The exposure, however, may be priceless. SansÉgal is also designing and manufacturing apparel for the TCM Classic Film Festival in April and the Palo Alto International Film Festival in September.
Sundance "brings us a lot of business from other festivals. It exposes our recycled and our made-in-the-USA apparel line, and that’s so important," she said.
Other buyers of SansÉgal’s Green Brand clothing include the Smithsonian Institution and several national parks. It has customers in several countries, including Germany and Japan.
Jenny Jacobi, the festival’s merchandise manager, wasn’t available for comment. But her LinkedIn Web profile says she "oversees" $500,000 worth of festival merchandise for Sundance.
The festival’s website says its merchandise is "repurposed, recycled, or reusable. In an effort to minimize our carbon footprint, we strive to support domestic manufacturers."
The site says recycled merchandise sales are part of the priority that the festival places on environmental responsibility. It urges moviegoers to walk or use public transportation between theaters, deposit recyclables at special bins around Park City and rely on its online film guide (filmguide.sundance.org) or iPhone app instead of picking up and discarding multiple copies of its printed guide.
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