Who Really Made Your T-Shirt?

And Who’s Cashing In

By Isabella Cammarata

The Price of a Hoodie

Next time you pull on a Nike tee, think about this: who actually made it? Odds are, it wasn’t someone in Portland or Los Angeles. Most of our clothes are produced overseas in China, Vietnam, or Bangladesh by workers earning a few dollars a day.

Take Nike: an American icon, recognized worldwide, worth billions. Yet most of its products come from factories thousands of miles away. That $50 hoodie you bought? Only a tiny fraction of that price ever reaches the person who stitched it together. The rest flows upward to executives, shareholders, and corporate profits.

It’s not an accident. It’s how the system was designed.

Global Labor, Local Profits

This imbalance stretches far beyond fashion. The people doing the hands-on work cutting fabric, assembling phones, stocking shelves often earn the least. Meanwhile, those who rarely touch the product CEOs, investors, brand owners take home the most.

Apple, for instance, assembles most of its devices in China, where long hours and low wages keep production costs low. Amazon’s warehouse employees lift and sort around the clock to keep deliveries fast and cheap, even as executive bonuses soar into the millions.

The pattern is consistent: profit is concentrated, labor is expendable.

The Hidden Cost of Convenience

The modern economy runs on invisible labor. Every “Made in” tag tells a quiet story of time, sweat, and survival wages. We chase low prices and next-day shipping, but someone else pays for that convenience often in another country, under far harsher conditions.

It’s easy to forget this when you’re scrolling through sales or unboxing a new pair of sneakers. But behind every purchase is a global chain of workers whose names we’ll never know, even though they made the things we can’t live without.

What You Can Do

So, what can change? Start small: support brands that pay fair wages and produce responsibly. Buy local when you can. Thrift, repair, and upcycle instead of replacing. Every purchase is a kind of vote for the kind of world you want to live in.

The truth is simple: someone made your clothes. Someone packed your delivery. Someone built your phone.

And if we start paying attention to who those people are and what they deserve maybe the system starts to shift.

Because at the end of the day, someone had to make it. And it probably wasn’t you.