Planet Money Makes A T-Shirt

Planet Money is making a very special T-shirt. A T-shirt unlike any other. A T-shirt that can tell you the story of its own creation. Follow us around the world as we document its journey.

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From Cotton To Shirt, In 4 Gifs

After months of reporting and thousands of miles of travel, our T-shirt project is live. Check it out: planetmoney.com/shirt.

Thanks to everyone who ordered a shirt and followed us along the way. Please accept these four gifs as a small token of our gratitude.

1. The cotton for our shirts came from the Mississippi Delta.

2. It was spun into yarn in factories in Indonesia (men's shirt) and Colombia (women's shirt).

3. The yarn was knitted into fabric, dyed and sewn in Bangladesh (men's shirt) and Colombia (women's shirt).

4. The shirts were printed in Brooklyn.

P.S. If you want a second-generation Planet Money T-shirt, you can buy one here.

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Remember the last image? That was me (@kainazamaria/NPR) cutting the intro to our PLANET MONEY MAKES A T-SHIRT website. Well, we now have a trailer and it's pretty sweet!

We'll have the full story Dec. 2: planetmoney.com/shirt (Music: "Mirrors" by the Crocodiles)

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Brooklyn, New York - Cutting intro with a pretty sweet view of downtown Brooklyn. Any good places to eat around here? (@kainazamaria/NPR)

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Brooklyn, New York - Our Martini-loving squirrel gets inked on our T-shirts.

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Brooklyn, New York - Filming Alex Blumberg at our T-Shirt's last stop before it gets to you - the printshop. (@kainazamaria/NPR)

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New York, New York - The original print color on our men's T-shirts wasn't working ... so we decided to go back for round two. With some help from Jockey, we chose the new color - it's the bottom spirit animal.

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New York, New York - It's an edit party. 12 members of the Planet Money team scrunched into a room to listen to early drafts of the T-shirt stories.

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New York, New York - We went to the fiber lab at the Fashion Institute of Technology where they’re going to do some wicked testing on our shirts. Unfortunately, we had to sacrifice a shirt for science. Here’s a look at the T-shirts analyzed right down to the yarn (magnified at 48x). (@qdbui/NPR)

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Knoxville, TN - The cotton we harvested in Mississippi gets pulled and measured in Tennessee. Check out the wispy cotton ‘stache.

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Knoxville, Tennessee - The last stop on our T-shirt reporting trail. A lab that grades the quality of our cotton. If it were a student, it would have earned a solid B. Slightly above average cotton. Good news for our farmer who would get cents knocked off his price if it scored lower.

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Middleton, Wisconsin - Peering down into the seed tubes at a Monsanto lab. It is amazing how much trial and error (mostly error) goes into genetically modifying a seed. Scientists can fairly easily add a new bit of genetic material, but then they have to grow and test each seed to see how it responds in nature. It can take years to make sure the right gene is in the right place doing the right thing. (@radiosmith/NPR)

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Middleton, Wisconsin - We have finally reached the very beginning of the T-shirt chain. This is the Monsanto lab where new genetic traits are added to cotton seeds. More than 90 percent of U.S. cotton has been modified so it can resist insects and pesticides. Our farmer we’re profiling loves the science, but complains about the price of the high tech seeds. (@radiosmith/NPR)

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Clarksdale, Mississippi - The members of Team Delta (Smith & Jiang) are leaving the farm to return to the big city, but not before a selfie with a ton of cotton. This was the last big reporting trip of the project. The stories of your Planet Money t-shirt start to air in mid-November. (@radiosmith/NPR)

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Mattson, Mississippi - Next stop for the cotton bales and us reporters: the cotton gin. If you remember your history, Eli Whitney perfected the process of removing the sticky seeds from cotton and it changed the South. We can't see into the giant gin machine, but all the retro bulbs and switches say its working. (@radiosmith/NPR)

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Clarksdale, Mississippi - The John Deere cotton picking machines plop these giant round bales of cotton on the side of the road. The drivers barely slow down. The bales will be picked up later in the day by trucks from the cotton gin. Til then, it’s a easy place to parallel park. (@radiosmith/NPR)

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Washington, D.C. - Meanwhile, back at headquarters, our crack team of nerds is plotting the website that will tell the story of our T-shirts. (Brian Boyer/NPR)

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Clarksdale, Mississippi - It took Bowen Flowers and his men only two days to harvest a thousand acres of cotton. By sunset, this was just about the only cotton left to pick. (@radiosmith/NPR)