PTA Spiritwear

[jtbuko]

I have been sucked into the vortex of the PTA and put in charge of spirit wear. I want to add a greener item this year. Consensus is that an organic cotton t-shirt would not fly with our school population, but that we are "ready" for a BPA free water bottle. Can anyone suggest an online vendor with decent prices, turn around time and quality?

[emilysmama]

Not sure about the water bottles.

Our PTA sells cloth bags. You know, like you would use at the grocery store. They are really nice because they are insulated and I think the top closes with a zipper. Maybe a noninsulated bag would be popular as a green item?

[Tigerchild]

discountmugs.com had the best prices that I found, and they will give you the BPA-free certificate and lots of information on demand. I was very happy with them. Our school is Title 1 and we sell spiritwear/school store stuff at cost, so it was so nice to be able to offer a nice BPA free waterbottle with a cute imprint for $1 or less--for bottles of similar quality I found elsewhere (after I had to call and ask about BPA status) the price was more like $2 or around there, with the same imprint/setup fee (those tended to be around $50 no matter what company it was). In addition, some companies will do a bait and switch, you order a lower priced bottle and then they tell you they're out of stock and want to switch you to something higher--as it happens, the vendor I used DID run out of stock because of the delay in my response, but they gave me two options and charged me the original price (both of the options were more expensive than the original).

I sold them all year and had no complaints, still saw the kids who bought them at the beginning of the year walking around with them, no reports of the imprint smudging off.

Now, I did order 500 of them to get the good price! But the prices were way better than any of the school supply stores. The turnaround time was 2 weeks I believe, it would have probaby taken less time but the proof approval got sent to my junk email folder so I didn't see it for almost a week!

[jtbuko]

Thanks for the replies!

[ClothDiaperMommy]

If you have not already done so, check out PTOtoday.com, they are a wealth of info for all things pto related and have forums where you can ask questions, also have yellow pages of recomended companies. We have found them to be really helpful. Good Luck!

[Milkymommy]

Contact Sigg...they do a really cool reusable bottle with the school logo.

The Enviromental club at my DD's school did a cool fundraiser with the Sigg bottles, laptop lunnchboxes and reusable sandwich bags. It was a big hit!