I first met Rachel Weeks at the Cotton Room grand opening, where I was struck by her jaunty upswept puff of blond hair and her grin that lit up the room. I took her picture with her friend Sam Swartz, and as I left, he
beckoned back, apologized, and said although Rachel would never toot her own horn like this, he would like to.

She’s a U.S. Fulbright scholar from Duke, he said, who opened up a living wage factory in Sri Lanka to produce collegiate apparel, and, he gushed, she’s amazing. Her Greensboro-based company is called School House Ethical Fashion.

That’s a pretty solid pitch, I said, but I needed a stronger Durham connection.

Here it is: Rachel, 25, wants to join the creative class in Durham and relocate her business here. She is looking at locations in Brightleaf and Golden Belt.

I write in our current issue that she is part of the trickle of fashion-related businesses that are interested in moving to the Bull City. Her apparel is different – it’s university-licensed garments and accessories – and many of us may be beyond that. But we can certainly appreciate what a young person has done to try to expand her definition of community.

She started her clothing factory in Sri Lanka in January of 2009, using a combination of her own money, and her Fulbright scholarship funds, which were to be used to research socially responsible clothing initiatives, to start the company. She learned that employees (mostly women) in this line of work were paid about $60 a month. She worked with a coalition of nonprofit organizations and labor unions to come up with a “living wage” and paid that to her employees instead: $165 a month.

“It’s not all I want to do, but we have been able to triple the wages at this factory by paying an extra dollar per garment we make,” she says.

Her model appears to be working. Women’s Wear Daily recently reported that to date, she has passed on $300,000 in orders to colleges in North Carolina as well as Harvard and Yale. Locally, her merchandise is sold at Duke, UNC and N.C. State, Women’s Wear Daily reported. As of October, Weeks’s company shipped 15,000 pieces of apparel to a total of eight universities.

Want to learn more? Weeks is holding a School House fashion show and shopping event Thursday (tomorrow) at 8 p.m. at the Cotton Room at Golden Belt. RSVP to info@shopschoolhouse.com