PACT Organic Underwear

Jason and Jeff met at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley during the first year of their MBA program. Jeff was telling anyone who would listen that he wanted to start an underwear company. While most people thought he was a pervert, Jason was intrigued. Brought together by their belief that business has an opportunity to have a positive impact on the world, they spent the next two years examining every aspect of the apparel industry, and developed a new kind of business model that would combine design, sustainability, activism, and internet technology.

PACT really came together as more than just a fake underwear empire in the Fall of 2007 when Jason and Jeff took a course called "Managing New Product Development" at business school. With a motley crew of designers from the California College of the Arts and a Berkeley engineer, ActionPact - as it was called back then - produced its very first prototypes in the wee hours of the morning at a silkscreen studio in Oakland, California. The team's well-endowed engineer then triumphantly paraded their creation in front of everyone at a tradeshow at UC Berkeley. Needless to say, they grabbed some limelight and, serendipitously, the attention of hotshot designer Yves Behar. Yves liked the concept and said he'd take on the project if Jason and Jeff could raise the money to turn the idea into an actual company.

Both gifted and burdened with extreme tenacity, Jason and Jeff set off on a global hunt for investors, partners, advisers, and cheerleaders. Assembling the puzzle pieces of a new brand dedicated to doing business in the most responsible way possible required that every aspect of the business be considered from the cottonseeds to where they would bank. This pursuit has taken the guys to Portugal, Las Vegas, Barcelona, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, China, Portland, Turkey, Chicago, Santa Barbara, Vietnam, Montana, and across the Bay Bridge. They've shared a seedy hotel room in Vegas, whizzed through the back alleys of Saigon on mopeds, hob-knobbed at the Western Governors Association meeting, and spent some very unfortunate time at ORD.

PACT has been a labor of love for Jeff and Jason, and they are excited to share with you their belief that change starts with your underwear. <<

For Nicholas Negroponte's One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organization, fuseproject designed the world's first $100 "XO" laptop aimed at bringing education and technology to the world's poorest children. Yves' commercial projects set out to be equally impactful, as exemplified by the Herman Miller LEAF Lamp, the Aliph Jawbone and, most recently, Y Water.

Yves' work has been the subject of two solo exhibitions and resides in the permanent collections of international museums worldwide, including the MOMA, the Musee d'Art Moderne/Pompidou Center, the Chicago Art Institute and the Munich Museum of Applied Arts.

He is the recipient of numerous awards, including the prestigious National Design Award for Industrial Design, which celebrates design as a "vital humanistic tool shaping the world" - awarded by Cooper-Hewitt, Smithsonian National Design Museum. He has also received the INDEX: Design to Improve Life "Community" award for his role in creating the "XO" laptop.

In addition to his responsibilities at fuseproject, Yves acts as Chairperson of the Industrial Design program at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco and has taken on creative, business-partner roles at Aliph Jawbone and other client-companies. <<

They are fostering change and supporting the evolution of the brands they work with through positioning strategies implemented in industrial design, packaging, graphics, naming, UI, and environmental design. Clients benefit from this approach through fuseproject's ability to provide design services that are are both broad and deep, including an overall branding program, marketing strategies and communication tactics, and product design. <<

It all starts from the soil. Plants are grown on these farmers' fields without use of any artificial fertilizers, insecticides, or herbicides. This enables the fields to clean away any past plantation residues. Furthermore, crop rotation is employed to contribute to soil improvement. All processes from farming through ginning, spinning, knitting or weaving, washing, dying, or manufacturing the garments are certified by Skal, GOTS, and EKO. <<

In its most recent fiscal year, more than 110 individuals with disabilities participated in the PAC workcrew, processing over 250,000 units of product. Additionally, a portion of PAC's net income is used to support Search for Adventure, which provides outdoor adventure and vacation experiences to Search's program members. <<