10% for a Reason: Our Charity Commitment

Ten percent is an old number. Long before it appeared in business plans and impact reports, it was a practice: the first and best portion of what you gathered did not belong to you. It went outward. Not what was left over at the end of the year, and not whatever felt comfortable in a good month — the first portion, off the top, before you had a chance to grow attached to it.

We built that practice into TIAC from the first order, when the numbers were small enough to be embarrassing. That timing was deliberate. A commitment made when giving is inconvenient is a real commitment. A commitment made after success is a marketing decision.

Ten percent of every profit is donated. Profit, not revenue, because revenue-based claims are usually theater — a brand can donate one percent of revenue while losing money and call itself generous. We would rather tell you the honest version: when TIAC makes a dollar, a dime leaves.

People sometimes ask why we do not simply keep the money, grow faster, and give more later. It is a reasonable question and the answer is not financial. Generosity is a muscle, not an event. Brands that wait until they can afford it almost never become generous, because the threshold moves every time they reach it. There is always another hire, another season, another reason.

There is also something clarifying about giving away money you would like to keep. It changes the way you make decisions. It slows down the impulse to squeeze every last margin out of a customer. It keeps you from believing your own story about how much of this you did alone. If the entire premise of the brand is that we did not create ourselves, then holding everything with a closed fist would be its own kind of contradiction.

We direct the ten percent toward organizations doing direct, unglamorous work: food, shelter, education, and support for families in crisis. We prefer groups where the money reaches a person quickly rather than passing through five layers of administration first. We will publish where it goes as the amounts grow, without turning it into a campaign.

None of this makes a shirt holy. A garment is cotton and thread. But commerce is not neutral either — money moves, and it moves toward something. If you are going to build a business, you may as well aim the money at people who need it.

It is worth being specific about the mechanics, because vagueness is how most giving claims survive scrutiny. Profit here means what is left after the cost of goods, fulfillment, payment processing, platform fees, and the small amount of advertising we run. It does not mean the number on a sales dashboard. When a fifty-two dollar tee sells, the majority of that price is already committed before anyone gets paid — cotton, cut and sew, printing, shipping, card fees. The tithe comes out of the remainder, not out of the headline.

That has an obvious consequence: in a slow month the donation is small. We would rather report a small honest number than construct a percentage that flatters us. Any brand can pick a denominator that makes its generosity look enormous. If a company tells you it gives one percent of revenue and never mentions margin, you have learned something about its marketing department and nothing about its ethics.

We also decided not to make the giving into a purchase incentive. There is a whole genre of commerce where the donation is the product — buy this and a child receives something, framed so the buyer becomes the hero of the transaction. It works commercially, and it slowly turns generosity into a conversion tactic. We would rather the reason to buy a piece be that the piece is good, and the giving be a fact about how the business is run.

Where the money goes follows a simple filter: how many hands does it pass through before it reaches a person in need, and would the organization exist whether or not we funded it. We favor local and direct — food programs, shelter, tuition assistance, emergency support for families — over large campaigns with heavy overhead. Small organizations tend to be under-resourced and over-honest, which is a good combination for a dollar to land in.

There is a private reason for all of it that has nothing to do with impact reporting. Giving away money you would like to keep is one of the few reliable ways to stay unattached to it. Businesses drift. The pressure to squeeze one more point of margin, to raise prices because the market will bear it, to treat a customer as a number, arrives gradually and always with good justification. A commitment made in advance, before the temptation exists, is the only kind that survives it.

So when you buy a piece, part of the purchase leaves the brand and does not come back. That is not a bonus feature. It is the design.