Fruit of the Loom - Apparel industries oldest company

There can't be many company's trading today that can trace their beginnings back as far as 1851, but that is exactly what the branded clothing product company Fruit of the Loom can do.
Fruit of the Loom started in Rhode Island, America when Robert Knight, a textile mill owner and a friend, Rufus Skeel who owned a small shop selling cloth got together and formed one of the first branded clothing companies in America. Rufus Skeel's daughter had painted pictures of apples and applied them to cloth. It was this image that Rudus Steel decided to use for his labels and this apple can still be seen today on the Fruit of the Loom logo. In 1871 Robert Knight applied for and obtained a patent. He was issued the patent number 418 for the brand Fruit of the Loom.
Since the late 1800's, Fruit of the Loom has lead a varied and at times unstable life. This culminated as recently as 1999 when Fruit of the Loom filed for protected bankruptcy, following losses of $576.2 million.
The company was bought from bankruptcy by Berkshire Hathaway Corporation in January 2002. A more recent problem for Fruit of the Loom was the boycott by over 100 universities in 2009 when it emerged that Fruit of the Loom were allegedly violating workers rights in Honduras, where it is the countries largest employer. This lead to significant losses in profit.
Fruit of the Loom is probably best known for its printable garments, particularly it's t-shirts. JKL Clothing has been using the Fruit of the Loom Valueweight t-shirts in almost all of its t-shirt printing production runs for some time. Vicky Clow (JKL Clothing's, artwork and production manager) comments "the Fruit of the Loom Valueweight t-shirt ticks all the boxes our customers require, it is a good quality garment at a reasonable price and from a printers point of view provides a great surface on which to screen print"
To view the Fruit of the Loom t-shirt range and see what JKL Clothing can produce from their t-shirt printing facility, visit the JKL Clothing website at www.jklclothing.co.uk