Vero Poblete-Howell’s sustainable clothing for infants and toddlers is made from cotton fabrics she designs in her Waldoboro home, cuts to order and then dispatches to be sewn in home-based locations around Maine and Massachusetts. The 44-year-old native of Chile sells her Baobab Organics clothing line, founded in 2008, at local stores, on Etsy, and this fall will make her debut at the Common Ground Fair.
ORIGIN STORY: She was raised in Santiago and studied textile design there before going on to have a career designing fabrics in Chile. Then she fell in love with a visiting Woolwich native, writer Josh Howell, and settled in Waldoboro with him.
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INSPIRATION FOR THE CLOTHING LINE: Dressing her own daughter, Sofia, now 7, when she was an infant. “I couldn’t find anything that I really liked, not the prints or designs,” she said. “Everything was pinkish.” In her collection, there are no mainstays of kids’ clothing, like animals or cutsie patterns.
WHERE DID THE NAME BAOBAB COME FROM: Two places. It’s a type of tree that looks like something out of a child’s fantasy of a tree and grows in Africa and Madagascar – and, to the dismay of the title character in “The Little Prince,” on his native planet/asteroid, where he weeds them to no avail. “I was always in love with that book,” Poblete-Howell said.
SOURCING: Her organic cotton is American (most from Texas, some from California) and is milled in North Carolina and Texas. Ideally, she’d work with cotton grown in Maine, but the climate is all wrong for it. Organic is double the price, she said, but worth it. The cotton is grown without pesticides and then finished without chemicals. “It’s for a new baby,” she said. “You want the most pure thing for them, something that is like a second skin.”
DISLIKES: Waste. That’s why she still cuts each piece for every garment she makes. “If you send them out to be cut, they don’t care much, they are not trying to save every single corner, so you lose a lot of fabric.”
TEXTILE DREAMS: Bring textile manufacturing back to Maine, but in a way that’s not harmful to the environment. Using water-based ink to print the designs. And no bleach. “It’s so ambitious, I know,” she said. “But if I can contribute a little piece of it by doing my line here …”
WHY SHE’D RATHER STAY SMALL: “I was in China many times when I was working in Chile, and I didn’t agree with what I saw.” The pollution, the working conditions, the hourly rate for factory workers. “It doesn’t fit the way I think.”
BE LOCAL: Finding Maine seamstresses was a challenge – “I knocked on every single door.” Well, not really. But she did put out a Craigslist query that netted 100 responses. She works with a handful of seamstresses from Kittery to Waldoboro to sew the garments.
CAN SHE MAKE THAT IN A SIZE 8: “The garment would be really, really expensive,” she said, laughing.
FIND BAOBAB: Stores throughout the midcoast, including Lisa-Marie’s Made in Maine, Bath; Bonnie’s Place in Rockport; Jane Alden Gifts in Camden, and The Mix in Brunswick. Or etsy.com/shops/BAOBABorganics
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