Rit Tie-Dye Went From Bankruptcy 5 Years Ago to a Pandemic-Fueled Resurgence

Two kinds of cultural history were made in Bethel, N.Y., at 2:00 a.m. on Aug. 16, 1969. The first was Janis Joplin, barefoot and a bit stewed from partying. She strode onto Woodstock's plywood stage and faced the half-million crowd as a solo act, having quit Big Brother and the Holding Company several months earlier. The other historical entry from this scene belongs not so much to Joplin but to what she had on. Below her billowing tunic and loops of love beads, the 26-year-old singer wore tie-dyed bell bottoms—of velvet, no less. A kaleidoscopic snowflake of colors, the pants spun off shades of orange and rust on the left leg while blending into a terrain of purples and blues on the right. And while nobody will ever know for sure, the odds are good that it was Rit Dye that put those pants in the spotlight. After all, in the late 1960s, Rit was the tint in pretty much all the tie-dye you could find. Janis Joplin with those pants. Now fast forward half a century to 2020 and 800 miles west to Chicago, where a brand creative director named Jonathon Spagat was about to get a surprise. Spagat and his father, founders of Nakoma Products, were the new owners of Rit, which they’d purchased out of a bankruptcy sale a few years earlier. It was a solid product, well known among the crafts and hobby set and once owned by Procter & Gamble and Unilever. But Rit hadn’t seen a mass audience since the Summer of Love. As the pandemic took hold in the early months of 2020, however, Spagat watched sales volume grow. “We were up probably more than 50%—and we would have actually been up 100%, maybe even 150%, [but] we just couldn't make enough dye,” Spagat told Adweek. “We make our dye in Indianapolis, out of our facility, and we just couldn't keep up.” A little quarantine does a lot of good The last 12 months have been feast or famine for American industry. While a handful of brands prospered, many more languished or even disappeared. Perhaps one of the smallest and most unlikely victors has been Rit as consumers, consigned to spending most of their days at home, rediscovered tie-dye. Since all you need to make a tie-die shirt is a few rubber bands, an old cotton T-shirt and a $2.99 bottle of Rit, it’s a cheap and easy project. Parents can do it with their kids. Teens can do it on their own. “It’s the Covid trend, up there with baking bread,” Spagat said. “When ever is there a fashion trend that you could literally create yourself that doesn’t involve a sewing machine?" Since Rit is a liquid dye, it mixes easily with water, making it the preferred brand for tie-dye practitioners. Rainbow resurgence The tie-dye resurgence actually began a few years before the pandemic. In 2016, Jerry Lorenzo, the designer behind the Fear of God shoe label, produced the stage clothing for Justin Bieber's Purpose tour, including some tie-dyed denim. When the tour wrapped, Bieber just never took the tie-dye off. In September of 2018, when the singer went on a Starbucks run in New York, an eagle-eyed Cosmopolitan reporter announced: “Justin Bieber is out here in a full tie-dye sweatsuit and it’s hard to deal.” By the time of Paris Fashion Week in 2019, the likes of Prada and Proenza Schouler had put tie-dye on the runway, leading Harper’s Bazaar to proclaim that the style was “back.” “Up until fairly recently, tie-dye was as dead as a doornail,” the fashion magazine said. “But then Beyoncé wore it on holiday on the beach, Dree Hemingway chose the print for a red-carpet event and Justin Bieber turned up to church wearing it.” The thing about tie-dye, though, is that you don’t need a thousand-dollar designer shirt to wear it. And the do-it-yourself accessibility that helped the color-spattered design catch on during 2020 was the same one that gave Rit its first big moment in 1969. Rit capitalized on the post-Woodstock popularity of tie-dye with ads like these. Rubber band men While Rit made its debut during World War I in the wake of a government ban on the import of German-made goods, the product won favor among homemakers who wanted to dye clothing they had sewn themselves. But it was never a mass-market product. That opportunity came in the late 1960s, when the brand was on its last legs. Rit’s marketing manager Don Price noticed that a few Beatniks in New York’s West Village had resurrected tie-dye. In truth, tie-dye had been in the U.S. as early as the 1920s, and deadheads sold tie-dye shirts at Grateful Dead shows four years before Woodstock happened. But it was Price who advised ditching the messy powder dyes they were using in favor of liquid Rit. And when Price got wind of the upcoming Woodstock music festival, he asked a few of those artists to sell their shirts up at the concert grounds. And in snapping up those shirts, countless attendees discovered the Rit brand. Colloquially, it became “the official brand of tie-dye.” The looks are more contemporary, but those psychedelic color swirls are straight out of 1969. For tomorrow we dye As a young entrepreneur who studied marketing in college, Spagat isn’t naïve enough to assume that a homespun pandemic hobby and a few Instagram posts from Justin Bieber are going to keep his brand riding its renascent wave. Instead, he’s actively sought out partnerships with larger brands in an effort to keep tie-dye and his brand in the spotlight. "I never thought that there would be any interest in an apparel or fashion company wanting to work with us,” he said. “But we've just been getting so much interest from so many different brands.” In the U.K., Reebok recently partnered with Rit on a self-dye sneaker package. By replacing the leather on its Legendary Club C sneaker with cotton canvas, the athletic brand allows wearers “to put the design of the classic silhouette in your hands,” the company said. Reebok's self-dye sneakers let wearers do up their own designs with Rit. Then actor Jaden Smith’s people called. “He came out with an album and wanted to do all this new merch,” Spagat said. So Rit also produced a DIY shirt and tote bag kit for Jaden Smith, timed to the release of Smith’s new album CTV3. Jaden Smith's tie-dye kit included a T-shirt, tote bag and a few bottles of Rit. Rit’s also working on an Earth Day collaboration with up-and-coming designer Gabriella Meyer and her upcycled denim brand Denimcratic. Most anticipated, perhaps, is an upcoming summer collaboration with Bombas, a limited-edition kit that will let customers soak some psychedelic colors into their T-shirts and possibly even underwear. So you might say that Spagat’s brand has had a long, strange journey since its debut in 1918. Historically, he said, “we were a grocery store brand, [then] we evolved obviously into craft stores. But to become this hot, trendy fashion type brand has been quite an evolution to witness. It's been pretty magnificent.” OK Boomer: Why E-Retailers Should Pay Attention to This Demographic Post Pandemic