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For the next few months, we’ve decided to dig into the CR4 archives and expand upon some blog posts from 2007. Back then, we published a series of lists of women inventors and now we will write full blog posts about those who have yet to be featured. Do you know of a great person to be a subject? Let us know!
Sally Fox is a cotton breeder who figured out an eco-friendly way to create colored cotton that could be spun into thread for clothing and other materials.
Her work solved a problem that many encountered. Before her invention, cotton could only be spun by hand and to create colors, there was a harsh bleaching and dying process.
She first became interested in fibers at age 12. She purchased a spindle with babysitting money and created threads from various household linens. In high school, she also took an interest in insects and went on to major in biology at California State Polytechnic University.
Photo by Paige Green
She joined the Peace Corps after college and traveled to The Gambia in West Africa to learn about the harm pesticides had on the local rice and peanut crops.
In 1980, she started looking for a job but the farming industry was in economic turmoil. She got a job as a cotton breeder and this ended up being the spark for her invention.
One day she noticed a bag of brown cotton seeds and took them home to plant them and see what happened. Over a few years, she worked on crossbreeding the plants and studying them. She picked out the best seeds with the longest fibers and regrew them year to year. Eventually, she started a farm where she studied thousands of cotton plants.
In 1988, she produced her first series of natural colored cotton that could hold up to being spun on a machine. She made her first sale to a Japanese textile mill and quit her full time job, opening her own fiber company.
The orders began flowing in: major brands like L.L. Bean and Land’s End placed significant orders with her company, now called FoxFibre.
The company is still growing and processing the cotton today on the Viriditas Farm in California.
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