Trent and the entire staff at the Athleta Store, 156 5th Ave, NYC was fantastic. The best sales help I have had in years.

Dear Athleta:

Despite the rhetoric on your various web pages, the Athleta tote bag is NOT sustainably or responsibly produced: because of its cheap sewing construction, the seams split after a few uses, and it goes into a landfill after all. As explained below, either a) construct the bag better so it has a better chance of living up to your sustainability propaganda, or b) take the misleading message out of the bags.

The message printed inside the bag is at best misleading when it states:

"We're committed to reducing our impact on the environment. The fabric in this bag is made with 82% recycled material, which saves plastic bottles from ending up in landfills. Re-use it as a farmer's market tote or gym bag."

Contrary to the aspirational message in your bags, these bags don't save plastic bottles from ending up in landfills: they just delay the plastic ending up in landfills in the form of these tote bags. I would speculate that you just put this message in the bags to make customers feel better about their environmental footprint.

You could actually do a better job of keeping plastic out of landfills with a simple step: direct the manufacturer to reinforce the bottom seams and put a few rows of extra stitching where the handles meet the bag, which would give these many bags a chance of staying out of landfills at least a bit longer.

Sixty percent (60%) of American women do not have any sewing skills. You can extrapolate from that that the moment a seam splits on your bag or a handle pulls off, 60% of users of your tote bags will throw them in the garbage and into the landfill they go. As a fiber artist, I happen to have an extremely high level of sewing skills, so I repaired my bag. But I doubt few of the 40% of women who do have sewing skills would take the time to repair such a bag finding it simply not worth their time.

Also, you make it very hard to contact you. There is no on line comment form. It is all one-way outbound communication touting your environmental message that customers like to hear, even if they know a lot of it is fluff. If you can't even rely on a bag to fulfill your message printed in the bag, then the rest of what is on line must to some degree be not entirely true as well.

I hope you will take my suggestion so you can honestly keep that message in your tote bags.