When Anna Brakefield launched Red Land Cotton in 2016, she didn’t have any sheets to sell yet. What she had was a drawing. She made a charcoal sketch of the sheets her family was going to produce, put it on a website she built herself, and started taking orders. By the time the first real shipment showed up, she had about a hundred orders waiting to be packed.
Anna grew up on her family’s cotton farm in Moulton, Alabama, studied at Auburn, and left for a career in advertising in New York with no plans to come back. Then her dad called. He’d been farming cotton for over thirty years, watching it sell cheap and come back to America as expensive products made overseas, and he was tired of it. He wanted to make something himself, from his own cotton, and he wanted her help. She came home.
They decided to make bed sheets, modeled on a set from the 1920s. A family friend still had a flat sheet that once belonged to a woman named Madeline Gray, hand-embroidered and edged in cotton lace, the kind of linen that came off the line a little crunchy and softened over years of use. That one inherited sheet became the first two lines Red Land Cotton launched in October 2016.
Ten years later, the family runs the whole thing themselves. The cotton is grown on their farm. The company owns two cut-and-sew facilities, one in Alabama and one in Mississippi. From the field to a customer’s bed, it’s American made the entire way. An American cotton farmer can’t compete with cotton that’s grown and milled overseas, Anna says, and if there’s no American mill to buy the fiber and no American customer to buy the finished product, there’s no reason for the farmer to keep going. Gins shut down and farms get sold off every year. Making it all here is the reason the company exists in the first place.
Holding that together has been the hard part. Over ten years, Anna counts twelve mills they worked with that have shut down. Last fall it was Santee Print Works, in Sumter, South Carolina, which handled their printed fabrics. It was the last wide rotary screen printer left in the United States. When it closed, there was no one else to call. The months since have gone into rebuilding the supply chain instead of designing new things.
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Her advice for anyone sitting on an idea sounds a lot like that first charcoal sketch. Don’t spend months perfecting your logo or your plan, she says. Start selling. Put it out there before it’s ready. When something breaks, and it will, you adjust and find another way. Liz Morris summed it up with a line from her own father: shoot, ready, aim.
There’s more in the full episode. Anna tells how a comment on her dad’s Instagram post first put the idea of sheets in his head, and how they rebuilt that 1920s sheet’s yarn and weave from a few small swatches with help from Cotton Incorporated. She talks about the holiday market in Franklin, Tennessee where they sold out the first night and had to drive halfway across the state for another pallet. She gets into what it takes to run a company with most of your family, where everybody still talks to each other, whether at a higher volume or not. And she tells where this hard year is finally starting to turn, and the part of the work she’s missed the most.
Anna built a company off a drawing because she would rather start than wait. Ten years and a dozen closed mills later, that instinct is a good part of what’s keeping it alive.
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