Pursuits
Dirty Linen: A Bed Sheets Scandal Hits the Cotton Industry
- Wal-Mart, India supplier face suits over fake luxury sheets
- Blending Egyptian cotton with cheap grades said to be common
An employee monitors cotton being processed on a machine in a cotton factory in Mahalla, Egypt. The highest-quality Egyptian material costs twice as much as the standard grade sourced from India.
Photographer: Shawn Baldwin/BloombergThis article is for subscribers only.
Huddled inside Target Corp.’s headquarters in downtown Minneapolis, a team of investigators spent the summer trying to answer what should have been a simple question: What were hundreds of thousands of the retailer’s sheets actually made of?
What they discovered has undermined trust in a global luxury product and set off a salvo of class-action lawsuits that have created a king-sized public relations challenge for the Indian textiles industry and the U.S. companies it supplies.