The celebrated fashion designer Natalie Chanin shows a couple of visitors around the empty shell of the old Dr Pepper bottling plant, in the heart of her northwest Alabama hometown of Florence.

She pulls out a set of architectural drawings and fast-forwards to a year or so from now, when the century-old building in what was once Florence’s Cotton District will find new life as the second home of Alabama Chanin, the sustainable, organic-cotton women’s clothing line she started roughly 20 years ago.

She envisions the downtown studio and factory — which will also include a retail shop, office space, workshops and maybe a café — becoming another piece of the tapestry of “Alabama’s Renaissance City,” a more visible extension of her current factory and store in an industrial park on the outskirts of town.

And she sees artisans and makers, on their breaks, walking down College Street to grab an espresso at Rivertown Coffee Company or get a crunchwrap and browse for vinyl at All the Best.

“We have removed these acts of making from downtown spaces where people interacted with one another, where they passed one another on the street or shopped at the same drugstore or got food from the same carry-out place,” Chanin says.

“I really think that bringing this back downtown (will bring) this act of making back into our common culture, where young people see that could be a pathway for their future career,” she goes on. “We need to appreciate makers in this nation for the important place they have — we have.”

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Here to stay

A gracious Southern soul with glorious white hair and a gentle drawl, Natalie Chanin came back to Florence a couple days before Christmas in 2000 with the idea that she would finish a fashion project and then be on her way.

When she left here as a teenager, Chanin never imagined a day when she would come home and put down roots in northwest Alabama.

More than 23 years later, though, she’s still here.

“I thought I was coming back for a month or six weeks and doing a project, and then I was going to go back to my life, right?” she remembers. “And I’ve pretty much been home ever since.”

That project, which she planned to present at New York Fashion Week, was a 200-piece collection of recycled T-shirts cut apart and hand-sewn back together again using a simple quilting stitch Chanin had learned from her grandmothers.

But she needed sewers and quilters who knew those old-school techniques, so, while standing on a street corner in the Garment District, Chanin had her a-ha moment: She would go back to Florence and find them.

“I ran a little ad in the local paper that said, ‘part-time hand-sewing and quilting,’ and that first round we got about, I don’t know, 60 calls,” she recalls.

“The response was huge, and after that, it was kind of word of mouth. Somebody would see somebody sewing somewhere, like at a doctor’s office, and it just grew that way.”

That one-time venture, which she called Project Alabama, later morphed into a full-fledged business that eventually became known as Alabama Chanin, which has since grown into a global brand.

And with it, Natalie Chanin has discovered the life that she was going to go back to is instead right here in Florence, where she and her teenage daughter, Maggie, now live a short walk from the University of North Alabama campus. (Her son, Zach, is a chef in Cashiers, N.C.)

“For many years, until my daughter was born, I was kind of living here halftime,” she says. “But once she was born, it changed my life and how I live it.”

Life lessons

Growing up in Florence, Chanin learned some early, real-life lessons in sustainability from her grandparents, who lived on a farm in the unincorporated community of Central, about 10 miles from town.

When she would visit them, she shucked corn, shelled peas and helped in the garden.

“The house they lived in, my grandfather built,” Chanin says. “Every scrap of food that came across our table came from their hands and their farm. My grandmother made every dress her daughters ever wore. She made the quilts on the beds.

“They made everything, and I was lucky enough to be born at a time that I was able to see that before it totally changed.”

Chanin’s father ran a construction business and her mother taught school and later worked as a systems analyst for the Tennessee Valley Authority.

In the 10th grade, Chanin moved with her mother to Chattanooga, and after she graduated high school there, she earned a degree in environmental design at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

From there, she moved to New York City and worked for a couple of years in the fashion industry and then spent about a decade working as a stylist for photo shoots, TV commercials and movies in Europe.

When she moved back to Florence in 2000, Chanin lived and worked outside of town in a house that was built by her paternal grandfather and next door to the house of her maternal grandparents, where she hung out as a little girl.

Her life had come full circle.

As Chanin writes in her 2022 book “Embroidery: Threads and Stores from Alabama Chanin and The School of Making,” she was “astounded at the notion that this project would come to life in my own grandparents’ backyard – the place my journey began.”

T-shirts and hit songs

As her fledgling business grew, Chanin later moved her operations to the Florence-Lauderdale Industrial Park, into a building that had been part of Tee Jay’s Manufacturing Company.

In its heyday, Tee Jay’s employed about 4,000 people in Florence and was the fifth largest T-shirt manufacturer in the United States, and just as neighboring Muscle Shoals had become known as the “Hit Recording Capital of the World,” Florence would lay claim to being the “T-Shirt Capital of the World.”

That symbiotic connection was like music to Chanin’s ears.

“At the time that all the music was being recorded across the river, they were making T-shirts that were going on tour with all those bands,” she says.

“The whole industrial park here was populated with dye houses and manufacturers and knitters,” she adds. “They were running three shifts a day in this building.”

The Tee Jays factory later shut down after NAFTA went into effect in 1992 and many of those textile jobs went overseas, but the company’s founder, Terry Wylie, became a friend and mentor to Chanin, who moved her business into the vacant Tee Jay’s space in 2008.

“I always make the joke that I came back five years after NAFTA was signed and started figuring out how to recreate textile manufacturing in America — or in our community,” Chanin says.

“I’m not saying we were developing new techniques, because a lot of the techniques that we use are age-old,” she adds. “But we were doing work that was interpreting ancient techniques, hopefully, in a contemporary way.”

The next generation

Through the years, the Alabama Chanin brand slowly and steadily grew to also include The School of Making, which hosts workshops and offers DIY sewing kits to aspiring artisans, and Project Threadways, a nonprofit that documents the history and explores the future of textile production in The Shoals.

“Most of the women who were sewing for us early on were 40 and older,” Chanin says. “There were very few young people. I realized that it was really a dying craft in our community, that there were no people coming up behind us who were going to carry these traditions on.”

But thanks in large part to Alabama Chanin, The School of Making and Project Threadways, a new generation of sewers in their 20s and 30s has since come along, intrigued and inspired by the slow fashion movement.

“There’s a shift in thought about how we do things and I do see younger people being drawn to sustainable design and making things by hand and preserving cultural traditions,” Chanin says.

“I think we’ll begin to see this more and more over time, but there’s definitely been a shift since I first started doing this work.”

And to ensure that work will continue, this January, Chanin gifted Alabama Chanin and The School of Making to the nonprofit Project Threadways, meaning all three branches of her organization will operate under a single, not-for-profit umbrella.

“I have been thinking about succession planning for 10 years,” she says. “What happens when I retire? How do you take a 20-year-old business and propel it forward for another 20 or another 50?

“It just occurred to me – and I don’t know why it took me so long to figure it out — that it really should be a nonprofit. We’ve always invested everything back into the business anyway.”

And if it works according to plan, the nonprofit business model should preserve her sustainable lifestyle brand for generations to come.

“Hopefully, it would become a permanent part of the landscape here in North Alabama,” Chanin says. “And continue to work globally but remain local.”