Recent visitors to Seekers Books, the popular bookstore at the corner of Bloor Street West and Borden Street, will be surprised to see some fresh faces at the back of the store.

The Fair Trade Clothing Co-op moved there last month, displacing its old head shop. The store was started by Scott Gilbert and two friends from the University of Guelph who wanted to make fair-trade clothing available for the first time in Canada.

“I was very frustrated,” Gilbert recalled of his time at Guelph. “I found that of all the courses that I needed to take for my degree, I could not take a single course that had to do with fair trade and social justice. This is what I think education should be about.”

Fair trade is a certification and labelling system that stamps its logo on products for consumers who want to pay a higher price to see that standards for better working conditions and wages are met by clothing manufacturers.

The shop debuted earlier this year in Kensington Market, then moved to the more prominent location at 509 Bloor St. W. last month.

All the clothes they sell are made from organic cotton. The shirts come from a co-operative in El Salvador called Cooperativa de Madres Solteras, which employs single mothers.

The store is yet to break even after four months of operation. In order to get loans they are officially a for-profit business, but the co-op has decided to give away all the extra money they have after expenses are paid off to progressive community groups.

In addition to selling fair-trade products, and attending Guelph part-time, Gilbert has been putting on weekly screenings of documentaries at the Bloor Cinema. The store has a growing selection of such films, which Gilbert hopes will grow to be Canada’s largest one day. It also sells books and fair trade foods.

For Kate Sage, one of the store’s volunteers-none of the workers are paid-the store makes global sense.

“One hundred years ago, the sweatshops were here,” she said. “People heard about the stories of kids who got their hair pulled off and fingers pulled off and people got angry about it.

“Now we can get these products super-cheap, but it’s at the cost of the livelihood and the standard of living of people overseas.”