As he sorts through cheery racks of Harvard t-shirts, socks and caps, David Sullivan, general manager of the Coop, often ponders the path his Crimson-colored stock took before it reached the store.

"I think about it all the time," he says of his inventory. "Where it came from, what it's made of."

For months, anti-sweatshop activists have been raising the same questions, to no avail. But in the past two weeks, Harvard's two largest apparel makers, Champion and Gear For Sports, have each made stunning announcements: the answers are near.

Shedding the garment industry's longstanding image of secrecy and silence, Gear proclaimed earlier this month that it would disclose the locations of its factories by January, in response to heightened concerns about sweatshop labor. Yesterday, Champion said it would do the same.

After Gear's announcement, members of the Progressive Student Labor Movement (PSLM) expressed cautious optimism that their battle for better international working conditions had been nudged forward, but they could not help but gush at the ball Gear had set rolling.

"The event is important because they're starting a movement and signaling to others that this is the way things are moving," said Nitzan Shoshan '00 at the time.

Almost any anti-sweatshop activist can tell you that it is essential for companies to disclose their factory locations if there is to be any success at all in improving working conditions from Honduras to Timbuktu.

Without disclosure, trying to get a handle on the manufacturing conditions of the mind-boggling array of Harvard insignia products--from hats to baby gear to chocolates--is nearly impossible.