Where You’ll Find Your New Favorite Bed Sheets: Red Land Cotton
Anna Yeager Brakefield never intended to start a cotton business with her father, but now she can't imagine life without it. Learn the unexpected story of Red Land Cotton.
While today Anna Yeager Brakefield is at the helm of beloved and successful Southern brand Red Land Cotton, that wasnβt always in her plan. In fact, it couldnβt have been further from it. After growing up in a small town in Northwest Alabama β βsmack-dab in the middle of a cotton field,β as Anna likes to describe it β her ambition was to move far away from small-town life in Moulton, Alabama, and instead live in the Big Apple. She did just that, getting a job at a New York City advertising firm after graduating from Auburn University. After she got engaged to now-husband Nick, she made the move to Nashville, but she never quite found the fulfillment she was looking for. βI just wasnβt happy with my career and what I was doing,β Anna explains. βItβs really funny how life preps you for things, and you donβt even know it.β
What life was prepping Anna for, she believes, was the move back home to Alabama. At the very same time she was wrestling with unfulfillment in her career, her father, Mark, was hoping to start a new cotton business with Anna. βSometimes you have to get away to have respect for where you came from,β Anna says. βIf I hadnβt gone to New York City and lived that life, I wouldnβt have the same appreciation for the way of life here that I have now. So when he approached me about coming home and starting a business, I was ready to give it a try.β
So Anna headed home, back to the nearly 5,000 acres she grew up on. She and Mark got to work, knowing they wanted to make a bedsheet, and they wanted it to be made strictly of their own homegrown cotton, which they also custom gin. βBeing able to gin our own cotton automatically gave us a lot of quality control, as we are able to control the heat and moisture put on the fibers,β Anna explains. βWe could make sure that we were selecting only the absolute best cotton for our product.β
With quality cotton readily available, it was time to determine the style of sheet to be made. Mark was nostalgic for the bedsheets he grew up sleeping on, so to recreate that feeling, they took an heirloom 1920s bed sheet β loaned to them from a family friend at church β and reverse-engineered it to determine the weave and yarn size they wanted. They landed on an open weave with substantially sized yarn, which provides the softness of a high-thread-count sheet with the breathability of a nice percale. That gave Mark the same feeling he remembered as a kid. βHe felt so strongly about it, and any time you can have a strong conviction about what youβre going to make, I think itβs a home run,β Anna says. βI felt that really fit the feeling of what we were trying to do, which was bring back a way of making things that are done right.β
Red Land Cotton started out with two lines of bed sheets, one with a decorative hemstitching and another with cotton lace. With both products, Anna ensured that they were both 100 percent made in the U.S.A. βThatβs really hard to say, as so much of the textile industry in the United States has been decimated, but it was incredibly important to us to make that happen,β Anna adds. βWe are the only single cotton farm in the United States that is making a product direct-to-consumer strictly from our crop.β
Not only are the sheets made in the U.S.A., but they are practically made completely in the South, with the cotton being grown and ginned in Moulton, then spun, woven and finished in South Carolina. Itβs then cut and sewn in Moulton by a group of local women who have a combined 200+ years of experience.
Red Land Cotton ran out of its first shipment of sheets almost immediately when it launched in October 2016. Since then, the company has grown to include bath towels, duvet covers, shams and even 100 percent cotton quilts β one of Annaβs personal favorites as they can handle being thrown in the washer and dryer. While that list of offerings continues to evolve, what wonβt change is the process by which they are made. Anna and Mark will continue to carefully manage the cotton from seed to stitch, and it will continue to be a family affair. Annaβs brothers have gotten involved by helping their dad with farming, Annaβs sister-in-law manages their local storefront, and her mother helps at the store as well β when sheβs babysitting Anna and Nickβs little girl Katharine.
βOur message seems to really be resonating with people,β Anna says. βMore people are wanting to know where the products they use every day come from, and itβs something thatβs important to me β important for us β to provide to our customers. Thereβs a lot of love and passion that we pour into every one of our Red Land Cotton products.β
Thatβs a quality that canβt be beaten!
Learn more about Red Land Cotton and shop their products at redlandcotton.com.
All photography by Stacie Kinney.
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Paige Townley
Paige Townley is a Birmingham native with a soft spot for good stories, interesting people, and beautifully made things. When she's not writing about places that inspire or people who shine, she's likely spending time with her family, planning her next adventure, or cheering on the Crimson Tide.