Wholesale Hand Ice-Dyed Apparel for Boutiques & Retailers

Ice dyeing isn’t tie dye. It’s an entirely different art form, and it’s the technique that built Floorboard Findings from a kitchen-table Etsy shop into a wholesale supplier serving boutiques across the East Coast.

The process starts with premium garment-dyed blanks — Comfort Colors crewnecks, Bella Canvas tees, Gildan hoodies — soaked in a soda ash solution that opens the cotton fibers to bond permanently with fiber-reactive dye. Each blank is then manipulated by hand: crumpled, folded, twisted, or laid flat depending on the pattern Maria wants to coax out of the fabric. Ice is mounded on top, sometimes two or three layers deep, and powdered Procion MX dye is carefully sprinkled across the surface.

What happens next is pure chemistry meeting artistry. As the ice melts — slowly, over 24 hours in our York, PA studio — it carries the dye particles down through the fibers in unpredictable rivulets. Colors split into their component pigments: a single dye called "Boysenberry" might fracture into deep plum, rose pink, and pale lavender. "Jade" separates into teal, seafoam, and golden chartreuse. This pigment-splitting effect is what gives ice-dyed apparel its signature watercolor aesthetic — rich, layered, and impossible to duplicate.

After the dye sets for a full 24 hours, each piece goes through multiple rinse cycles in our industrial washers, removing all excess dye until the water runs clear. The result is colorfast apparel that holds up to years of machine washing without fading. We don’t cut corners on this step — a garment that bleeds color in your customer’s first wash destroys trust, and we’ve built our wholesale reputation on reliability.

Every single piece that leaves our studio is genuinely one-of-a-kind. Even when we produce a batch of 50 crewnecks in the same colorway, each one develops its own pattern — its own rivers of color, its own depth and contrast. For boutique owners, this means your inventory is inherently exclusive. No customer will ever walk into another store and see the exact same piece on the rack. That exclusivity is what drives repeat wholesale orders and gives your shop a competitive edge over mass-produced inventory.

Our wholesale ice dye program is designed for boutique owners who want artisan-quality product without the unpredictability of working with hobbyist dyers. We maintain consistent quality standards across every batch, use only premium blanks that your customers will reach for again and again, and ship on reliable timelines so you can plan your floor sets with confidence.