After purchasing her first spindle with babysitting money, she created various threads of cotton from household objects such as dog hair and linen.
[1][3] In high school, an entomology teacher and then Stanford Ph.D. student, Elizabeth Wangari, inspired Fox to take an interest in insects.
[3] After graduation, Fox joined the Peace Corps and travelled to The Gambia, West Africa in order to learn about the environmental factors harming local rice and peanut crops.
Fox taught safety classes regarding the usage of pesticides but was forced to return home after becoming very sick (due to exposure).
[1] After her stint in the Peace Corps, Fox furthered her education by earning a master's degree in integrated pest management from the University of California at Riverside.
After a sale with a Japanese textile mill, Fox quit her job at Sandoz Crop Protection and founded Natural Cotton Colors Inc., setting up base in Wasco, California.
Southern California cotton growers, who feared the crop would contaminate their own produce, pushed for re-enforcement of early 20th-century legislation that placed strict laws on Fox's growing process and her fields.
The company faced further barriers when, between 1990 and 1995, a majority of the spinning mills in Europe, Japan and the United States closed down, possibly in efforts to promote globalization and industrialization.
[4] Fox's cotton was a gateway for the textile industry to see how good quality clothes could be made while prioritizing the health of the environment.