After decades of manufacturing in the United States moving overseas, there are calls to bring it back. But doing that is not straightforward. WSJ’s Suzanne Kapner and the founder of American Giant explain how that company produced inexpensive T-shirts in the U.S. Further Reading: -How a $12.98 T-Shirt Is Made in America—at a Profit Further Listening: -How One Business Owner Is Getting Ahead of Trump's Tariffs -China, an Alabama Business and a 20-Year Battle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What makes a $12.98 T-shirt special?
My colleague Suzanne Kappner covers retail, and recently she wrote about one particular shirt sold at Walmart. It showed up in stores last summer for the Fourth of July. Can you describe the shirt?
Sure. It's a 100% cotton t-shirt. It has the words American Made on the front, and there's a little American flag patch near the hem on the bottom.
At first glance, it looks like any other patriotic T-shirt. What stood out to Suzanne, though, were two things. First, the shirt's price, $12.98. And second, its origins.
What's remarkable is that it was entirely made in the United States. The cotton was grown here. It was ginned. It was dyed. It was sewn all in the U.S.
Is that unusual to see an inexpensive item of clothing made in America? It is very unusual these days, yes. There's been a lot of talk about trying to move more manufacturing back to the U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has proposed sweeping policy changes to try to make that happen. Everything from 25% tariffs on Mexico and Canada to upending trade deals.
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Chapter 2: Why is American-made clothing unusual today?
But getting more things made here can be complicated. And no one knows that better than the guy who got that T-shirt on the rack in the first place. Did you think that you would make a T-shirt in America that sells for $13?
If you'd asked me that a year and a half ago, I would have said, no way.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, January 3rd. Coming up on the show, how one company made an affordable T-shirt in the USA. The guy who made that shirt at Walmart is Bayard Winthrop.
Chapter 3: What challenges exist in U.S. clothing manufacturing?
My name is Bayard Winthrop, and I'm the founder of American Giant.
And what is American Giant?
We are an entirely made-in-America clothing company that started about 12 years ago. And we're primarily online, though we've got six retail stores, but primarily a direct-to-consumer e-commerce business.
American Giant sells sweatshirts, sweatpants, and other basics. And they make them in the U.S. using American cotton and American labor. You are wearing a sweatshirt right now.
I am.
Is that by any chance an American Giant sweatshirt?
I'm typically dressed head to toe in American Giant as I am today, except for my shoes and my underwear. So everything else I have on my body is American Giant.
Chances are, if you check out what you're wearing right now, it wasn't made in the U.S. My shirt was made in Indonesia and my pants were made in Vietnam. But that wasn't always the case. According to one industry group, back in the 1960s, about 95% of the clothes Americans bought were American-made. The U.S.
was a powerhouse when it came to knitwear, flannel, and of course, those iconic blue jeans. But it didn't stay that way. Here's Suzanne again.
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Chapter 4: How did American Giant come to be?
It's a good question. I mean, the stuff that was made here, I would say the strongest piece of that capability was in knitwear. Knitwear are T-shirts and sweatshirts, fabric that has some mechanical stretch in it that just kind of gives. Knits in the U.S. have been traditionally very, very strong.
And so Bayer decided to start with a classic piece of American knitwear, the sweatshirt. Now, if you want to make a sweatshirt in, say, China, it's relatively straightforward. There are cities there that specialize in certain products, like socks or T-shirts, with manufacturers and supply chains built up to deliver those clothes efficiently and cheaply.
Show up with a design, and they'll handle the entire production process for you, soup to nuts. But in the U.S., so many factories and suppliers have shuttered that strong textile supply chains are a lot harder to come by. To make his sweatshirt, Bayard would have to cobble together his own supply chain.
I knew nothing to start. And that really isn't an overstatement. I knew nothing. I didn't know who to talk to. I didn't know who to ask. And so I began to, you know, do Google searches. And then I started traveling. One day I found myself in a place called Carolina Cottonworks that is in Gaffney, South Carolina, run by a man named Paige Ashby. And I'll never forget it.
We'd almost given up on the process and Paige said, I'll get this figured out for you. And he began to introduce us to the right knitters and the right places that can sew. And we got turned down by a bunch, but some of them agreed to try. And once that momentum began to build, then it became a function of just lining up the steps.
And there are a lot of steps. Bayard and his team had to find the farmers who'd grow the cotton for their sweatshirts, the cotton gins to gin that cotton, the mills that would take that cotton and convert it into yarn, the knitters who would turn it into cloth, and the dyers who would color and finish their fabric.
And then finally places the cut and sew of that product, places like Eagle Sportswear in Middlesex, North Carolina, that actually bring it finally to life.
Each of those companies along the supply chain needed to be paid, and those costs were baked into Bayard's sweatshirt. The company also wanted its sweatshirt to be a high-quality product, long-lasting and well-made. Those choices were reflected in the sales price, too. American Giant's classic sweatshirt costs $138.
As the company has expanded into tees, sweatpants, dresses, and socks, its prices have remained on the higher end. Bayard was making clothes in America, but they weren't affordable for every American.
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Chapter 5: What is the process of making a T-shirt in the U.S.?
As I began to get into the business, Part of my hope was that, you know, when I was a kid, you could get American-made products at places like Caldor's. And, you know, working class families, families that were throughout the economic spectrum could afford really good made, well-made American-made sweatshirt or American-made t-shirt or American-made blue jeans. That's not available today anymore.
You really can't. And in our case, I hoped that I was going to change that with American Giant. But eight, nine years in, I began to realize, like, you know what, as hard as I've tried, my cheapest T-shirt is $30, $35. And that's out of reach for a whole swath of Americans. And that was hard for me to swallow because it was a big part of what I was trying to do as a business.
And then one day, about two years ago, Bayard got a phone call that would change that. That's after the break. In February of 2023, Bayard was on a podcast. He was talking about American Giant when he went on a bit of a tangent about Walmart. Walmart is the country's largest importer of consumer goods. So the opposite of what Bayard was trying to do.
Chapter 6: Why did Bayard Winthrop choose sweatshirts and T-shirts?
But there he was actually defending the company. Here he is on that podcast.
You know, everyone likes to pound on Walmart, but Walmart has actually taken a stand on this issue. And they've made a real commitment to domestic production.
That stand Bayard was referring to was a pledge Walmart made in 2013 to buy more products made, grown, or assembled in the U.S. In 2021, the company doubled down on that pledge.
You might think on the face of it that I would be an anti-Walmart person, but boy, do I value a company like that that has taken a stand.
Bayard didn't know it at the time, but that podcast episode made the rounds at Walmart. And it wasn't long before Bayard got an unexpected call from the company.
They reached out and said, would you fly out to Bentonville and talk to us? We were having a hard time on the textile side of things. We'd love to, you clearly have figured something out. We'd love to learn from you. And so I went and we had this conversation that began, you know, what ended up being a year and a half long process.
One of the things to come out of that process was an order, a big one, for American Giant to make those American-made teas for Walmart. My colleague Suzanne says the size of Walmart's order was critical.
What Walmart did that was a game changer is they committed to ordering a certain number of T-shirts over a certain time period. And that gave American Giant and its suppliers the confidence to invest. You know, they had to put in a lot of money to make this work. They weren't going to do that unless they knew that they had these guaranteed orders. You know, retailers can cancel orders.
You can put in all that work and all that investment and then the retailer could turn around and say, yeah, we're going to cancel the order. But Walmart didn't do that. It was like a non-cancellable order that they committed to.
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Chapter 7: What steps are involved in building a supply chain for clothing?
You're going to make me look at my T-shirt. I want to, like, go to my closet and start examining the seams of my T-shirt. In the end, American Giant was able to make a T-shirt that they could sell for just $12.98. You know, on the one hand, it seems like your story shows that it is possible to make affordable clothes in America.
On the other, it also sounds like you wouldn't have been able to do this without Walmart or a Walmart. So... Is this a story about how easy or how hard it is to make stuff in America?
Well, it's a great question. I mean, I think making stuff in America is really hard. I mean, it's hard because I think that in textiles, the supply chain has become so disaggregated and atomized. On the other hand, I think when you have a framework that provides some consistency of demand and time, it's not so hard.
I mean, it's like, it is hard. It is possible.
It's hard, but possible. And I think it really comes down to, you know, I think I can't stand this question about, you know, I hear, oh, you can't make that in America anymore. It's like, what are you talking about? Like, I hear that all the time, Jess. I hear it on every category. It's like, that's just horseshit. Like, get out into some factories, talk to some people and find out.
Now, whether you can make it for the same price you can make it in China, that's a different conversation. But can you do it here? Of course, of course you can. Of course you can.
American Giant now has plans for other collaborations with Walmart, like a hoodie that'll sell for $38.98. But in the context of how much we import, these T-shirts and hoodies are still drops in the bucket. And Suzanne says it's not clear other companies will follow suit. Could other companies do what American Giant is doing?
Absolutely. Yes, they could, but it's not easy. And as far as I can tell, you know, it's not really happening yet at any kind of scale. It's still sort of these one-off small companies trying to make this work. Why is that? I think it's just difficult for like a large American clothing company who has, you know, their supply chain overseas to make these changes.
We don't really have the factories in the U.S. to make it that kind of scale. I mean, it's happening slowly and it may, you know, the momentum may continue to increase under the new administration. But this is like a nascent thing and it's kind of one step at a time.
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