American Giant: Bayard Winthrop

Bayard Winthrop founded American Giant in 2011 with the simple idea to sell clothes made entirely in America at a time when most apparel manufacturing had moved overseas. The first struggle was finding all the components—the cotton, the buttons, the zippers, the rivets; the next was finding people to actually do the work—the dying, the napping, the sewing and the finishing. Once Bayard did all that he ended up with his first product, a plain hooded sweatshirt. But soon after a viral article proclaimed it “the greatest hoodie ever made” Bayard faced a backlog of orders that took him almost three years to fulfill. Today, American Giant has expanded their line to include all the basics: t-shirts, denim, flannel, and accessories, still entirely produced in the U. S. This episode was produced by J. C. Howard, with music by Ramtin Arablouei Edited by Casey Herman, with research help from Katherine Sypher. You can follow HIBT on Twitter https://twitter.com/HowIBuiltThis & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/howibuiltthis, and email us at [email protected] mailto:[email protected]. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2 a.m. kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people? So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan,

• 0:46Guy Raz?

  build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea, what separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. We get support from U.S. Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't.

• 1:32Guy Raz?

  Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems. But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned, money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back

• 2:16Guy Raz?

  on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer. For the first time ever,

• 3:00Guy Raz?

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• 3:45Guy Raz?

  or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the car that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Maine to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. When I pull up to a gas pump to fill my car, I'm not thinking about chemistry or engineering. I'm thinking about getting in, filling up, and getting on with my day. And it reminds me a little bit of the founders I talk to on this show, because the best

• 4:27Guy Raz?

  ones obsess over things their customers will never see. Tiny details, invisible improvements, relentless iteration. And not because anyone's watching, but because it makes the product better. That's what the mobile brand does. It engineers fuel the same way great founders engineer their products. Mobile Supreme Plus Premium Gas helps keep engines three times cleaner, which can mean better performance and improved gas mileage. It's for people who care about what's under the hood, even if they never see it. Three times cleaner compared to mobile regular gas in port fuel-injected engines. Actual results may vary. Visit mobilefuels.com for details.

• 5:11Guy Raz?

  Hey, really quick before we start the show. We have an announcement about a really exciting new thing we're launching: a newsletter. And like our show, the newsletter is designed to be interesting, informative, inspiring, and most importantly, fun. It's 100% free, and to sign up, just visit guyraz.com. That's G-U-Y-R-A-Z dot com.

• 5:47Speaker 01

  I've got a handful of brands in my life that I like giving them my money because I admire what they're doing and it aligns with my own values. And I think that is probably behind it is there's this intuitive sense that the Amazon-ification of our lives is not great and that we're getting this disconnected reality from the people and the places that make the things that we need and love. And we've got to turn back on that a little bit.

• 6:18Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:29Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how an idea for apparel made entirely in the US launched the brand American Giant, as well as what's been called the greatest hoodie ever made.

• 6:47Guy Raz?

  You've likely heard many businesses talk about purpose. And purpose could mean a bunch of things: commitment to quality, or healthy living, or bringing people together, right? But at the end of the day, and I say this with the utmost respect, a business is about being sustainable. Or, to put it a bit more bluntly, it's about making money. It's about scaling, and it's about finding the most efficient way to do these things, which is what makes today's story so unusual, so remarkable. Because almost everything American Giant does flies in the face of convention, starting with where and how they manufacture their products.

• 7:31Guy Raz?

  American Giant is an apparel brand. They're best known for zip-up hoodies, t-shirts, and jeans. And everything they make, and virtually everything they source, is American. The cotton for the flannel shirts and denim jeans, the dyes they use, the rivets, the buttons, all produced in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, and North Carolina.

• 7:56Guy Raz?

  This is an expensive proposition. The company could make a lot more money by simply outsourcing to China or Vietnam. But that would defeat the purpose of the business. The whole point of American Giant was to build a brand that was entirely American-made. And why? Why would someone be obsessed with this idea? Well, for starters, because it is really, really hard. But more specifically, Bayard Winthrop, the founder of American Giant, couldn't find the thick and soft cotton sweatshirts that he used to wear as a kid in the 70s and 80s, when, believe it or not, 70% of clothing sold in America was made in America.

• 8:39Guy Raz?

  So he decided to make them himself. And he also decided to see if he could create textile jobs in some of the very same places that lost them in the 80s and 90s. Today, barely 3% of all clothing sold in America is made in the US. And American Giant has managed to become one of the very few US-made activewear brands. And Bayard has proved with a lot of difficulty that you can build a sustainable and profitable clothing business without outsourcing. You might make a bit less money, but he'd argue the long-term benefits massively outweigh the money. Bayard grew up just outside of New York, in Greenwich, Connecticut.

• 9:23Guy Raz?

  His parents split up when he was young, and Bayard went to live with his mom, who was a real estate agent. Growing up, they moved around every couple of years, and Bayard remembered not having a lot of stability.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  I did, at a pretty young age, get pretty fixated on this idea of being stable financially.

• 9:39Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:40Speaker 01

  And in that town, Wall Street was kind of the thing. And starting, I think, in my sophomore year in college, I got a summer intern job at a bank.

• 9:48Guy Raz?

  In New York City?

• 9:50Speaker 01

  In New York City. And doing fairly menial work that first summer. The bank was called Donaldson, Lufkin and Genret. I was working in, essentially, the mailroom, the sort of private wealth kind of back office part of that bank.

• 10:04Speaker 01

  And that kicked off, I think, three summers of internships that eventually landed me a job in their investment banking program, which was a pretty prestigious program at a pretty prestigious bank. And it was one of a couple of professional moments that was a real kind of aha, because when I finally got that job, it became clear to me that I was ill-suited for that as a career.

• 10:24Guy Raz?

  To get into finance and banking?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:27Guy Raz?

  Which is a grind. I mean, especially when you're starting out, it's like 60, 70 hour hours a week, right? Just a grind. But if you can stick it out, you can make a lot of money.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Well, we did make a lot of money. And it was a grind. There was, DLJ became kind of legendary. There was a book written about how difficult the life was as an analyst. You basically didn't get days off. And that, that took its toll, but you know, I have to say, that experience was phenomenal. I have tremendous amount of appreciation for that job because it taught me how to work hard, it taught me how to be accurate, taught me how to get things done and over the line. But at the same time, I was surrounded by a bunch of folks who had gone to Harvard and Wharton and Michigan and Stanford, who were econ majors and were way smarter than me, were outperforming me.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  And I think that began to kind of creep its way into my head, that I just was not in the right place. And I think about it a lot, and that's a gift. If you can early on figure out, even if it's what I don't want to do or what I shouldn't do, it's a real gift. And that certainly was that. I, after my, my tenure in that program, I decided to get out of banking, which was a big decision for me because I'd worked so hard to get the job.

• 11:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 11:44Speaker 01

  But it had become clear to me that it was the wrong fit.

• 11:46Guy Raz?

  So you, you stay there for about two years and you decide you're going to leave New York and not just leave New York, but go to the West Coast, go to the opposite side of the country. First of all, what, what do you remember about that time? I mean, you're probably 25. What was it about the West Coast that seemed interesting to you?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  You know, I think it was purely the desire to be, start new and be free and ended up in San Francisco on a total happenstance. A really good friend of mine called me one day, I answered my phone at my desk and he said, fired? I said, yeah. He said, you sound totally different. I'd made the decision to leave work. He said, you sound totally different. I said, that's funny, I'm leaving. And he said, would you ever move to San Francisco? I need a roommate. And I had no plans. And so I said, sure. And we got an apartment together. But I think the real motivation guy was just wanting to let go of all of these things that I had sort of built as part of my narrative and say, it's wrong and I'm going to try something new. It was kind of that intensely liberating, but that poorly thought out also.

• 12:48Guy Raz?

  And it was just like, yeah, I'll go and figure it out, right? I mean, which you can do when you're 24, 25.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  And I had a fair amount of cushion financially from two years of DLJ and that made it easier.

• 13:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:02Speaker 01

  And, you know, I began to form a philosophy then, having kind of gone through that experience at DLJ where I really wanted to crank down on everything in my life to give me freedom in my professional sector. So I got into a posture that said, I'm going to do whatever I can to give me maximum flexibility on work, which included taking a lower salary, which I ultimately ended up doing at the first job I got. But, you know, driving an old car and not buying stuff, including, you know, clothes and other things like that, really trying to live as modestly as I could to give myself as much opportunity professionally as I could.

• 13:40Guy Raz?

  So you get to San Francisco, and this is like 1993. So this is the dawn of the internet era. And you had just come off a job on Wall Street. But I guess you were really looking to get into like products, like working for a company that made something. Where do you think that interest came from?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  A part of it was in the two years at DLJ and the summers that led up to that. That work was almost theoretical. It was analytical in nature. It was looking at spreadsheets. It was not at all tangible. And so I had no interest in technology or the advent of the internet or none of that. I wanted to go in the opposite direction. I really wanted to find a company, a brand, that made a physical product. And that's really what I focused my energy on.

• 14:28Guy Raz?

  So you, I guess, through like a series of friends of friends, you ended up meeting this guy who was one of the owners of a company called Atlas Snowshoe, which I looked up. They are literally snowshoes. Were you like, I don't know, was it like a skier, a snowshoe? What was your interest in that?

• 14:45Speaker 01

  Neither a skier nor a snowshoe. I don't think I'd been on a pair of skis more than once or twice when I moved to California and had never been on a pair of snowshoes. But that company, Atlas Snowshoe, was a remarkable little company. And when I found out about it, it was a couple of guys, one guy out of Stanford's product design program and another guy who had actually conceived of the idea of building a modern snowshoe. There had been no innovation really at all in 30 or 40 years. And they had designed an interesting harness for your foot that gave you a mechanical advantage when you use the snowshoe itself. And they launched a company around that. And I was their, I think their first or their second employee. But it was all I could have dreamed of. A couple of really smart guys

• 15:29Speaker 01

  making a product, trying to get a company stood up in a warehouse in a bad part of town in San Francisco. And it was just, I felt like I'd fallen into a tub of butter. I mean, it was just the, it was the absolute realization of what I'd hoped for. And it's really from the ethos that those two instilled in that business. And I had a front row seat to that, really seeing those guys be sticklers for design and manufacturing. That was something that never left me.

• 15:53Guy Raz?

  And what did they have you do? I mean, you came from a job on Wall Street. Did you do sales, marketing? I mean, I'm assuming it was a small company, so you had to be like a Swiss Army knife. What did they have you do at the company?

• 16:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, in the beginning, it was literally that. It was Moving desks, sweeping floors, cleaning toilets, just doing anything I could. You know, the business, they had done something funny. They'd been interviewed by a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and they were nobody at that point, they were just getting started. And the reporter said, where can I get this thing? And one of the guys said, oh, they sell it at Marmot Mountain Works in Berkeley, which was not true. The snowshoes were not there. And suddenly, a bunch of people started calling and the owner of Marmot Lot called up these guys and said, I keep getting all these customers, I should get some pairs in. So they were beginning to see some growth and it was just the two of them and one guy helping to build snowshoes, Mario. And so I came in and said, listen, I'll do whatever and you basically have to pay me nothing.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  I think I offered to work for $15,000 a year, something like that. And they finally agreed, but very quickly, as the business started to grow, as you point out, they needed everything. They needed help in building a sales force, help in running the production floor. And so just by being in the right place, I got to take on a lot of those functions. And maybe most importantly for me, all these theoretical things I'd been learning at the bank, I was now applying and finally understanding how they impacted business. So understanding why a cash flow statement mattered and what margin meant and how it impacted the finished performance of a business and all those things. And so I eventually ended up overseeing quite a bit of the business just because I was

• 17:31Speaker 01

  someone there that was willing to work really, really hard and I loved it and I never left the office. And so anyway, it was a period of rapid learning and also just real joy and passion for me. It was a really important chapter.

• 17:44Guy Raz?

  They got, I guess, acquired by K2 Sports in 96. And this is now kind of the dawn of the dot com era, right? And so at that point, I read that you went in that direction. Like you worked for a couple of years as the head of an internet company called Webchat that was itself acquired in 1998.

• 18:04Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 18:05Guy Raz?

  So what did you do after? I mean, I would think that maybe there were other tech companies you were looking at or other opportunities in that space. Did you do that?

• 18:15Speaker 01

  No, in fact. So we got acquired. And I was so ready to get back to a tangible thing. Webchat had seemed like though it was a good financial moment for me. It was a return to banking in that I was dealing with a product that didn't truly understand, wasn't passionate about.

• 18:35Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 18:36Speaker 01

  And so I didn't even consider tech. I had met another guy that had gone through the Stanford Product Design Program and his name was Steen Strand and I had met him when I was at Atlas and Steen and I became close. And, you know, fast forward a few years later, I had sold Webchat. I was sitting out on Clement Street in San Francisco and had just come out of a bar with some friends and I saw a guy go flying by on a skateboard and then he turned around and he said, "Bayard, it's Steen." And we reconnected and he told me about the business he was trying to launch and little by little kind of began to suggest to me that maybe I could join him. And so that's what I did.

• 19:20Guy Raz?

  So this was, I think this company is called Freeboard.

• 19:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:23Guy Raz?

  And Freeboard, literally like skateboards? That's what it was?

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Well, Steen had become obsessed with this idea of snowboarding. He loved snowboarding. He started to work on a project at Stanford that was trying to mimic the action, the sliding and edging action of a snowboard on pavement. And he did that through a incredibly complicated but innovative and brilliant design that allowed you to ride a skate, especially a skateboard, just like a snowboard. And that product became Freeboard.

• 19:54Guy Raz?

  Fully like turn around, it was 360.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, just imagine the way a snowboard functions, right? You slide on its base and you edge on its edges. And if you're on the base, you can spin 360 if you want to, or more importantly, you can go down the steepest hill and just drop speed by edging in essentially. And so that innovation was an incredible product, but it was dangerous and difficult.

• 20:16Guy Raz?

  Oh, my God. I'm looking at a video of it now. It's so dangerous.

• 20:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:20Guy Raz?

  These guys going down these hills.

• 20:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:22Guy Raz?

  I mean, if you fall off a snowboard, you're falling into snow.

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Well, exactly.

• 20:25Guy Raz?

  You're falling into the concrete.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. So think about things that maybe you should consider before you dedicate your professional life to something. The inherent difficulty of that product and that category, I didn't appreciate. I was enchanted by Steen, brilliant guy, and the innovation. And just wanted to get back into a warehouse and back around making things. And I didn't think for a minute about whether this business could be

• 20:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  A $2 million business or a $2 billion business. I just wanted to do it.

• 20:52Guy Raz?

  I mean, you were there for almost seven years as the president of this company. It seems like a really narrow.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  Nidgy.

• 21:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Product.

• 21:03Guy Raz?

  But maybe I'm wrong.

• 21:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, no, no, you're right. Getting it to any substantial size was very difficult because of the inherent constraints on a dangerous product that's hard to learn. On the other hand, the people that learned how to ride it were and are totally fanatical about it. And so what was relatively easy was to build it to a sustainable size and keep it there. And I think for a long time, we held on to aspirations that maybe it could get bigger. And it took me seven years, I think, to come to grips with the fact that, okay, this is capped. And it was clear to me that my time had run out there, that it was time for me to do something different.

• 21:44Guy Raz?

  And when you left Freeboard, I mean, it sounds like it just, you came to the conclusion, this is 2008, that it probably wasn't going to become a massive mainstream product. And so you went on to work for a company called Chrome. And tell me about that company, also based in San Francisco, imagine.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just felt like I wanted to be operating on a larger playing field. And I had gotten to know the owner of a company called Chrome. He was a very successful entrepreneur in his own right. He had built a business that resold running shoes and then went into the footwear manufacturing business and bought Chrome.

• 22:20Guy Raz?

  So he bought Chrome because I think Chrome was founded in like the mid 90s.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  That's right. And Chrome had come out of Colorado originally by a couple of guys, Mark and Bart, who had identified an opportunity in the market for bike bags that you could just.

• 22:35Guy Raz?

  Messenger bags.

• 22:35Speaker 01

  Messenger bags. At the time, it wasn't specifically messenger bags. It was, they were big mountain bikers, just something to carry that felt anatomically correct while you were riding.

• 22:44Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 22:44Speaker 01

  And they built these beautiful bags. They actually ended up, they wanted a way to release it across your sternum. And they went to a local dump and started to cut seatbelt buckles out of old cars.

• 22:55Guy Raz?

  Yes.

• 22:55Speaker 01

  And they used these seatbelt buckles, yeah, at the chest. And that sort of quirky solution ended up becoming this iconic badge that you would see riders riding with old seatbelt buckles on the chest.

• 23:04Guy Raz?

  So they were the ones who were the first ones who had the seatbelt buckle on messenger bags?

• 23:09Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 23:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah, because I know Chrome, I mean, it's like that like winged lion logo or whatever.

• 23:13Speaker 01

  Griffin, yeah. Yeah, and so it was this awesome company and it was small and was the industry leader for these really beautiful handmade, hand-sewn bags in Colorado, but they were a couple of entrepreneurs, they weren't business guys really.

• 23:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 23:28Speaker 01

  And Rory came in and said, listen, I think there's an opportunity to take this brand into apparel and into footwear and make it much bigger.

• 23:34Guy Raz?

  Rory was the guy who bought it, acquired it.

• 23:37Speaker 01

  That's right. And so he did, and he brought me in to help drive that process, to expand the product offering, grow apparel, add footwear, and to expand its distribution. And that felt to me like a heck of an opportunity, great brand, great reputation for quality, and owner that wanted to do big things. And so that felt like a good moment for me.

• 23:59Guy Raz?

  So your job was to, I mean, you become president of Chrome, and what, I mean, this is 2008, so this is in the middle of a financial crisis. This is still pre-direct-to-consumer, obviously you could do direct-to-consumer, but it was still early days. So you were mainly selling, like, your customer base was mainly like cyclists?

• 24:20Speaker 01

  Our customer base was becoming kind of urban hipsters, people that were biking or skateboarding or taking the subway to work and were carrying messenger bags and wearing clothing that was attached to kind of urban culture, I would say. And then that group began to expand out a bit to include skateboarders and other things that were part of that core youth fashion movement.

• 24:45Guy Raz?

  I know that about two and a half years, or maybe close to three years in, you must have started to have some disputes or differences of vision with the owners. What was going on?

• 24:58Speaker 01

  You know, I think I was evolving. I was starting to have real conviction about, this was all happening at a time when the internet was exploding, to your point, e-commerce was really coming on the scene in a fast and furious way. And I began to get real conviction that your currency with your consumer was based on your brand values and your quality. And I felt that at its core, what Mark and Bart, the founders of Chrome, had built was a total dedication to quality and a total dedication to local manufacturing. And that was, I felt, a really important part of building a foundation from which you could grow.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  And that if you lost that foundation, if you lost that commitment to quality, you lost that value system that supported local manufacturers, your core customers would leave you. And when they left you, eventually you'd lose everybody. I had seen moving manufacturing overseas. I'd done it myself. I did it at Atlas, I did it at Freeboard. And I was had this growing discomfort with both my disconnection from the product when something came from, you know, somebody that was, you know, where I'm sitting today, the person that stamped our snowshoe cleats is three blocks from me. And I used to walk in there every day and pick up cardboard boxes filled with stamped cleats. That connection to him, to his business, to the five people he employed, when that stuff all began to ship overseas, I felt this loss of quality and connection and integrity

• 26:25Speaker 01

  around the product, but also, more importantly, the personal connection. When I made, ultimately, I made a really impassioned pitch at a board meeting to Rory and his board that we had to basically make a stand on, on staying committed to local American manufacturing and really, really high quality. And from that foundation, we build a great, great brand.

• 26:44Guy Raz?

  And just to clarify, they were moving manufacturing overseas for obvious reasons. It's just much more cost effective and efficient. And if they could replicate, you know, the quality or get pretty close to it, their margins would be much higher and they would have maybe a more sustainable business. I mean, that was their argument, which is not an unfair argument.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  It's a really sound argument. I mean, I think his, his position was, we're going to get this thing into REI and a bunch of other mass retailers, we're going to drive margin and we're going to ship manufacturing overseas.

• 27:13Guy Raz?

  And it was, and they decided to move it to China.

• 27:16Speaker 01

  And they were moving progressively, all the manufacturing to Shenzhen and Guangzhou, both the apparel, the footwear and the bags. And I sort of laid it all on the table there and just believed that we were making a mistake from a business standpoint. I also felt there was a moral part of it, too, and that we had a responsibility to lead. And he disagreed.

• 27:37Guy Raz?

  I mean, they must have thought that you were very naive.

• 27:39Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm sure. I was. I mean, I probably was, Guy. You know, I think, I think that you have to be a little bit, I don't know, naive or crazy or something to try to defy a trend like that. But there was something in my bones that told me that it was the right thing. I knew that I wanted to be associated with a company that felt really proud about the products we were making and how we were making them. And that, to me, meant with men and women that I knew and talked to and could visit and that were, you know, my neighbors or down the road from me. And I wasn't going to be a part of something that wasn't signing up to that basic commitment. So.

• 28:14Guy Raz?

  I understand that, but that made you a total outlier, right? Because I think at the time and even now, a lot of people could probably would have said to you, look, we can still be proud of our product. We can still visit those facilities. They're just not going to be in the US. We, but we need, we're, we're business. At the end of the day, we're not a charity. We're not a, you know, a nonprofit. We have to make money to pay our employees. And this is the only way it can work.

• 28:40Speaker 01

  Agreed with everything you just said up to the last point. I think you do have to do all those things. That's absolutely right. And, but there are multiple ways you can make it work. And, and in my mind, you know, there's another piece of this, which is, at that time, I think it's more true now than it was then, is there was this emerging consumer desire and interest in, in local and farmers markets and.

• 29:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah, craft fairs.

• 29:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I felt that that spoke to a larger shift in mindset and maybe even a growing sense of loss among consumers for great quality products that we grew up around.

• 29:11Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  And so if you exist on a, on a foundation of a commitment to a type of, of a supply chain, like American made, or a really high quality that gives you a leg up, you could stand out and do something unique and something that, that customers would really value. And I. I didn't know then whether that would be 2% of the audience, or 5%, or 10%, or 20% of the audience. I'm not sure I even cared that much. I just felt that the challenge in consumer products is carving out a piece of turf that you can defend with a relatively unique value proposition to your customers. And I felt that opportunity was wide open for Chrome, and it definitely resonated. It was just my head was in a different place.

• 29:55Guy Raz?

  So, given that you were just committed to this idea, which made you an outlier, if somewhat naive as well, it was not tenable. You were not gonna, you couldn't really run the company if the way you saw things was so different than the way the owner saw it.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I remember, it was December. My wife had just had our first child, Agnes.

• 30:21Guy Raz?

  It's December of 2010.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  December of 2010. And Rory asked to meet me at, I think, 5:00 AM at the Starbucks. And I remember saying to Alison before, I said, "I think I might get fired tomorrow." And we both were like, "No." We had, Chrome was doing well. I think probably it was the best year in my career. I'd put to bed up to that point. But anyway, so the next morning, after about an hour of polite conversation in the dark at a Starbucks, Rory said, "So, we're making a change."

• 30:55Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  So, my spidey sense had proven accurate about that.

• 31:01Guy Raz?

  They needed somebody who was gonna buy into what they wanted to do.

• 31:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it makes sense, right? I mean, if I was him too, I think you can't, you can't have a CEO running your company that is fundamentally misaligned with the way that you want to build the brand. And to your point earlier, he, his approach was super logical. In fact, probably more logical than mine was.

• 31:21Guy Raz?

  So, this is December of 2010, and probably you had a couple of weeks to wrap things up. Did you have a plan? Did you, I mean, I don't, you probably didn't anticipate this, or maybe you did for a few months or something, but... Did you just think, well, I'll go find something else? Or what was your initial thoughts in early 2011?

• 31:42Speaker 01

  Well, it was a little terrifying. I mean, I had a newborn baby. And Christmas coming up and 10 days later, or whatever it was, it was a really discombobulating time. And I remember I sort of, I kind of laid out for myself three possible routes. One was I could get a group of people together, a group of investors that had worked with me in the past and buy a company. That was one thought. Another thought was I could go run another existing company. And the third thought was I could start my own.

• 32:10Guy Raz?

  What did you do? Did you have conversations with people?

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, called everybody I knew and called every investor I knew, called every entrepreneur I knew. And pretty quickly, the idea of buying a company slipped away. There was just no obvious companies that I could find that were for sale or I couldn't obviously get investors together. I had a couple of companies that came up that were looking for CEOs that were sort of interesting. But at the same time, this idea that I had kind of lodged in my brain at Chrome was rapidly coming into focus for me.

• 32:43Guy Raz?

  The concept of making something domestically.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  Here, of the best quality. And thinking about growing up in the 70s and the American products that I loved and that I felt said something about me as a consumer, the blue jeans, the KitchenAid mixers, the Red Wing boots, the Woolrich shirts, these things that were iconic in my mind, they were still in my closet. These iconic, American, well-made, indestructible, beautiful things. And how that wasn't in the market today, period. You know, back then, those products were not just shining examples in the world of quality, they were also the shining examples of value. People used to think that the products that were made in the US lasted forever, they were very well-made. That paradigm is gone.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  And so for all of those reasons, I began to get really obsessed about starting my own company. And I remember I called my oldest brother in the middle of all this. I explained to him what I was thinking, which at that time was sort of a faint outline of making, launching an apparel business primarily online, all entirely made in the US of the highest quality, and told him why. And I remember he was quiet for a minute and he said, "You gotta do that."

• 33:55Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Bayard found the money to get started and why one of his first calls was to someone who knew nothing about apparel. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 34:18Guy Raz?

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• 35:00Guy Raz?

  The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. AI isn't just opening new business opportunities, it's changing the way businesses get work done. The questions they ask, the decisions they make, the routine tasks they can hand off. That's the idea behind NetSuite Next, the next generation of NetSuite with AI woven into the tools your business already relies on.

• 35:45Guy Raz?

  NetSuite Next surfaces insights exactly when you need them, puts agents to work on routine tasks and problems, and lets you ask complex questions in plain language, like talking to a knowledgeable colleague. But technology is only part of the story. AI is also reshaping how people and Teams work together, and that shift is already underway. That's why NetSuite wants to put a new expert-created business guide in your hands today. It's called Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work. And right now, it's yours, absolutely free. Inside, you'll discover how AI could reshape work across your entire organization, and how to position your business to prosper from it.

• 36:30Guy Raz?

  If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, get NetSuite's free business guide, Aligning for the Agentic Era: How AI is Changing Everyday Work, at netsuite.com/built. The guide is free to you at netsuite.com/built. netsuite.com/built.

• 36:55Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2011, and while most companies are outsourcing their manufacturing, Byrd has decided that he wants to start a brand-new clothing company, where not just every piece, but every thread is made in the US.

• 37:14Speaker 01

  I had a gut instinct that it was going to be hard, but it was possible. And I did what I do, which is I kind of got on planes and got in cars, and I started meeting with anybody that would meet with me, and began to get a sense about what was still around in the US in terms of capability. And it became clear that knitwear, which is knits as opposed to wovens, which is basically the two categories you have in your closet. Knits are t-shirts and sweatpants and sweatshirts and things like that. That knits, that capability was still in OK shape domestically. Wovens, less so. But I began to get enough faith that there was enough there that we could launch certainly a sweatshirt.

• 37:55Guy Raz?

  And just to, again, to put this in context, this is around the time of like, and I don't want to get into the politics of this stuff, but it's like, you know, the rise of the Tea Party and, you know, whatever the reasons behind that. Some would argue that some of that was a reaction to the collapse of the manufacturing base. And then, you know, eventually what would happen to our politics in this country. Were you paying attention to any of that? Any of the populist movements or conversations around people being frustrated, left behind, whatever it might be?

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Definitely the latter part, that idea that there was a whole bunch of people out there that had jobs where they could get up every day and make a decent living and serve on the school board and put food on their table at night and that those jobs were going, that was on my mind a lot. I really hated the political nature of those discussions. I view those types of things as patriotic and nonpartisan in their very nature. And this idea that, let's say, the conservatives have claimed patriotism, I find to be just wrong. I think that we're all, you know, most Americans are deeply patriotic and they might have different approaches to it. So I didn't care about

• 39:09Speaker 01

  the politics. I cared a lot about what was happening to rural communities and urban communities all across the country and believe pretty fundamentally that if we continued or continue down that path, we are going to start to create, you know, a country that is really divided and between people that, you know, have college degrees and can go on to be bankers and people that don't and that are getting left behind. And I, that's, that's a driving force for me now. It certainly was then. And that, that I thought about a ton.

• 39:41Guy Raz?

  So you have this idea to make an American sweatshirt, right? And first of all, how did you go about it? I mean, you said, okay, everyone's on board. Everyone's like, Bayard, you're the guy. If there's anyone to do this, you're the guy. Go for it. Follow your dreams.

• 39:59Speaker 01

  No, no one was on board, guy. My, my wife and my oldest brother. That's about it.

• 40:04Guy Raz?

  Okay, your wife and your oldest brother.

• 40:05Speaker 01

  I thought I was an idiot.

• 40:06Guy Raz?

  But, but how did you just, just, what was the first step you took? I mean, yeah, you had experience, but you know, first of all, how are you going to finance a sweatshirt business?

• 40:18Speaker 01

  So there's a few different questions in there. I think in the beginning, the concept was American-made clothing of the highest quality, you know, soup to nuts made here. If you go to China today and you and I want to launch a, let's say, a jacket business, we can go order 100,000 jackets in pink and 250,000 jackets with a hood in orange. And we can do a turnkey, just write the order. You can't do that domestically. Couldn't then, can't now. What you have to do is you have to assemble an actual supply chain of all of its component parts.

• 40:46Guy Raz?

  The zippers.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, all those pieces.

• 40:48Guy Raz?

  The rivets, the fabric.

• 40:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and most brands, virtually all of them, and most retailers are not in that business. They are in the purchase order writing business. And so you have to become a manufacturer, again, the way they all were. You know, they all were manufacturing businesses 20, 30, 40 years ago.

• 41:06Guy Raz?

  Back in the day.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Today, they're not. They're marketing and purchase order writing businesses. And so that was the concept. And that then turned into, well, what can I make? And I was interested in what I think of as the American canon, you know, the most important pieces of clothing that identify American style. And that, to me, was the blue jean, it was the flannel shirt, it was a T-shirt, and it was a sweatshirt. And those were kind of the four.

• 41:31Guy Raz?

  A sweatshirt with a zipper, like a hoodie?

• 41:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, at that point, I just, it was one of those four things. And I sort of looked at all of them. And flannel shirt felt impossible to me. Blue jean felt, you know, a little less impossible, but so incredibly difficult for our early nascent business. And a T-shirt didn't feel particularly substantial. So I kind of defaulted into a sweatshirt. And so that became the thing I wanted to make as our flagship product. And so that was sort of the product piece of it that I was really focusing on and looking a lot at the underlying supply chain underneath it. And then separately, as I thought about financing it, I began to reach out to my network of people. And one of the most important father

• 42:15Speaker 01

  figures in my life was growing up back in Greenwich, was a man named Don Kendall, who had really built PepsiCo.

• 42:22Guy Raz?

  He became, he was the CEO of Pepsi at one point.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  Became the CEO of Pepsi and started out as a syrup salesman. And he had been someone that I was a very important professional and personal guide. And I would periodically meet with him and tell him what I was up to. And I, when I was forming this idea, I had a coffee with him and told him about it. He said, I'm going to write your first check. And he did. He wrote me, I think, a $25,000 check. I don't know whether he said it or whether it was implied. He said, if you go do what you say you're going to do with the 25,000, there's more behind that. He was true to his word and I guess I was true to mine and he, over time, began to invest more and really became the professional and financial backstop to the business in those early days.

• 43:00Guy Raz?

  So that money was going to be enough, I guess, to get you started, to design the sweatshirt, right? And what was the design going to be? I mean, a sweatshirt or a hoodie? How did you think about what your sweatshirt was going to be?

• 43:13Speaker 01

  So one part of it was just looking at what I remember of the, kind of, the heyday of American sweatshirts, which in my mind were sort of the 50s and the 60s with Champion and Russell and building these really beautiful, heavyweight, 100% cotton, thick sweatshirts that got softer and better over time versus what was in the market then. And so I knew conceptually, I wanted to get back to some of the things that I thought were so great about the best of American fleece. And then the other thing that I did that was maybe smart was I hired a guy named Philippe Manu, who was someone I'd known for a long time.

• 43:50Guy Raz?

  Philippe Manu?

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Philippe Manu, and he is one of the smartest people I know, one of the hardest working people I know.

• 43:56Guy Raz?

  And he was an apparel designer?

• 43:58Speaker 01

  No. Quite the opposite. He'd spent his career in medical devices and working on the early Apple iPod. He worked on the glass surface on the iPod.

• 44:10Guy Raz?

  And you thought he was the right guy?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  I thought he was very smart. I thought he was passionate. And what I liked was he had no apparel experience. As counterintuitive as that sounds, I really wanted somebody to come in that had completely unencumbered eyes, where he and I could ask very open-ended questions about what made a great sweatshirt. So I got with him somebody that started with no preconceived notions about anything, not what was possible, not the way things do things, not the way that designers are trained or merchants are trained. I wanted somebody to come at this totally fresh, and he did. And he challenged basically every single assumption. And we, piece by piece by piece, began to assemble what we thought was going to be a pretty great product.

• 44:51Guy Raz?

  Bayard, this is 2011, the dawn of the direct-to-consumer age. So you're getting into it right, really at the right time. Because you decided, I think, from the beginning, we're going to sell this direct to consumers, right? We're going to go online and do it that way, at least initially.

• 45:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, not only that, but exclusively, I really, I thought at the time, which proved out to be wrong. That there was great economics to clean up if you could launch a direct-to-consumer business and try to pass on as much value and quality to the consumer without any distribution costs as cost as we could.

• 45:27Guy Raz?

  I mean, it's interesting. I remember being in San Francisco around this time with a friend, walking through like Union Square, and my friend saying, brick and mortar's dead. There's going to be no brick and mortar. And parts of San Francisco, that might be true. But in general, that was wrong, right? I mean, everyone said, brick and mortar's dead. But now, of course, direct-to-consumer is not necessarily a bad model, but it's more competitive and that there are advantages to having a foot in both.

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that, myself included, just misanalyzed the problem. I mean, I think we, physical stores and resellers provide a critical piece of the puzzle, which is just exposure to customers that an online brand only has a much harder time doing. And it's expensive to try to do that online. And I just didn't, that wasn't even part of my calculus, didn't even consider it. And I was just totally blind to that.

• 46:15Guy Raz?

  So you found the company. And by the way, the name American Giant, how'd you come up with that name?

• 46:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll tell you a really quick funny story about that. When you are starting a company and naming a company, you have to go through this agonizing, personal process of what am I going to name it? And then you have to, once you come up with a name you might like, you have to make sure that your URL is available and that there's no trademark infringement or any other thing. And I started to keep notes and lists and pads of paper in my car, next to my bed, and everywhere that I might jot things down. And I had gotten it down to, I don't know, three or four that I thought were okay. I didn't love them. But I was sitting at a coffee shop. I was on a phone call with part of the supply chain I was starting to build. And I was kind of daydreaming on the call. And I had, my mother's mother grew up in northern Maine. And if you looked out of her window of her house,

• 47:06Speaker 01

  you could see these two hills that were called the Sleeping Giant. And I was thinking about that, kind of reminiscing about that. And the name American Giant popped into my head. And I was like, gosh, that's, that's great. And I love this idea of... A giant being a quiet but strong thing and sort of felt there were correlations to American manufacturing kind of has been left alone, but would be strong if it got reawakened. So I got on my computer and did a USPTO search and saw on there that it was available for automotive, but not for apparel. And I was just crushed.

• 47:46Speaker 01

  And the next day I drove to my trademark attorney's office in Sacramento. I met with him. I said, hey, I had this name. It's taken. And he looked it up and said, no, this guy just renewed like a month ago. He just renewed his trademark on it. You're not getting it.

• 48:04Guy Raz?

  For apparel?

• 48:05Speaker 01

  For apparel. And I was just bombed. And so anyway, I was driving back to the city of Sacramento. I was on the Bay Bridge and I just couldn't let it go. And so I got the phone number attached to the trademark filing. I called the number and somebody answered the phone and I said, hey, do you own the trademark to American Giant? And he was like kind of taken aback. Yeah, I do. And I said, well, I told my story and I said, is there any chance you would sell it to me? And he was quiet for a few minutes and he said, I'll tell you what, I'm a lawyer. I wrote a thriller in the kind of John Grisham vein called American Giant. It's like a legal thriller.

• 48:46Speaker 01

  And I've always thought that I might one day become a New York Times bestseller and people buy T-shirts or something with the name of the novel on it, but that's a pipe dream. And if you write me a $5,000 check, you can have it. I almost drove off the road. Anyway, that guy Keith Berkshire has become a dear friend of the company. He just emailed me two days ago, said he was going to go to our store in Boston.

• 49:07Guy Raz?

  I love that.

• 49:08Speaker 01

  But he's a part of the, you know, as you know, any of us that have ever started a company, there are these moments that feel like it was meant to be. Well, Keith is.

• 49:15Guy Raz?

  You told him your vision over the phone?

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:18Guy Raz?

  What a great story.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  It's a great story. Yeah.

• 49:21Guy Raz?

  So here's my question, like you, it took you, it would take you a little less than a year before you had the first product. And I want to get to how you made it. I mean, the goal of course is to, is to get to the point where you can sell something. I mean, you want everything to be in the U.S. Right? That means, you know, the zipper, the fabric, the stitches and then the labor. Was that even possible? Was there even, for example, like a zipper? Manufacturer that made zippers in the US?

• 49:53Speaker 01

  I mean, the real answer is I didn't know.

• 49:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  We began some of the early work with a group called the S Group in Portland, Oregon. A guy named Gary Peck runs that operation up there. And Gary had worked for Adidas for many, many years, had worked in the American-made division of Adidas and had a lot of knowledge. And Gary was a really integral part early on, as the S Group was, helping us steer through the difficulty of figuring out exactly the questions you're asking, where to go for what.

• 50:17Guy Raz?

  They're like a consulting group?

• 50:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, they're kind of like a turnkey, like you want to go make a, fill in the blank, a pair of boots. They can help you design and develop and then source that product. And so we began to, through him, I began to meet more and more people. And, but the fabric piece of it, we couldn't figure out. We couldn't, we were after a very specific, if you hold our, it's called our classic full-zip sweatshirt, if you hold it, the fabric is pretty unique. It's very tightly knitted, it's got, it's 100% cotton, it's got a very dry feel to it. And to get that fabric knitted, I don't want to get too wonky with your audience, but it requires a certain type of knitting machines. And those machines had gone over to Japan a long time ago. And so we were really struggling with how to get that made.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  And in the middle of all that, I had met in a town called Gaffney, South Carolina, a company called Carolina Cotton Works. And the man that ran that company was a man named Paige Ashby. And Paige saw something that, I think, lit a spark for him. And he sat in his conference room on the second floor of that building, and Paige looked at me and said, "I'll get this figured out for you." And he did.

• 51:26Guy Raz?

  What did they make?

• 51:28Speaker 01

  Carolina Cotton Works is a, originally was a washing facility that just washed fabric. But Paige grew it into what we refer to as a finishing facility. So they put color into cloth and they put texture into cloth. In our case, napping. And napping is, if you ever think about a bath towel, that's essentially a French terry. If you ever stare at it, you can see that the loops of the knitted fabric are intact.

• 51:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  When you nap that fabric, it's literally thousands and thousands of needles that pick those loops, they kind of cut them. And that's what creates kind of a fuzzy backing, let's say, to the inside of your sweatshirt.

• 52:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Paige got us connected to a group called Clover Knits in Clover, South Carolina. Clover knitted the cloth and Paige figured out how to get it napped and finished to our specs. And it's not an overstatement to say we would not be here today if it hadn't been for Paige and his leadership. And Paige passed away a few years ago, but he was a remarkable human and a remarkable business person and a good friend and really got us off the ground in a way that we couldn't have done on our own.

• 52:32Guy Raz?

  All right. So you have this deal with them to make it and they produced the first run of sweatshirts, right? And these were zip-up hoodies. And I guess I should, at this point, just full disclosure, Bayard, I own a few of your sweatshirts. In fact, for this interview, I'm wearing one now so I can feel it as you describe it because there's those double stitches and it's heavy and it's just a thick, solid sweatshirt. So I know them well. When you got this first run in, what did you do? Like, did you just like put them on the website? Did you reach out to media to get some attention? Like, how did you get people to become aware of this thing you were trying to do?

• 53:15Speaker 01

  Well, the basic business idea was if you built a really great sweatshirt and did it in a way that both the brand and your consumers would be proud of, that customers would care. So that basic idea was what we wanted to launch the business around. And so we poured everything into the product, basically. And I sent out, you know, a thousand emails to everybody I've ever met in my life saying, hey, I'm launching this company, please buy a sweatshirt. And so we did that. And so we launched, we shipped our first sweatshirts, men's only at the time, in February of 2012. We got a little bit of press and we had friends buy stuff, but it was still Tiny Guy. I mean, I think we sold, I don't

• 53:57Speaker 01

  know, maybe $10,000 worth of sweatshirts a month.

• 54:01Guy Raz?

  And they were expensive compared to the mass-produced, you know, sweatshirts made overseas. They were...

• 54:08Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 54:08Guy Raz?

  I mean, like, you could buy, you'd go to, you know, Uniqlo and you could get one for like 15 bucks, right? Yours cost, what, 75, 80 bucks at the time?

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:19Guy Raz?

  Maybe 100, closer to 100.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  From a brand nobody knew.

• 54:22Guy Raz?

  And that was because the cost to manufacture them was going to be, naturally was going to be higher if you were sourcing almost everything from the United States.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Well, it was really every component part. In fact, we underpriced the sweatshirt at the beginning by quite a bit.

• 54:38Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 54:39Speaker 01

  The fabric itself was expensive. The zippers are expensive. The ribbing, I mean, I can give you a chapter and verse on all these different parts. The double lined hood, the metal aglets, the custom pulls on the zipper, all these things, they are expensive. The needle and hiring, you know, we really wanted craftspeople sewing these things. We didn't want just ton and gun sewing. And so at every part, we were investing in the product and asking our customers to trust us on that because they weren't walking into a store to feel it, right? They had to take it on faith that when it arrived in their house in a box, that it would meet their expectations.

• 55:15Guy Raz?

  And I think concurrently, you opened a store, right? Around that time?

• 55:20Speaker 01

  Well, when I started the business, I opened up in the back of a friend's factory and just rented a desk. But eventually, when the business started to get going, we rented a tiny little building on 21st Street and Mission in San Francisco. And we put five desks upstairs and we built a little, essentially a warehouse downstairs where we could store the sweatshirts. And then a little, at the front door, a little desk where someone could come in and buy stuff. So you had a little, if you walked down 21st Street, you could walk in and try on a sweatshirt and buy one. And we did all of our shipping out of there. We did all of our everything out of there. But it was good to have a place where people could walk in because you could interact with people and see when they tried it on, was there the response? And so there was this feedback loop there that was great. But it was really small.

• 56:06Guy Raz?

  So that first year, you're trying to sell to whoever you can. And by the end of that year, and this is when I first heard about this product, it was December of 2012. An article in Slate comes out by Farhad Manjoo, who used to be at the New York Times. This article was titled, "This is the Greatest Hoodie Ever Made," which doesn't get much better than that. I mean, it's a pretty ringing, rousing endorsement.

• 56:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:33Guy Raz?

  I was working at NPR at the time, and I interviewed you when that came out. We talked about the sweatshirt. What did that article do? Because I imagine just things blew up, like, for a time.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  It changed everything.

• 56:50Speaker 01

  I had met Farhad. We had approached him and said, listen, we think we're doing something kind of interesting. Why don't you look at this and compare it to a bunch of the sweatshirts and see what you think? And he was a tech reporter for Slate at that time. And I think this kind of grabbed his fancy a little bit. It was a, some part of tech story because of the e-commerce angle, I guess, but it just felt something different for him. And I think he intended to give it a couple of hours and move on. And he came up to the city one day and met with me and he ended up spending, I don't know, four or five days with us and really immersing himself in the whole thing and wrote this really detailed article that was not only an exploration of the business model, but the sweatshirt itself. And I think he was moved by what he saw in the product and wrote this article

• 57:35Speaker 01

  that when it went out, and to your point, it was early December of 2012, I'll never forget it. The article hit. I didn't know it. I got a phone call from the people that were hosting our e-commerce platform and said, are you aware of what's happening here? I was, no. He said, something's happening. We are trying to get-

• 57:54Guy Raz?

  Getting inundated with orders.

• 57:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're getting inundated. But inundated was the understatement of the year. I think we were getting something like 100 orders a second.

• 58:01Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 58:02Speaker 01

  And we didn't have that much inventory.

• 58:06Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, Bayard scrambles to meet demand. And soon after, a key partner leaves him with thousands of orders to fill and nowhere to get them made. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 58:33Speaker 02

  Hi, Guy. My name is Deidre. I live north of Baltimore. My favorite episode is Dogfish Head Craft Brewery. Many of us tend to gravitate towards that area in the summer where they establish their business. They just have an incredible story. So, thanks.

• 58:46Guy Raz?

  If you want to share your favorite episode of How I Built This, record a short voice memo on your phone telling us your name, where you're from, what your favorite episode is, and why. A lot like the voice memo you just heard. And email it to us at [email protected] and we'll share your favorites right here in the ad breaks in future episodes. And thanks so much. We love you guys. You're the best. And now, back to the show.

• 59:18Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2012 and American Giant's hoodies are the subject of a viral article. But at the very moment customers are beating down his door, Bayard realizes that he just doesn't have that much inventory.

• 59:36Speaker 01

  And not only did I not have that much inventory, the contracts that we had for future yarn and knitting and finishing were finite, too. We had maybe, I don't know, so another, call it 10,000, not even, probably 5,000 sweatshirts on order. And so, within the span of like 12 hours, we sold out of everything that was downstairs in our facility in the Mission, heading into holiday.

• 59:58Guy Raz?

  Which seems like a good problem to have.

• 1:00:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, right.

• 1:00:01Guy Raz?

  But.

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  And in fact, you know, one of the guys I worked with had come in a week prior saying, "We have way too much inventory for holiday." So that was gone in an instant. And the next day, we kind of all gathered and said, "What are we gonna do?" We said, "Why don't we put up a blog post that said if you want to get a sweatshirt, fill out this form," which people did, filled out a form in droves, and within 12 hours, bought all future production. So sweatshirts that we were not going to ship until March, people were buying today in December and saying, "Ship it to me when it's done." So that sold out instantly. And then we sat in a room and said, "Well, we gotta order more. How much are we gonna order?" And that was a good luck with that conversation, you know? By the time that new stuff was gonna land,

• 1:00:47Speaker 01

  it was gonna be hitting our warehouse in the middle of summer. That article would be old news and it'd be 90 degrees in New York City. And so, we made a guess and off we went. And what ended up happening, just to complete that story, is he wrote a follow-on article about, I don't know, eight or nine months later. And the title of that article was, "The Only Problem With The Greatest Hoodie Ever Made Is You Have To Wait Nine Months To Get It." And so, that took us from our being completely swamped and like shoved us under, you know, another 100 feet of water, because that article went as crazy as the first one did. And those two really created havoc for us for, you know, it went on for about three years.

• 1:01:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah. There's a backlog for almost three years.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think everyone asked about that, right? Which is like, "Why can't you get in front of it?" And the thing that I think people don't really appreciate is... When you sit in a room and try to figure out what demand is going to look like in six months, it's incredibly difficult. And so you make your best guesses. And we chronically underestimated demand. And I think what that did was it was creating- Is that because you were worried about spending too much money? Yeah, if you get it wrong, you just you bankrupt the business. And so we- Yeah. So you end up being conservative in those bets. And that conservatism ended up in sellouts. And the sellouts added to demand. And everyone thinks like, oh, that's great. It is partially great. We luckily, our customers really stood by us. And we were very transparent with the challenges that we were having getting back in stock.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  But it's not a great feeling when you feel like you're chronically disappointing your customers and not able to deliver what they're asking for. So, but yeah, it went on for a long time. How long did it take to make one sweatshirt? Yeah, so I'll tell you the whole step-by-step process. Yeah. So the big regions of cotton production are California, Texas, and the southeast, North and South Carolina. So that cotton gets grown. It gets harvested typically in late October, early November, and goes to a gin. If you remember your- Yep. -your old history lessons about Eli Whitney. The ginning process removes seeds and leaf litter. It used to be done by slave labor in the United States, was a big part of the southern economy. Now it's done through automated ginning machines, which are kind of dotted all over the United

• 1:03:02Speaker 01

  States cotton-growing regions. So it goes and gets ginned. So in this example that I'm giving you, we get ginned at the Enfield Gin, which is in Enfield, North Carolina. Yeah. And that gets cleaned and then baled. And so that gin takes in raw cotton, and out the other door goes a bale of cotton. And that cotton gets labeled. So you get varietal, you get moisture content, color, but a whole bunch of quality controls, much like a grape and a wine. Yep. And then that bale goes to a storing facility where it sits for anywhere from a month to eight or nine months until it gets pulled into a yarning production facility. They have to turn to yarn. Yes, turn into yarn, in our case. That goes from North Carolina, where it was grown, across the border into Gaffney, where there is a company called Parkdale Mills. And they convert that raw cotton into finished yarn.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  And that's a highly automated process.

• 1:03:49Guy Raz?

  But that yarn can't be turned into a sweatshirt. It's supposed to be turned into something else.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  That's right. That spun yarn would then go to Clover, South Carolina.

• 1:03:57Guy Raz?

  So another factory.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Another factory. This is a knitting.

• 1:03:59Guy Raz?

  That turns this into.

• 1:04:00Speaker 01

  A knitting facility. So it takes the raw yarn and converts it into knitted cloth.

• 1:04:05Guy Raz?

  Into basically fabric, the fabric that you would see in a flesh product.

• 1:04:09Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 1:04:10Guy Raz?

  Sheets of the fabric.

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Sheets of that fabric that look like the color of cotton grown in a field. So it's sort of like a dirty white, maybe.

• 1:04:17Guy Raz?

  Yep.

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  It's, they call it grage color. And it's, it's sort of a tough fabric. Rolls of that raw fabric then would go to Carolina Cotton Works, right down the street.

• 1:04:27Guy Raz?

  Another factory.

• 1:04:28Speaker 01

  From where Clover is, Clover's in Clover, South Carolina. And now back to Gaffney, where it gets dyed, napped and finished. And so.

• 1:04:35Guy Raz?

  Finished means it's smoothed out.

• 1:04:36Speaker 01

  Smoothed. And it's, in our case, the back of it, the front of it gets some sanding, the back of it gets napped. So that fabric gives you that dry hand feel that you can feel in your sweatshirt now. And the napping gives that soft and cozy interior. Now you've got finished fabric in a roll that looks like basically what you're wearing. And the final step is that goes north about 140 miles.

• 1:05:00Guy Raz?

  Back to North Carolina.

• 1:05:01Speaker 01

  Back to North Carolina, to a facility that we own outside of Raleigh, where that fabric is cut and sewn into a final sweatshirt. And what emerges out of that facility is, yeah, is the finished product that you're wearing.

• 1:05:13Guy Raz?

  There, I mean, just the, the number of steps from field to, to finish. It's going through so many different places. So the costs add up over time and the time to do it, right? I mean, so given that this is all done domestically and all of those people involved are domestic employees or workers of those factories, you know, by the time it's ready to be sewn into, into the garment, the cost of that roll is, must be relatively high.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I, you know, I think if I took you through our supply chain, step by step, it's hard not to emerge out of that process and think, boy, it's, it's underpriced, maybe. The amount of craft and knowledge and people that touch it is remarkable. I think it's important that we, as, you know, just people, understand how hard it is to get food produced or, or products to get produced that we consume. And I think we've lost touch with a little bit of that. But it is amazing to see it up close and to see all the people and all the skill that goes into making a sweatshirt or, or a t-shirt.

• 1:06:16Guy Raz?

  Um, who, what were the reasons people were interested in buying the product? Was it, was it a sense of patriotism? Was it like, I want to support made in the USA? Was it, or was it something different? Or was it a bunch of different things?

• 1:06:28Speaker 01

  I think it was a bunch of different things. I think at its core probably was, probably what you experienced was this article that came out that seemed totally unique and different, went totally viral. You couldn't get it. But I think in addition to that, I've got a handful of brands in my life that I like giving them my money because I admire what they're doing and it aligns with my own values. And I think that is probably behind it is, and this gets back to the earlier comment about this sort of nonpartisan patriotism that I think lots and lots of Americans feel that there's this intuitive sense that the Amazonification of our lives is not great and that we're getting this disconnected reality from the people and the places that make the things that we need and love. And we got to turn back on that a little bit.

• 1:07:12Speaker 01

  And I think that's probably part of it, too.

• 1:07:15Guy Raz?

  One of the things I wonder about is, as you were introducing this product to people, of course, one of the reactions was going to be, this is too expensive for me. I can't spend a hundred dollars on a hoodie or 120 or whatever. How did you explain to potential customers why the price was what it was and why that was worth it for them?

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, we still get that, right? I mean, our stuff is expensive. Any way you look at it, it's expensive and it's in many cases too expensive for a lot of customers of ours. You know, we don't, we can't sell to the...

• 1:07:47Guy Raz?

  You can't make a $8 sweatshirt. It's not possible. It's impossible.

• 1:07:52Speaker 01

  An $8 sweatshirt is not possible, but, but...

• 1:07:54Guy Raz?

  You can't make a $20 sweatshirt.

• 1:07:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. What is interesting, though, is the role of volume and commitment, what that plays with pricing. So if you had a significant commitment from a major brand or a major retailer, the pricing paradigm changes pretty fundamentally.

• 1:08:11Guy Raz?

  Even with the cost of labor in the US, like even though just the built-in costs are higher because American workers... Are paid more.

• 1:08:20Speaker 01

  That is true, and that's that you cannot get around that, right? So the cost of labor in the United States compared to China is they're not really comparable. And and I think we should be addressing some version of that in our trade policy. But there's an inherent cost structure about making the United States that is forever going to make it more expensive than, say, manufacturing in China. But you can close the gap down massively if there was volume and commitment there. But so to your original question, how do we communicate that to our customers? You know, I think we try to communicate on our website. We try to talk to the media and we hopefully deliver on the quality. But how our customers understand that they're buying and supporting communities and neighbors

• 1:09:02Speaker 01

  and when they buy products from us and that hopefully that that is part of the value proposition, right? And by the way, there's no judgment attached to that. There are many people that that need to shop at places where they can get a sweatshirt for $19.99 and it's important that they could do that. But I think for people that have the ability to make choices there, I think that that is part of the value proposition, that if I can direct my dollars towards something that I think is going towards something I believe in and is consistent with my values is part of how our customers think about value when they buy a sweatshirt or a T-shirt or a pair of jeans from us.

• 1:09:35Guy Raz?

  You acquired a manufacturing company called Eagle Sportswear, which which means that you essentially became a manufacturing business. I mean, you earlier talked about how most apparel companies are just purchase order companies. They're just filling out forms, they're probably designing it, and then it's just made, everything's just made for them in China or wherever. You are actually, you had to become a manufacturing company in order to do what you wanted to do.

• 1:09:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the real quick story there is we were making all of our stuff in a facility about 20 minutes south of where I am today called SFO Apparel. And that facility is run by a guy named Peter Mao, who is a very important partner of ours. And when that Slate article hit, I went down and saw Peter, and said, Peter, I need all your capacity through the end of the year. And in any normal circumstance, that would be the best news ever if you were a domestic sewing facility. And Peter said, okay, let me spend the weekend. I'll talk to my team. I'll get back to you Monday. And he called me in Monday and said, I've just gotten a phone call from Under Armour and they have a container ship of, I forget what it was, jerseys or something that had a problem with it.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  And they needed Peter to fix them. And he said, I love American Giant. I love you guys, but you've been around for a year and this is Under Armour and I can't turn this business down.

• 1:10:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he shrunk our capacity down. I think we had two sewing lines at the time. He said, I can keep one open for you.

• 1:10:56Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  And so in the middle of all that, we were panicking and I remember I met with Mr. Kendall and

• 1:11:04Guy Raz?

  This is Kendall, the guy who's your mentor.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry. This is my primary investor and our kind of guiding force. And he said to me, do the customer want the product? It was like the most basic question. And I said, yeah, they're, you know, we're having a hard time supplying them. And he said, well, then you can't have your manufacturing be a constraint. And so we ended up buying a facility in Middlesex, North Carolina, which is a sewing facility called Eagle Sportswear that now sews probably 60% of our product.

• 1:11:37Guy Raz?

  Wow. Bayard, in March of 2024, a book came out called American Flannel by a guy named Stephen Kuritz. And a lot of this book is about you and about, it's about basically about entrepreneurs who are trying to make clothing in the United States and how hard that is. And part of it talks about this, this saga that you went through to create a flannel shirt, which I think initially, when you launched American Giant in 2011, this was like in your vision. You wanted to make a flannel shirt, but it wouldn't, it would take like seven years to figure out how to make a flannel shirt in the United States. I think most people think, think of that and they're like,

• 1:12:19Guy Raz?

  a flannel shirt? What's so hard about making a flannel shirt? What's the challenge there? Why can't you make this in the US? What was so hard about that?

• 1:12:28Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, so. Where do you begin, right? Yeah, I mean, I think when I originally thought about the business, I thought of, you know, there are probably four iconic American silhouettes. There's the T-shirt, there's the sweatshirt, there's the blue jean, and there's the flannel shirt. And of those four, the flannel is the most complicated and much more complicated than I even gave it credit for. The difference is, just to try to keep it really simple, when I was young, the great flannel shirts you bought from Woolrich, L.L. Bean, that lasted forever, and they were beautiful and got more and more patinaed as they aged and got softer as they aged, those were yarn-dyed flannel shirts. And yarn dyeing is a, it's kind of half art, half science, that the individual strands

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  of yarn are dyed and then woven into the fabric to create the flannel pattern. Oh, it's not like dyed, you don't just make the shirt and then just stamp a flannel? And print flannel on it, and that is what you buy today is. Oh, most of it's printed. Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And so I wanted to do a yarn-dyed flannel shirt in the United States. So you have to actually buy the yarn and then dye it, unlike the knitted fabric that we spoke about earlier, but it has to be individual strands of yarn need to be dyed. Wow. And so I got it in my head that I wanted to do a yarn-dyed flannel program, and I reached out to the New York Times, and there was a reporter there who worked in the, in the fashion team named Stephen Kuritz, and asked him if he wanted to come along for the journey.

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  I didn't, had no clue whether, whether we were going to be successful or not. And he's a guy that grew up in western Pennsylvania, under the shadow of Woolrich, grew up in a mill town, and had witnessed the decline of that brand and the offshoring of its production, and I think it, it struck a note with him, and he said yes. And he ended up following us for a year, basically, as we went down this incredibly arduous path of assembling the component parts necessary to make a yarn-dyed flannel. And we released it in time for Christmas of that year, I think it was 2017, and Stephen wrote an article for the New York Times called "The Annals of Flannel." That tracked that journey.

• 1:14:39Speaker 01

  And I think Stephen got approached by two or three publishing houses to turn it into a book. But I think, you know, I think the thing that's interesting about that book is it poses pretty fundamental questions about, you know, what happens to a country if we don't make things anymore?

• 1:14:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  And I'll shamelessly plug Stephen's book because he did a, he did a heck of a job. And I think, I think Stephen King said it was, without question, was going to be one of his favorite books of 2024. So, and if I, if I just will say, I think it's a good example of, I think this not, the nonpartisan nature of, of domestic manufacturing. You've got people on the right and the left that care really deeply about this stuff. And I think that's as it should be.

• 1:15:19Guy Raz?

  You've been at this since 2011 and even before, but, but publicly pushing for making things in the U.S. And there, you know, there's some brands that were doing it. American Apparel was doing it for, for a while. But you've been on this, out there, talking about this. Have you seen any movement? I mean, have you seen manufacturing, at least in the apparel business, you know, moving towards making more stuff in the U.S.? Or has it not really happened yet?

• 1:15:46Speaker 01

  Well, here's the thing. About 40 years ago, we made a bipartisan decision to place consumption at the center of our foreign policy.

• 1:15:57Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:58Speaker 01

  We felt that getting consumers the cheapest prices and the most choice was the absolute best thing to do, as opposed to putting manufacturing at the center of our foreign policy. And I think that a lot of that policy makes some sense, right? That we now can get flat screen TVs for cheap, lots of choice. But there's also a lot of consequences of that policy, which has resulted in real devastation to lower middle-class jobs, to urban rural communities that have been just decimated.

• 1:16:23Guy Raz?

  Agreed.

• 1:16:24Speaker 01

  If you have a four-year degree and you can be a consultant or, or work in banking or, you know, you're doing well, you can be in the stock market, you've done great. If you have not done those things, if you've, if you've got a high school degree and you have a job that's going to put you into the trades or manufacturing, the last 40 years have been absolutely devastating. And that doesn't end well for a country. And I think that was a fundamental mistake. It was a bipartisan mistake. We cannot build a country on the back of consumption arriving at your door, eight dollar pair of sneakers the next day. We are going to hollow out the middle class in this country in ways that have long term, very bad consequences. I think the good news is that consumers are waking up to it. Policies makers are waking up to it. And so have we seen movement?

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  I think you're definitely seeing movement in DC. Certainly the Biden administration is doing that in a pretty important way. And the Trump administration was as well, actually. Two pretty opposed administrations, obviously. They're quite consistent on trade policy. Bob Lighthizer, who is the US Trade Representative

• 1:17:25Guy Raz?

  Yes, Trade Rep.

• 1:17:25Speaker 01

  Under Trump, right? And Ambassador Tai, under Biden, actually see the world quite similarly and are doing good work. Ambassador Tai particularly doing good work at beginning to restore some protections to domestic manufacturing that are going to have good long term consequences. There's a lot more work to do. But she particularly has been at the fore of driving real change that we're going to see the benefit of in the coming years.

• 1:17:51Guy Raz?

  Yeah. A couple of years ago, you guys took on a strategic investor who gained a controlling stake in the company. Miguel McKelvey, who co-founded WeWork. Tell me about why you sort of made the decision to partner with him.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  Well, I assume it's appropriate to talk about this, but I got a phone call one morning when I was out walking my dog in the Presidio in San Francisco from you, Guy. And you had reached out to me and said, you and I hadn't spoken for a long time, I don't think. And you had said that you had a guy that was interested in US manufacturing and was kind of poking around and someone that you felt was a good human and was wondering if you could make an introduction so that I could share some of our scar tissue with him.

• 1:18:42Guy Raz?

  Yeah, he was Miguel McKelvey, who had been on the show. He was looking to start a sneaker company because he played basketball in college and he wanted to make the sneakers in the US. And I said, "Oh, you should talk to Bayard Winthrop, who makes everything in the US. He could be a really good resource." And he wasn't looking to invest or buy anything. He was just looking for some advice on where he could make the shoes.

• 1:19:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and like all these things, you spend enough time banging your head and fist against the wall. You learn stuff, right? You learn who can do what things and what things are possible domestically, which aren't. Where to spend time, where not to spend time. And I was trying to, as you know, Miguel, he's a great person. And so it was just, those were invigorating conversations to be able to speak to somebody that has done interesting things and was thinking about the problem well and was kind of trying to enter into the industry. And so those were really good conversations. And I began to sense that the conversations, though, were kind of in the micro about footwear, they're more broadly about his interest in trying to improve work environments for humans. And you know him, he's a very philosophical, deep thinker.

• 1:19:46Speaker 01

  And the conversations often took on that form. And I remember one day, I was talking to him and said, "You know, why don't we do something together? You're thinking about this in a way that's different than me, but that's very much consistent and aligned to what we're trying to do here. And I think you have a huge impact. And I think it would allow you to explore some of the things that you're interested in." And that conversation, over the course of a long time, evolved into him saying that was something that he'd consider and then ultimately happened. And like, it was two years ago now, or three, two and a half years ago.

• 1:20:20Guy Raz?

  He's your main investor now.

• 1:20:22Speaker 01

  And he's now our main investor. And I think it was a condition of his investment that he wanted to be able to really have a long-term view about how to build something great and be able to do the things that he felt were important. And so it was really important to him that he could have controlling interest in the company. And so that's what he ultimately did. It's just been, it's been a fascinating thing for me to have a thought partner who really thinks about things quite differently than I do, but has made me a lot smarter and I think more thoughtful about how we're approaching the problem. I'll give you an anecdote. In our facility in North Carolina, he came in one day and said, he was asking about labor and the challenge of getting labor there. And Miguel said, "Well, who's the typical worker here?" And Miguel said, "You know, it's..."

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  It's all women, the factory's probably 98% women. And Miguel said, well, a lot of them have kids, yeah. A lot of them have to like get kids after school, yes. Be home after school, yes. And so Miguel said, why don't we convert a couple of these offices into an after-school program? Put in some computers, provide some snacks.

• 1:21:22Guy Raz?

  In North Carolina?

• 1:21:23Speaker 01

  In North Carolina. We haven't done that. But that was a suggestion eight months ago. And it hit me like a ton of bricks, Guy. I was like, well, yeah. What's that gonna cost me? $50,000, maybe? You know, I worry about whether I've got free coffee and snacks in my offices in San Francisco, but it didn't even occur to me to do that in North Carolina. So we're looking into that exact thing. And so that kind of thinking is pushing us forward.

• 1:21:49Guy Raz?

  You know, you mentioned earlier, you mentioned this idea of scale, right? And so to produce something inexpensively, like to make an $8 t-shirt, you can do that if you, you know, make a bunch of them in Asia and then put them in a container and ship them over here. To do domestically, much harder. But is there a world where you can actually use scale and domestic labor here in the US and produce something competitively priced?

• 1:22:17Speaker 01

  No question about it.

• 1:22:19Guy Raz?

  It can be done?

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  Absolutely can be done. The key factors are volume and durability of commitment. What I mean by that is if you had a major retailer, of which maybe there are three or four in this country, or a major brand that said, I am going to make a commitment to a t-shirt, let's say, and I'm going to commit to it in a reasonable volume, maybe that's some small fraction of the number of t-shirts you sell in a year, but I'm gonna do it domestically. And I'm gonna be steady in that commitment, measured in years, not months. So that the supply chain partners knew that there was going to be steady

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  volume over time, that has a fundamentally transformative impact on cost. And therein lies the irony, is that there is a real chicken and egg with domestic textile production, that it is all offshore. And so the businesses that are left are constantly trying to land the next, you know, 5,000 piece order.

• 1:23:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:26Speaker 01

  But if you had a way to drop in a order quantity measured in the hundreds of thousands of units, it changes price in the most basic levels and blows up entirely. The negative paradigm of, boy, American manufacturing is so wildly expensive, it's only available for the elite.

• 1:23:47Guy Raz?

  So in theory, a T-shirt, right, that retails on your site for 50 bucks, which is, again, we know the supply chain, the cotton's American, it's spun in four different factories, it's made in a facility in North Carolina, the cost of that could go down considerably if you had, you know, a factory that was on order to produce 200,000 of them?

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, I could produce a great quality, 100% cotton T-shirt that you would love, that would retail for 15 bucks or less.

• 1:24:20Guy Raz?

  Made in the US?

• 1:24:21Speaker 01

  Made in the US.

• 1:24:21Guy Raz?

  Entirely domestically sourced?

• 1:24:24Speaker 01

  Of great quality.

• 1:24:25Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:24:26Speaker 01

  Yep. That is the impact of, and the thing is, is what we need, is we need a retailer or a brand to step up and lead.

• 1:24:37Guy Raz?

  So, I mean, what kind of impact can consumers have on this? I mean, if consumers make the decision to, instead of buying, you know, four shirts at H&M, buying one shirt that's American made, they could have a significant impact on how big retailers behave?

• 1:24:57Speaker 01

  Well, I think there are a number of constituents that are going to impact domestic manufacturing. Consumers are the least important in my mind, or should bear the least responsibility. Because as we keep talking about, there are many, many, many customers out there that don't have the luxury to spend 40 bucks on a T-shirt. And I don't want to be in a position where we're asking someone like that to make trade-offs that they otherwise may not be able to do. I think the people that really play roles are brands, like American Giant, or pick any other brand that you may admire. Are they trying to have some values component? And to be clear, if you make stuff in the United States, you get the human rights benefits, the environmental benefits, the worker safety benefits, that are baked into domestic law

• 1:25:41Speaker 01

  in a way that if you make it somewhere else, like Bangladesh or China, there are nowhere near the levels of protections for those brands. No matter what greenwashing may be coming from those brands, there's nowhere near the level of protections there. So to lead with values that they Instagram about, to apply those into actual supply chain decisions, that's one group. The retailers, particularly the big retailers out there, have a huge role to play between whether they're going to be helpful in this regard or not. And then the third are policymakers. If you think about, let's just pick an example, car fuel efficiency. We make decisions to say we're going to ratchet up fuel economy standards. Over time, our

• 1:26:25Speaker 01

  policymakers could easily be doing a similar thing with constraining a little bit where we allow our brands to manufacture based on some criterion that we can agree on, like human rights records, living wage, environmental standards. We do a really inadequate job to do that. But I think those are the three most important ones, probably in this order, probably policymakers number one, probably retailers number two, and brands number three. And then consumers, I think, are fourth and the least important, because I think consumers have got to act rationally, and they should.

• 1:26:55Guy Raz?

  Bayard, when you think about the journey that you've been on, right, and where the brand is today, and its future, right, where it's heading, how much of where you got to today do you attribute to the hard work and the grind, and how much? Do you think has to do with getting lucky? You know, people being interested in craft made goods and, you know, meeting Miguel? And just what do you attribute your success to?

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I think it took me a long time to realize this guy. I think you and I have talked about this off the air, that it took me, you know, into my 50s to realize the importance of affiliating with and working with people that I like, that I think have good values. And so I think that that's mattered a lot because I've surrounded myself, thankfully, rather than a bunch of people that want to have an impact, that have a sort of nonpartisan patriotism in them. And so I think that's helped. It's kind of got me into an ecosystem of people that are good and are trying. But I, boy, do I attribute a lot to luck. You know, meeting Paige Ashby or having Farhad write that article, or having you introduce me to Miguel, or whatever it might be.

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  Those are just hard not to contribute those to lucky to be at the right place in the right time. Hard work helps. You know, all those other things help. Great product helps, but you know, luck, I think anyone that tells you otherwise is lying. I think luck plays such an important role in any, you know, company's success.

• 1:28:24Guy Raz?

  That's Byrd Winthrop, founder and CEO of American Giant. And by the way, if Byrd's name sounds a little familiar, like you might have heard it in a history book somewhere, well, that's because he's actually a descendant of John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And don't forget to sign up for my free newsletter at guyraz.com. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Casey Herman with research help from Katherine Seifer. Our audio engineer was Robert Rodriguez.

• 1:29:05Guy Raz?

  Our production staff also includes Niva Grant, Alex Chung, John Isabella, Elaine Coats, Kerry Thompson, Chris Messini, Carla Estevez, and Sam Paulson. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.