American Giant

“And a lot of that is in places like North and South Carolina, where the bulk of our production is done. And we actually own some factories down there.”

“We were asked by FEMA to help make some masks for the federal government, and we had to convert our factories to do that.”

“We grew and that was growing despite our retail stores essentially shutting down. We had retail, which we had four doors in last year You know, produced, they became cost centers. They were not generating any revenue at all, but we did grow.”

“For the first year that we tried to make our sweatshirt in the U.S., basically everybody we spoke to told us there couldn't be none.”

“And he wrote me my first check, which was a 25,000 dollar check. It wasn't enough to pay me, but it was enough to begin to defray some of the costs. And he gave me a few milestones to hit. And then I hit him. And four months later, he put in another 25 grand, …”

“And our business, I think we were down 40 or 50% year on year.”

“It put us into a backordered status for almost four years, about three and a half years we were trying to catch up.”

“We do basically everything domestic from the cotton up. That's just a good guiding principle that keeps us committed to what we're trying to do here, and it's not, we're not total purists about it, but we're 99% pure about it, I would say.”

“Without that article, I don't think we'd be here. I think that, that changed the trajectory of the business.”

“He said, I'm going to write your first check. And he did. He wrote me, I think, a 25,000 dollar check.”

“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 would Even give it credit for.”

“Those two really created havoc for us for, you know, it went on for about three years.”

“I wrote a thriller in the kind of John Grisham vein called American Giant. It's like a legal thriller, 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 t…”

“These iconic American, well-made, indestructible, beautiful things, and how they're, that wasn't in the market today, period.”

“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.”

“To get that fabric knitted, the 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,”

“I mean, I could produce a great quality, hundred percent cotton t-shirt that you would love. That would retail for 15 bucks or less.”

“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.”

“If you get it wrong, you just, you'll bankrupt the business. And so we, so you end up being conservative in those bats. And that conservatism ended up in sellouts, and the sellouts added to demand”

“There's an inherent cost structure by making the United States that is forever going to make it more expensive than, let's say, Manufacturing in China, but you can close the gap down massively if there was volume and commitment there.”

“And he's now our main investor. And I think it was a condition on 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 importa…”

“I think we were getting something like a hundred orders a second.”

“I think we sold, I don't know, maybe 10,000 dollars worth of sweatshirts a month.”

“If you go to China today and you and I want to launch a, let's say, a jacket business, we can go order a 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 …”

“And print flannel on it. And that is what you buy today.”

“Miguel is an owner of, part owner of a brand called American Giant.”