How I Built This with Guy Raz - How I Built Resilience: Bayard Winthrop of American Giant

Episode Date: April 22, 2021

Bayard Winthrop is the CEO and founder of American Giant, known for its American-made hoodies, t-shirts and jeans. When the pandemic brought on production holds and storefront closures, Bayard found himself working from his car parked in front of his house. He speaks with Guy about the growth American Giant saw last year due to the increased demand for comfortable work-from-home clothing, and he offers advice on how to incentivize other companies to produce their clothing in the US. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times. How I Built This Summit - information and tickets at:http://summit.npr.orgSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.ca. Hey everyone and welcome to how I built this resilience edition from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. Each week on Thursday, we invite entrepreneurs and other business leaders to come onto the show live to talk about how they've been building resilience into their business. businesses over this past year. And today, my conversation with Bayard Winthrop, CEO and founder of the apparel company, American Giant. They sell American-made casual clothing like hoodies, t-shirts, and jeans. I first interviewed Byard in 2012 for a radio story about American manufacturing.

He founded the company earlier that year with the idea of making a high-quality American-made product, something almost unheard of in a market dominated by fast fashion like Forever 20. and H&M. Now, almost 10 years later, Bayard has had to figure out how to keep the business afloat during the pandemic. The shutdowns last year initially put their production on hold and closed their storefronts. It's a 10-year-old business that really was founded on a very simple idea that we could still make great things in America, great clothing in America. And we started the business 10 years ago with the sweatshirt you're wearing, actually. It was a single product that we kind of poured our life and sold in. to, and the business is bigger than that now and a wider product line. But it basically was built

on an idea that everyone at the time was saying wasn't possible, that you could build a good, healthy, vibrant clothing business entirely in the United States, and the customers would respond to it. And so it started out online only, and now we've got some retail stores. But it's a pretty basic idea that I think the customers out there have been looking for and wanting for a long time, and no one had really, I think, taken the leap to try it. Byard, we should mention that you are based in San Francisco. And I'm sure people say, wait, you do make sweatshirts and T-shirts and apparel in San Francisco, right? But you were, you do have a background in tech.

You were in the tech world for some time. How did you get the idea to leave that behind and start an apparel company in San Francisco? How did that happen? I started off my career in finance, actually, and left that quite quickly, realizing that I wasn't any good at it. And I had no interest in it, really. and then sort of luckily found myself in a company that was making a physical product, a snowshoe of all things. And once you get your, at least in my case, once you get your arms around a physical product

and the making of something, that bug kind of never leaves you. And I did for a brief period run a tech company, an internet company, an early internet company. But that, more than anything else, that reinforced my total desire to be in the making of physical products. And so that part of the transition was quite easy. The contrast of being in San Francisco was sort of this tech capital with a real manufacturing business.

That's an interesting one. We are kind of one half of tech business because we've got a big e-commerce business. A lot of our business has to do with taking advantage of the innovations and manufacturing innovations, but also technology and technological and e-commerce innovations. And then the other half of it is manufacturing. 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. It's one part tech, one part old world manufacturing.

So it's been a pretty interesting 10-year journey of balancing those two things. One of the things that attracted me to your story and your clothing is that it's American-made. And I say that, and I want to be clear about that, because I don't mean this in a jingoistic way. Like, Go America, American-made is the best. That's not what I mean at all. There are excellent products that are made in China, in Mexico. There are excellent products made in Europe, made around the world. And I love particularly products that are made for domestic markets.

markets are often even better. The reason why I love the idea of clothing made in America is because it's not traveling on a ship halfway around the world and it has a smaller carbon footprint. And I think that's also a big reason behind your thinking. It's not about sort of America first idea, right? We should be clear about that. It's just about using local materials to make your product. That's right. And maybe even a little understated. I think one part of it is that the act of making clothing was for many years of quite a simple thing, actually, and was typically quite localized over the last 20 or 30 years as the globalized economy has become globalized and very complicated. What is happening in the apparel industry now, which has been this sort of

relentless march towards cheaper and cheaper and cheaper production, has also made a globalized manufacturing ecosystem wildly complicated. That actually kind of came into focus during the pandemic, I think. But proximity and localness not only drives better environmental practices because you're close and you're not moving things, as you say, across oceans and making things oftentimes in countries that maybe don't have the best environmental standards. But just the act of being close to the people and the places that make the things that you make, and my judgment makes for a better business. I oftentimes say that if you ask me how knowing a cotton farmer in North Carolina makes a better sweatshirt, I can't draw a direct line from A to B to tell you

how other than to just tell you that it does and that our level of connection to the people and the places that make our products, make us better stewards of the products, we're better caretakers of our customers and our producers. You're absolutely right that there's phenomenal stuff being made overseas, in many cases, better than what the American capability still has, but there are benefits by staying local as well that are rooted in quality and responsibility, I think. Yeah, and I think probably case in point is the iPhone, which is, of course, made in China, It's a phenomenal product. That's right.

Byard, why is it so hard? And maybe it's not. But why are so few clothing brands manufactured in the U.S.? Is it that hard to make clothing in the U.S.? Is it the cost? What's why? It's more expensive. So you've got labor rates in America,

and that really boils down to the cost of labor, I think, more than anything else. There are other factors, but that's the big one. And so I think it's more expensive. For many, many years, the dominant paradigm in apparel particularly was to drive cheap and to drive the means of the cost production down. And so during that time, there has been, I think, a progressive decaying of the manufacturing base domestically. But there are real strengths and bright spots as well.

So at first, it was motivated by cheaper means production. That drove, I think, diminishing investment in domestic manufacturing. So it's quite striking now that when you go into facilities overseas, you oftentimes will see more modern, more updated manufacturing capabilities and you see here domestically. On the other hand, part of this journey for us, too, has been, as we have stood up a supply chain now across T-shirts and sweatshirts and jeans and pants and jackets, you do find these incredible pockets of capability that have driven our business forward.

It's a mixed answer. I think that maybe the overly simplistic thing has been that brands have been incented by shareholders to chase cheap production in better margins as much as possible. And so they've been in some ways insented by our trade structures and our economic policies to incentive them to do that. So it's been that that's a factor too, obviously. And by consumer behavior, right? Because we're so used to just going, buying something cheap, wearing it for a short period of time and throwing it away. I should be also be clear about something.

Your sweatshirts are not inexpensive. They are more expensive than people might imagine. But they last. I mean, this is the second one I've had. The first one I think I wore out after seven years. It got frayed and Emmy was amazing, but seven years with one sweatshirt. So they cost more, but you get what you pay for. Well, thank you for saying that.

That's nice to hear. It is certainly true that 40 years ago, just as a generalized comment in America, we bought fewer things and we paid a bit more from them in today's dollars. And there has been this shift towards almost disposable clothing that I think has got bad implications for us as consumers and bad implications for the environment and a bunch of other things. But, and you're right, consumers have a role to play. I will say, though, that I think it is a big ask consumers to recognize why it may make sense to pay $116 for a sweatshirt or $88 for a sweatshirt versus $29 for a sweatshirt. I think we have an obligation as business leaders, as policymakers, as the media, to help understand what the costs of cheap are, because it isn't quite as simple as to say, oh, a sweatshers made for $29. You actually pay for that in ways maybe that are harder to see. and lost manufacturing capability in the U.S.

and maybe environmental impact and other things. And so it is true that consumers, I think, quite logically, will go for cheaper most often than not. And I think we have a responsibility to communicate why there are other alternatives in the market in terms of quality and durability and maybe more responsible business practices. But that's our job, right? And I think the consumer's job is to judge us on the job that we're doing and to see whether we're putting a good enough product into the market to make them happy that they bought it. You know, it's amazing because, and you know this, and a lot of people listening and watching will know this, there was a time where, you know, shoes were made in New England.

There are all these shuttered shoe factories all over New Hampshire and Massachusetts and in Vermont. There was a time when textiles, you know, all textiles were really made in North Carolina. Still has a robust textile industry, right? Cotton is still grown in parts of the United States. It's all just more expensive. is your entire supply chain American from the zippers to the stitches to the cotton to the dyes to, you know, these little rivets at the end? Is it all American made? Everything is with a couple of exceptions.

So marino wool, for example, which is a type of wool we use. There's not a great supply of marina wool. But our basic guiding philosophy is we will, you know, run through walls to keep things domestic. If it's still possible to do it here we will. There was a, you may have heard about our effort to do an American yarn-died flannel a couple of years ago. That capability had essentially left the United States. And we spent a year and a half of our working life to try to restand up that supply chain successfully, ultimately. But it was hard.

And I think that generally is our posture. We kind of reject the notion that you can't do things here anymore. There's some exceptions to that. Very, very high-end technical fabrics that take you to the top of mountains. Those textiles, by and large, have left. Like I said, we need a wool. But other than that, 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. What do you think would make it easier or more attractive for manufacturers to produce their clothing in the United States? Obviously, labor costs are always going to be high and they should be high. I guess ideally union as well. So employees are treated fairly. But what do you think are ways that could attract other manufacturers to either return their manufacturing to the U.S. or keep their manufacturing in the U.S.? Are there simple things that can be done? I don't know if they're simple, but that's a very important question. I would maybe frame it up this way. I think in my judgment, labor rates should be high. You should be rewarded for working and working well and unskilled and skilled jobs in this country. That's my opinion. But I also think it is an inconsistent policy from D.C. to say we're going to burden our domestic capability with high labor costs, let's say, or higher environmental standards. And at the same time, be incenting our big corporations to advantage themselves by chasing

the cheapest labor or the poorest environmental standards. So I think those two things are inconsistent. And the answer lives in there somewhat. I think to the extent that we can begin to even out the playing field between what we are allowing to happen from manufacturing standpoint internationally and what we are holding our domestic producers to, that's a big step to begin to level that up a bit more. I've got a great partner of ours who produces our yarns. And the CEO of that company always says to me, define free trade first, and then I'll tell you if I'm for it or not. And what he means by that

is if I'm competing on a level playing field with my international competitors, I'm all in. I'll go toe to toe. But if it's an uneven playing field, then that's your unfairly burdening me in the market. So one piece of that, I think, is policy. out of D.C. Another piece of that is retailers. I'm really encouraged by Walmart's $350 billion made in America initiative because I think as retailers begin to acknowledge and lean in and say, we are going to be a part of the solution here. And we're going to demand that our suppliers source domestically. What that does incredibly importantly is it gives, in textiles, for example, our partners the ability to know that they're going to have a consistent bit of work for not measured in months, but in

quarters or years. And that gives them the confidence to have the capital investments to invest in innovation and technology and automation, those things that are going to help them stay competitive. I think brands have a responsibility to lead. I think that brands like American Giant and others in textiles should begin to be a part of the solution there. There's a lot of things in the short term that people could shift domestically. Things like socks and T-shirts, the U.S. is actually quite competitive in those categories. It would be great to see some of the bigger brands moving that direction. And then finally to your point, I think consumers, and ideally we're doing a great job, educating consumers about the tradeoffs and doing a good job, building great product and great valuable product, and they're responding by directing their dollars. But I think those first three are the ones that matter the most.

The policy changes, the retailers and the brands, I think those are the ones that really have to begin to turn the ship around and give us a good dimensional economy that has the making of things as a big part of what we do as a country. Why don't we come back in just a moment? more of my conversation with Byard Winthrop and how keeping American Giants' apparel American Made has kept the company's growth a bit slower compared to their competitors, and why Bayard thinks that's their advantage. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR. Hey, welcome back to how I built this Resilience Edition, and I'm talking with Byard Winthrop, CEO and founder of American Giant.

It's an American-made casual clothing company based in San Francisco. In the time since you launched American Giant, there have been other, let's say, athleisure companies. I don't know if you would describe American Giant as athleisure, but it's in that category. Some very good brands, outdoor voices and Vauri. And I have some of those products. They're very good products, but they are generally made overseas. Those companies, you know, valuations have skyrocketed and have attracted a lot of investors.

I have to imagine that your growth has been slower as a result of the decisions you have made to remain domestic. It has, and a lot of that was intentional. You know, one of the first investors that we had was the guy that basically built Pepsi Cola, a guy named Don Kendall. And he grew up on a dairy farm and he drank a blue can of Pepsi and a bag of yellow, laced potato chips every day of his life until he died at 99. And he was a remarkable guy. And he never got involved in the day-to-day stuff, but he got involved in the big-picture stuff. And he would remind me what we were here to do. And basically, in essence, that was to build a durable generational brand that produced

great products and that live by our values. And so I think one of the things that, and we were not without our mistakes here, but I think a lot of what happened in the early e-commerce days were brands raising tons of venture capital money, really chasing growth above all else. That can be pretty attractive. It certainly was for us. We grew very, very fast for the first four years of the business. But he reminded me that when you grow that fast, the temptation to let go of values and quality is put to the test.

And so he just gave me the courage and the partnership to say, we're here for the long haul. And we are going to try to do things steadily and well. And over the long haul, be judged by our actions and our values and how the consumers respond to it. So you're right. And the other piece of it, just a quick bit of history about us, and Guy, I know that you know this piece of it. But early in our time, we had an article that was written about the sweatshirt that you're wearing in Slate magazine that called it the greatest hoodie ever made. Yes. Yeah. And that, that, I don't think it's an overstatement that without that article, I don't think we'd be here.

I think that changed the trajectory of the business. One of the things that it did is it put us into a back-ordered status for almost four years. Wow. three and a half years. We were trying to catch up. Hard to believe that. But there is a reality there about how you manage growth. And both in terms of the planning for it, do you get aggressive enough to meet the demand,

but also how you scale your supply chain? And so there were some inherent limiters to our ability to scale our manufacturing at a pace that allowed us to maintain our integrity from a product standpoint. Yeah. I want to get to some questions that we have from our viewers, some really good questions. This one is from Tushar to side. Tushar is a loyal viewer. Tushar, thank you for being here.

Tushar asks one challenge I face is the minimum order that American manufacturers expect. So Tushar asks, what is your suggestion to manage this risk in terms of cost versus inventory management, especially when startups are still trying to validate themselves in the market? That's a great question, Tuchar. I think just to put that into simple terms, oftentimes what you find is that domestic factories will ask, for minimums, 1,000 units of something or 5,000 units of something. And that's expensive and risky when you're just getting started. I think, too-sharly, I think that it's a two-part answer. I think one is don't take no for an answer.

For the first year that we tried to make our sweatshirt in the U.S., basically everybody we spoke to told us that couldn't be none. But if you kick on the door long enough, our experience has been, you'll find a factory that says, we believe it, we like it, we'll give it a shot, and I'll partner with you on it. and that in many ways has been the story of American Giant is our supply chain partnering deeply with us as a brand and really forming those bonds. So I think one part of it is that is talk to a lot of factories and there are a lot of them and find one that's a good fit for you.

The other piece is, I think, convincing in partnership what you are trying to do and bring them along as believers. In our particular instance of this was we have a very important vendor called Carolina Cottonworks that's based on a Gaffney, South Carolina. it's a family business that's been around forever. The patriarch of that family was a guy named Paige Ashby. I had talked to everybody I could find. I finally found myself in a room with Paige.

I told him the idea. I talked about that sweatshirt. And Paige finally said, to hell with it. I'm going to figure this out with you. And he threw his hat in with me. And without him, we could not have made that sweatshirt. But those people are out there and just spend time on the road, get out of your office, and get into the factories and talk to people.

And I think you'll be quite surprised at what you're able to do if you're tenacious about it. I'm just curious, fired. I mean, from a financial, personal financial risk perspective, I have to imagine that it was a few years before you were able to pay yourself a decent salary. So the really quick story there, guy, because it's a little bit more hairy even than that, is I had been running another manufacturing business prior to that. And I had just had my oldest daughter, Agnes, who was, I think a week or too old. And I got fired from that job. And it was two weeks prior to Christmas. And that sharpens the mind quickly. You get pretty serious about things like health care. But I had gotten so committed about the idea of American Giant that I proceeded with a business and basically funded it through credit card debt for the first few months.

And in that process, talked to Mr. Kendall, the Pepsi Cola person I was mentioning earlier. And he wrote me my first check, which was a $25,000 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 $25,000, I think. And so he actually stayed with me in kind of this drip, drip, drip investment

that gave me just enough. In retrospect, he was incredibly smart about that, that he was tough on me, he gave me just enough to get the elements in place that he needed to feel confident enough to put a bit more money into the business. So it was lean for a few years, but not so lean that I felt that I was,

I was being totally irresponsible about it. And I think within eight months, I paid myself a nominal salary. And within a year and a half, I was paying enough the salary that I could justify it to my family. Wow. Let's talk about the pandemic. I know that from what I read, I understand that early months were quite challenging. I mean, I think you had to, there were questions about supply chain and there were production halts. and, you know, obviously this concern about the safety of people working in factories,

and you even started to work out of your car in front of your house because you've got three kids at home. I imagine that's why you were working out of your car. That's right. That's right. You probably had the same situation guy. I was, I did this ridiculous sort of dance inside for a while where I was putting a sheet of plywood over my lap and, you know, invariably every five minutes, my four-year-old rose would come running into the room. yell at me and say, read me a book or I want a sandwich or something. And so I eventually realized that if I could get the parking spot right in front of my house, we live in the Castro in San Francisco, right in front of my house, I could still tether to my Wi-Fi. And so that became

my office. And it was great, by the way. It worked very, very well. I could just hop outside when I needed to be on a call or needed to be focused, slid my driver's side seat back, and I was good to go. And that was my office for, it still is, actually, but that was my office for quite a long time. I'm actually in our offices right now. But to speak about the pandemic, just for a second, you know, we, I think like everybody, when March came now over a year ago and the shelter and place orders happened in the Bay Area, the bottom fell out of the business. I mean, it really was scary. And our business, I think, we were down 40 or 50 percent year on year. And I, when I sleep at night, I keep a pat of paper next to my bed. If I'm not sleeping, I just get my thoughts out.

And I still have this piece of paper. But I think the first or the second night, of the lockdown, I wrote on that sheet of paper, I said that business is going to survive this and we're not laying anybody off. And those became the kind of two guiding principles for the business that informed every decision that we made after that. And what that immediately looked like was we got into a very aggressive posture and cost cutting. And this is, to get back to the proximity and the people of a domestic supply chain, we were fortunate enough to be able to call all of our suppliers, all of our meaningful suppliers. All of our meaningful suppliers. And we and I have developed relationships for these people over the years,

and whether that was Kevin McCarter at Cloverness or Page at Carolina Cottonworks or Andy at Parkdale and say, look, we need help. And we've got to cancel these orders. And two-way one guy, they all said, you tell us what you need. We'll figure it out. And so we were able to trim our supply back massively. We stopped our hiring. We canceled any software contract we could.

I took a salary cut. And then my leadership team took a salary cut. But then little by little things began to recover. And by July, we were growing again. And thankfully, and we were able to kind of navigate it well. But to your point also, I think one of the things that comes into focus pretty quickly is we're in the Bay Area. And we had the luck of working from home. I was able to work from home.

I don't get paid by having my hands on product every day. But our sowers and our operators and the Carolinas do. And they get paid only when they show up at the factory. And so that was a big undertaking, too, to make sure that we were being safe and that we were getting in the right protocols into those facilities. We had a brief period of time there where we were asked by FEMA to help make some masks for the federal government. And we had to convert our factories to do that. So it was a it was a bouncy year. The dominant takeaway was that people across the organization stood up and became leaders and helped us navigate it.

And it was an incredibly humbling experience for me to see. how people stepped up in a very difficult time and got the business through what was, I think, once in a generation kind of moment. And did you end up coming out of 2020? I'm assuming you had expected a catastrophic year, but did you come out of 2020 actually, you know, with some revenue growth? We grew, and that was growing despite our retail stores essentially shutting down. We had retail, which we had four doors in last year. produced, they became cost centers. They were not generating any revenue at all, but we did grow. And I think a bunch of things contributed to that.

I think to your point, people during the pandemic were particularly interested in the clothes that we make. They were buying sweatshirts and sweatpants and jeans and T-shirts and things that we happened to be in the right category at the right time categories. We didn't have, either we had four retail stores, we didn't have a ton of retail exposure. And I think the positioning of the brand of just of having a high-quality, localized supply chain helped both from a customer interest. standpoint and from our ability to be reactive. So it ended up, once the dust settled after the first three or four months of the lockdown, it ended up being a good year for us. A lot of that, by the way, was we learned so much about our business, about my management style, about all these things by being forcibly remote that helped get the business, I think, even more efficient and better than it

was going into the pandemic. How did the past year change and sharpen and presumably improve your management style. I've been thinking about this a lot. And I think that I have given lip service to, for most of my career, to empowering people to lead in my organization. And I think a lot of people do that, but don't actually do it. They talk about it, but don't actually do it. That was the case in my case. I continued to manage my team as opposed to leading them and empowering them. And I think that the, and I've been maybe talking about that for many years in my career, I think what the pandemic did is by the force of distance and working from home, it required that we give the control of all aspects of the business down to our senior people to our brand new hires. And I don't know, overstate this,

but almost without exception, everybody rose and stood up and did just incredible jobs about taking ownership and pride over what we do. And that was just a, it almost makes me emotional talking about it. It was just an incredible thing to be a part of, to see people throughout the organization step in and work hard and get things done that needed to get done in ways that were beyond what I think I'd ever believed was possible. So that has transformed the business in a really basic way. My management style now, I think is totally changed. I think if you ask my leadership team, they would say he is way less involved in the day to day. We're running the business now. And he is really, he's thinking about high-level direction,

but he's let go a lot of the day-to-day in a way that maybe I had a tendency to meddle and manage and get my fingers into the detail. So I'm very grateful for that. It's been unexpected, but a totally positive change for me personally and for the business, I think.

Yeah, I read an article in Inc. Magazine that was a profile of you a few years ago, and I was surprised because your entire day was meetings, and it seemed like you were really in the, granular you were into the granular side of things it was like meetings about photography of catalogs and meetings about specific different kinds of yarns and design and and that was just a day in your life and it seemed to me like that was quite a lot for the CEO of a company to be involved in every single step it's it's something you'd want to do it's your baby it's your company your business and i understand

that too because i have those tendencies too as a leader but it seemed like a lot and i i wonder if that is what you will go back to in a post-pandemic world. Yeah, I'm just thinking of that. Now as you're saying that, guys, go back and read that because that is really instructive, actually. And I think that point about it being my baby is that's sort of almost the narrative I told myself all along. Like, it's my baby, you know, I'm the only one that's going to care that much.

And in reality, throughout our organization, people have been caring and managing better than I would. And so that's funny thinking back about that because you're right. That really was right. I hope not. I really hope not. And I think it has been such a positive shift for us. And I feel it just kind of intuitively, I've got this great sense of almost a familial sense about our team in American Giant now that everybody, it's almost like you now, I think that the people throughout the organization are doing a better job at what they do than I ever possibly could. So let's check back in a year. But I hope I don't go back to my old ways because they were not as effective. So I hope it's a permanent change. That's an excerpt from my live conversation with Byard Winthrop, CEO and founder of American Giant, an American-made apparel company. If you want to see the full interview or any of our past live interviews, you can find them on the How I Built This Facebook page or at YouTube.com slash NPR. If you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR events, you can go to nprpresents.org.

This episode was produced by Liz Metzker with help from Ferris Safari, J.C. Howard, Bruce Grant, Elmanian, Gianna Capadona, John Isabella, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Janet Ujong Lee. Thanks for listening. Stay safe, and I'll see you in a few days. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This Resilience Edition from NPR.