Number of US hedge funds continues to decline Never Miss a Story Get The Post delivered directly to your inbox By clicking above you agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.American Giant, the San Francisco-based apparel start-up best known for its cult-favorite hoodie, is out to expand its audience, launching a new marketing campaign and stepping up its outreach to veterans. And it says its mission — selling high-quality, made-in-the-U.S.A. apparel at reasonable prices — is resonating as neverCMO Beth Gumm tells Marketing Daily more about the effort to nudge the niche brand more mainstream.Q. First, how about a little history for people not familiarThis is our fourth holiday season, and the company was started by Bayard Winthrop, who had spent years in manufacturing and investment banking. He saw that consumers were increasingly rejecting big brands, as well as apparel that was constantly being discounted. So he set about making high-quality clothes out of cotton grown here

and pricing it fairly, in part by avoiding brick-and-mortar stores. The company launched in 2012, and got its big break with an article in Slate called “The greatest hoodie everassassin's creed hoodie altairQ. The company’s “Don’t get comfortable” tagline is odd. pierce the veil merch warped tourAthleisure is the very definition of comfort. just rhyse hoodiesHow did that start?hoodie mark got7A. It goes back to the manifesto that Chuck McBride, founder of Cutwater, our ad agency, created. This idea of not getting too comfortable, of always pushing yourself, is the heartAll of us go through some failures, but that mindset of learning from failure — that optimistic sense of pushing through -- matters to so many people.

But they’re for people who keep pushing.Q. And the new ads?A. The campaign is called “Thank the Struggle,” and it amplifies how important those failures are. It’s running on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram. Marketing is a vehicle for getting the word out, and we still don't have much awareness.Q. Your positioning is similar to brands like Under Armour and Reebok. We are very careful not to just represent our audience as athletes. So — even though athletics are a very easy visual way to show people bouncing back from failure — we’re also talking about the ways people respond to breakups, to business setbacks, to getting fired. Life struggles are bigger thanQ. How are sales? Is the company profitable yet?A. I can’t say since we’re private. But I can say we had two record sales days this past weekend. And we’re a completely relevant brand. Q. Tell us more about the power of “Made in the U.S.A.” It was a big topic in the recent elections, what with crowds chanting “U.S.A.”

But it also appeals to the left-leaning locavores. A. Made in the U.S.A. matters to our audience, as does product quality and affordability. We strike a common chord, which resonates with people’s values of resilience, and the bigger theme of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S., of doing things that are hard.Q. American Apparel, also entirely made in the U.S., just filed for bankruptcy for the second time in a year. Might that signal some fatigue aboutA. We don’t feel like Made-in-America is fading. I just think the business model really matters. We are private, and our investors are veryWe’re investing in product quality first, followed by a great shopping experience on our website.Q. Why did you change your policy of not discounting for the recent Veteran’s Day offer?A. We don’t discount the brand very often. This was a way to generate more awareness and give all military personnel a lifetime discount. And we also offered our flagship product, the Classic Full Zip, for 30% off.

We’re also reaching out to the military community through a Facebook program. the U.S.A. resonates with them.Hoodie gets the Apple treatment December 10, 2012   Subscribe This is the greatest sweatshirt known to man? Maybe, but is it also the start of a revolution of American innovation in garment design?American Giant is gambling that you and I will be willing to pay for quality. American-made quality to boot. That the humble sweatpant and sweatshirt can get an Apple-style industrial design makeover is not in question. But will the business model compete with the foreign-made stuff we've grown accustomed to paying less for?When Bayard Winthrop founded American Giant, he set up manufacturing in San Francisco. The sweatshirt company focuses on the details and skips over the distributors. Winthrop tells host Guy Raz how making the clothing in America actually helps his bottom line. It's WEEKENDS on ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News. We're talking about the small but significant trend called insourcing, manufacturing things here in the U.S. Earlier this year, Bayard Winthrop opened up a sweatshirt and hoodie business in San Francisco, and he called it American Giant.

He's got 10 people in the front office and up to 150 workers in a factory where his entire line, soup to nuts, is made in America. We read about him in an article in Slate this past week, which called his hoodie the best hoodie in the world. And two days after that article was published, they sold out of almost everything. BAYARD WINTHROP: I believe as of this morning, we are almost entirely sold out of all sweatshirts that we make, which is saying something. We had a planning meeting about a week ago where we thought we were in great shape heading into the holiday season. So it was a pretty overwhelming response. RAZ: What makes your sweatshirts different from other sweatshirts? I mean, when you strip it down, for us, I think it really did start with a fabric and trying to make a heavyweight 100 percent cotton fabric that had a dry exterior hand, a soft internal hand. A lot of sweatshirts today are very baggy and very sloppy. We tried to do away with that, have them fit people correctly.

A lot of these things, frankly, are the result of big and unwieldy distribution mechanisms, manufacturers trying to build a one-size-fits-all garment for people. Trims and hardware are a big thing for us, I mean, our zippers and our grommets and our eaglets and our drawstrings and making sure that each one of those elements in the sweatshirt gets a lot of attention. RAZ: So you are doing what, you know, what a lot of people in your industry would consider to be impossible. You are making clothing entirely in the U.S. and you're actually making money?I think, you know, my whole career, there's always been kind of a belief that the distribution costs, the markup and margin that live between a consumer and the people that are actually making the clothes were sacrosanct - they couldn't be touched. And so we decided to leapfrog that a bit and say, we're going to do away with all the distribution costs. RAZ: You're not going to have stores, basically.By getting rid of stores, by getting rid of wholesale partners and saying we're going to get as close to the consumer, as close to the manufacturer as we possibly can and just ship directly to them.

That was the unlock for us, and that gives us, you know, a lot more investment opportunity to put back into product and service. RAZ: I mean, are you able to produce as much as, you know, I don't know, let's say, all of a sudden, you know, everybody in America wanted to order one from you. Could you produce on the scale of a Gap or, you know, one of these huge companies? WINTHROP: It's a good question. You know, we - I think there's an awful lot of chatter in the media about the death of American manufacturing. I think we're finding almost exactly the opposite that the manufacturing facilities that have made it through the last 30 years, which no doubt have been difficult, have come out the far side stronger and more efficient with phenomenal people, talented people, efficient people. And so the short answer is we feel really confident about our ability to scale. So I think we're not - it's something we keep an eye on, obviously, but we're feeling pretty optimistic about it.