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Bayard Winthrop

lines on the record: 123
first: 2024-07-01
most recent: 2024-07-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“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 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. A bunch of people that want to have an impact, that have a sort of non-partisan 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, those are just hard not to contribute those to lucky to be at the right place in the right time. Hard work helps. All those other things help. Great product helps. But luck, I think anyone that tells you otherwise is lying.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about the journey that you've been on, right, and where the brand is today and its future, 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 meeting Miguel? What do you attribute your success to?”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Car fuel efficiency. We make decisions to say we're going to ratchet up fuel economy standards over time. Our 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 a factory that was on order to produce 200,000 of them.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that there is a real chicken and egg with domestic textile production, that it is all offshored. And so the businesses that are left are constantly trying to land the next 5,000-piece order. 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 going to do it domestically. And I'm going to be steady in that commitment, measured in years, not months. So that the supply chain partners knew that there was going to be steady volume over time, that has a fundamentally transformative impact on cost. And therein lies the irony”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 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?”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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, guys. I was like, well, yeah, what's that going to cost me? $50,000 maybe? 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He's now our main investor, and I think he 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 important to him that he could have controlling interest in the company. And so that's what he ultimately did. It's just 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. May I 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, well, you know, it's all women. The fact is probably 98% women. And Miguel said, a lot of them have kids. Yeah, a lot of them have to get kids after school. Yes, be home after school, yes. And so Miguel said, why don't we...”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And aligned with 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 I think that was two years ago now or three, two and a half years ago.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and 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. I was trying to, as you know, Miguel's, he's a great person. And so 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 are really good conversations. And I began to sense that the conversations, though, were kind of in the micro about footwear where 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. 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He was Miguel McKelvy, 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 U.S. He could be a really good resource. And he wasn't looking to invest or to buy anything. He was just looking for some advice on where he could make the shoes.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 had spoken for a long time, I don't think, and you had said that you had a guy that was interested in U.S. 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Trump and Ambassador Thai under Biden actually see the world quite similarly and are doing good work. Ambassador Thai 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If you have not done those things, 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, $8 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 should waken up to it, policymakers are waking up to it. And so have we seen movement? 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, too pretty opposed administrations, obviously. They're quite consistent on trade policy. Bob Lightheiser, who is the U.S. Trade Representative.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's the thing. About 40 years ago, we made a bipartisan decision to place consumption at the center of our foreign policy. 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 TVEs 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. Do you have a four year degree and you can be a consultant or work in banking or you're doing well, you're in the stock market, you've done great.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You've been at this since 2011 and even before, but publicly pushing for making things in the US. There's some brands that were doing it, American apparel was doing it 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 moving towards making more stuff in the US, or has it not really happened yet?”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Publishing houses to turn it into a book. But I think the thing that's Know what happens to a country if we don't make things anymore? And I'll shamelessly plug Stephen's book because he did a heck of a job. And I think Stephen King said it was without question was going to be one of his favorite books of 2024. And if I just will say, I think it's a good example of, I think the non-partisan nature 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I reached out to the New York Times. There was a reporter there who worked in the fashion team named Stephen Kurtz and asked him if he wanted to come along for the journey. I had no clue 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 milltown, and had witnessed the decline of that brand and the offshoring of its production. And I think 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. And I think Stephen got approached by two or three publications.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 diet 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I think when I originally thought about the business, I thought of 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, LL 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, it's kind of half art, half science. And then woven into the fabric to create the flannel pattern.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In March of 2024, a book came out called American Flannel by a guy named Stephen Kurtz. And a lot of this book is about you and 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 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 would take like seven years to figure out how to make a flannel shirt in the United States. I think most people think of that and they're like 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?”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This is my primary investor and our kind of guiding force. And he said to me, do the customer want the product? It's like the most basic question. And I said, yeah, 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and he shrunk our capacity down. I think we had two sewing lines at the time. He took one open for you. And so, in the middle of all that, we were panicking. And I remember I met with Mr. Kendall.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 on Monday. And he called me on Monday and said, I've just gotten a phone call from Under Armor, and they have a container ship of, I forget what it was, jerseys or something that had a problem with it. And they needed Peter to fix them. And he said, I'd love American Giant. I love you guys. But you've been around for a year, and this is under armor, and I can't turn this business down.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You acquired a manufacturing company called Eagle Sportswear, which means that you essentially became a manufacturing business. Earlier you talked about how most apparel companies are just purchase order companies. They're just filling out forms. They're probably designing it, and then 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that hopefully that is part of the value proposition, right? And by the way, there's no judgment attached to that. There are many people that need to shop at places where they can get a sweatshirt for 1999, and it's important that they can 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That is true. And 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 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, let's say, manufacturing in China. But you can close the gap down massively if there was volume and commitment there. To your original question, how do we communicate that to our customers? We try to communicate on our website. We try to talk to the media and we hopefully deliver on the quality. But have our customers understand that they're buying and supporting communities and neighbors and when they buy products from us.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we still get that, right? I mean, art stuff is expensive. Anyway, you look at it, it's expensive, and it's in many cases too expensive for a lot of customers of ours. We can't sell to the...”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there's a bunch of different things. I think at its core, 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 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. 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. And I think that's probably part of it too.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, 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 underpriced maybe. The amount of craft and knowledge and people that touch it is remarkable. I think it's important that we as just people understand how hard it is to get food produced 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 a t-shirt.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, just the number of steps from field 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, by the time it's ready to be sewn into the garment, the cost of that role must be relatively high.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 the finished product that you're wearing.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So smooth. 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sheets that fabric that look like the color of cotton grown in a field, so it's sort of like a dirty white maybe. They call it grayish color, and it's sort of a tough fabric, rolls of that raw fabric, then would go to Carolina Cottonworks right down the street from where Clover is, Clover's in Clover, South Carolina, now back to Gaffne”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has turned 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. And that's a highly automated process.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then that bail goes to a storing facility where it sets for anywhere from a month to eight or nine months until it gets pulled into a yarning production facility.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. It 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 States cotton-growing regions. So it goes and gets ginned. So in this example that I'm giving you would get ginned at the Enfield Gin, which is an Enfield, North Carolina. And that gets cleaned and then bailed. 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I'll take you through the whole step by step process. 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”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, if you get it wrong, you just bankrupt the business. And 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. 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. But yeah, it went on for a long time.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then we sat in a room and said, Well, we got to order more. How much are we going to order? And that was good luck with that conversation. By the time that new stuff was going to land, it was going to be hitting our warehouse in the middle of summer. That article would be old news. And it would 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 shoved us under another hundred feet of water because that article went as crazy as the first one did. And those two really created havoc for us. It went on for about three years. Yeah.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And in fact, 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 going to 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. 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.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 Call it 10,000, not even, probably 5,000 sweatshirts on order And so within a span of like 12 hours, we sold out of everything that was downstairs in our facility in the mission. We're heading into holidays.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we're getting inundated, but inundated was the understatement of the year. I think we were getting something like 100 orders a second. And we didn't have that much inventory.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our e commerce platform and said, Are you aware of what's happening here? I said, no. He said, something's happening. We are trying to get...”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It changed everything. I had met Forhad. 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 other 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 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 explanation of the business model, but the sweatshirt itself. And I think he was moved by what he saw and the product and wrote this article 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 hooked.”
2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT