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Bayard Winthrop

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2024-07-01

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2024-07-01

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1. “So that first year you're trying to sell do 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 Manju, 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.”

   2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

2. “Well, when I started the business, I opened it 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 walk 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.”

   2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

3. “Well, it was really every component part. In fact, we underpriced the sweatshirt at the beginning by quite a bit. The fabric itself was expensive. The zippers are expensive. The ribbing, I mean, I can give you chapter and verse on all these different parts. The double-lined hood, the metal aglets, the custom poles on the zipper, all these things, they are expensive. The needle in 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.”

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4. “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 a thousand emails to everybody I've ever met in my life saying, hey, I want this company, please buy a sweatshirt. And so we did that. And so we launched, we shipped our first sweatshirts. It was 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 know, maybe $10,000 worth of sweatshirts a month.”

   2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

5. “Page 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.”

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6. “Carolina Cottonworks 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. 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 sweatshir”

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7. “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.”

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8. “Yeah, they're kind of like a turnkey. Like, you want to go make up and 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. But the fabric piece of it we couldn't figure out. We couldn't, we were after a very specific, if you hold our, let's call our classic full zip sweatshirt. If you hold it, the fabric is pretty unique. It's very tightly knitted. 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. 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...”

   2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

9. “I mean, the real interest I didn't know. We began some of the early work with a group called the S group in Portland, Oregon. Got in 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.”

   2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

10. “Was going to go to our store in Boston, but he's a part of the, you know, as any of us that have ever started a company, there are these moments that feel like it was meant to be Keith is...”

    2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

11. “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, and 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. 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.”

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12. “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. 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 a month ago. He just renewed his trademark on it. You're not getting it. For apparel, and I was just bombed. And so I was driving back to the city from Sacramento. I was on the Bay Bridge.”

    2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

13. “Giant popped into my head, and I was like, gosh, 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.”

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14. “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 and 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 my mother's mother grew up in northern Maine. And if you looked out of her window of her house, 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.”

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15. “Yeah, I think that myself included just misanalyzed the problem. I mean, I think 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. I didn't even consider it. And I was just totally blind to that.”

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16. “Not only that, but exclusively. I really 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.”

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17. “I thought he was very smart. I thought he was passionate. And what I liked was he had no apparel experiences. 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.”

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18. “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.”

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19. “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 Fleet Manu, who was someone I'd known for a long time.”

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20. “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 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. Over time began to invest more and really became the professional and financial backstop to the business in those early days.”

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21. “Yeah, at that point, 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 a little less impossible, but so incredibly difficult for our early nascent business. And the 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 figures in my life was growing up back in Greenwich, was a man named Don Kendall who had really built PepsiCo.”

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22. “Yeah, all those pieces, rivets that cut it. 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. They all were manufacturing businesses 20, 30, 40 years ago. Back in the day. 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 floor.”

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23. “So there's a few different questions in there. I think in the beginning, the concept was American-made clothing of the highest quality 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.”

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24. “We are going to start to create a country that is really divided between people that have college degrees. Can go on to be bankers and people that don't and that are getting left behind. And that's a driving force for me now. It certainly was then. And that I thought about a ton.”

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25. “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 a patriotism I find to be just wrong. I think that we're all most Americans are deeply patriotic and they might have different approaches to it. So I didn't care about the politics. I cared a lot about what was happening to rural communities and urban communities all across the country and believed pretty fundamentally that if we continued or continue down that path”

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26. “I had a gut instinct that. 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 NITS as opposed to wovens, which is basically the two kind of categories you have in your closet, knits or t-shirts and sweatpants and sweatshirts and things like that, that knits that capability was still in okay shape domestically, woven less so. But I began to get enough faith that there was enough there that we could launch certainly a sweatshirt.”

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27. “These iconic American, well-made, indestructible, beautiful things, and how that wasn't in the market today. Period. 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. 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 him what I was thinking, which at that time was sort of a faint outline of launching an apparel business primarily online, all entirely made in the U.S. of the highest quality and told them why. And I remember he was quiet for a minute and he said, you got to do that.”

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28. “hear 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 kitchen aid mixers, the red wing boots, the Woolrich shirts, these things that were iconic in my mind. They were still in my closet.”

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29. “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 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.”

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30. “Well, it was a little terrifying. I mean, I had a newborn baby and Christmas coming up in 10 days later or whatever it was. It was a really discombobulating time. And I remember I sort of laid out for myself three possible routes. One was I could get a group of people together, group investors that had worked 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.”

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31. “Yeah, and it makes sense, right? I mean, if I was him too, I think 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.”

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32. “December of 2010. Rory asked to meet me at 5 a.m. at the Starbucks, and I remember saying to Alice and Foy, I said, I think I might get fired tomorrow. And we both like, no, 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, Roy said, so we're making a change. Wow. So my spidey sense had proven accurate about that.”

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33. “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. And so if you exist on a foundation of a commitment to a type of 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 customers would really value. And 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 just was just my head was in a different place.”

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34. “Agreed with everything you just said up to that last point. I think you do have to do all those things. That's absolutely right. But there are multiple ways you can make it work. And in my mind, 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 local and farmers markets.”

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35. “Oh, I'm sure I was. I probably was, guy. You know, 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 my neighbors are down the road for me. And I wasn't going to be a part of something that wasn't signing up to that basic commitment.”

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36. “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”

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37. “It's a really sound argument. I mean, I think his position was we're going to get this thing into RAI and a bunch of other mass retailers. We're going to drive margin and we're going to ship manufacturing overseas. And to your point, it was.”

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38. “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 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.”

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39. “Manufacturing overseas. I'd done it myself. I did it at Atlas. I did it at Freeboard. And I had this growing discomfort with both my disconnection from the product when something came from somebody that was where I'm sitting today, the person that stamped our snowshoe cleats is three blocks from me. And I used to walk in 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 around the product, but also more importantly, the personal connection. When I made, ultimately, I made a really impassioned pitch at a board meeting DeRory and his board that we had to basically make a stand on staying committed to local American manufacturing and really, really high quality. And from that foundation, we built a great, great brand.”

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40. “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 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 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.”

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41. “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.”

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42. “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, an owner that wanted to do big things. And so that felt like a good moment for me.”

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43. “Or whatever Griffin. 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. And Rory came in and said, listen, I think there's an opportunity to take this brand into apparel and into footwear and make the bigger role.”

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44. “Messenger banks. At the time, it wasn't specifically messenger bags, they were big mountain bikers, just something to carry that felt anatomically correct while you were riding. 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 and they used these seatbelt buckles 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.”

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45. “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.”

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46. “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.”

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47. “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.”

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48. “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.”

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49. “Well, exactly. 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 just didn't appreciate. I was enchanted by Steen, a brilliant guy. And the innovation. It just wanted to get back into a warehouse and background making things. And I didn't think for a minute about whether this business could be a $2 million business or a $2 billion business. I just wanted to do it.”

    2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

50. “Well, Steen had become obsessed with this idea of snowboarding. He'd love 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 an incredibly complicated. It allowed you to ride escape, especially a skateboard, just like a snowboard. And that product became freeboard. 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. Oh my God.”

    2024-07-01 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · American Giant: Bayard Winthrop · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT