If you only know a little about our brand, you know we’re committed to making our product in the USA.  And although every product is made here, many of our fabrics come from other countries. 

There are two reasons we import fabrics:  either there’s no mill to buy from in the USA – or the American mill does not fit our needs.

Shirting Fabrics

You may find it hard to believe, that for a country our size, we do not have one mill that produces shirt fabric.  America has no shirting mills left.  We purchase our shirt fabrics from Portugal and Italy. 

Denim

The United States has four denim mills in operation.  We purchase from a family owned mill in Georgia, making specialty denim.  We believe it’s the best of the American mills, especially for our needs.

We also purchase denim from Japan and Italy.  The Japanese and Italians are widely regarded as the most advanced denim makers; these mills produce an artisan quality not yet matched by the American mills.  

Khakis

We’re aware of only two mills in the United States that make khaki fabric, and we purchase from one of them.  We also purchase khaki fabric from a mill in England. 

Wool Trouser Fabric

There’s only one mill in United States that makes wool trouser fabric, it’s an Italian owned mill located in Connecticut.  They make a luxury product; an excellent product.  We sampled their fabric, made some trousers and tested them.  Their fabrics have a sheen that works for their luxury aesthetic.  With a more grounded sensibility; the sheen does not match our style. 

We purchase trouser fabric from Germany and Italy.

T-Shirt Fabric

America still produces world-class knit fabrics.  The US manufacturing infrastructure for knit fabrics is still strong (relative to other fabrics); concentrated in the Carolina’s and Southern California.

We purchase t-shirt fabric knitted in North Carolina.  We use Supima cotton yarn, which is grown in the United States.   

There are good mills in the USA and abroad that we choose to not work with because their business philosophy is not in line with ours.  There are good mills in other countries that we choose to not buy from because their labor and environmental standards are not responsible from our viewpoint.

We’ve been testing fabrics from the best mills within the USA and internationally for several years now.  We have a good understanding of which mills produce the highest quality fabrics and which mills share our design aesthetic.  We’ve evaluated the business practices of these mills to ensure they meet our standards. 

Please know that our fabric has been thoroughly vetted for quality, design, and good karma.

Imported Pricing vs American Made Pricing
The largest driver of our pricing is USA labor.  Compared to what our competitors pay for overseas labor, the cost of making a product in America is staggering; doubling the retail price of a garment.

We know first-hand the differences in cost between imported and American made clothing.  We started out importing our product, and our prices were less than half of what they are today.

If you were to compare Todd Shelton costs to good department stores brands – you’d find that we pay more for one yard of t-shirt fabric knitted in the USA, than they pay for the entire finished imported t-shirt.  Our finished t-shirt will cost us five times what these importers will pay.

This example not only applies to t-shirts, it’s the same relationship for all garments.

The Cost of Making in America

The shops that we work with here in the United States (their owners and employees), merely make their ends meet; none that we know of are flourishing financially.

American apparel manufacturing has been squeezed so hard from low-cost foreign competition, there’s no excess.  Apparel manufacturing wages are among the lowest in American manufacturing.  It’s simply about survival for these American manufacturing shops.

If one were to think the cost to produce in the USA was unreasonably high, it would not only be wrong – it would be unfair.  The cost of doing business, labor laws, and environmental laws in these foreign countries, are incomparable to that of the United States.

Todd Shelton Compared to Good Department Store Brands

We could reduce our prices to be more competitive with good department brands, if we used a lesser cost, lesser quality fabric.  However, we pay a premium to have a product cut and sewn in the United States, it would be a shame to dumb-down the product with a low cost, low quality fabric.  We carefully select fabrics from the best mills internationally, and we pay a premium for them, three to four times that of merely adequate fabrics.

Todd Shelton Compared to Higher Priced Brands

One of the simplest ways consumers gauge quality is price; the higher the price, the better the quality.

However, we would put any of our products in a ‘quality competition’ with any brand.  The most successful brands, the highest priced brands, the brands that get the best press; none are “better” than the Todd Shelton brand.

If you compare a Todd Shelton product at $120 to the same type of product at $180 or more in a retail store, the difference in price is not quality related.  The difference in price is retail markup.

We choose to sell directly to you, bypassing the traditional wholesale/retail channel.  If we wholesaled our product to retail stores, our prices would double.  If we operated retail stores, incurring the property and staff costs of a store, our prices would increase.

Selling direct enables us to keep high-quality clothing priced as reasonably as possible.  Additionally, selling direct is the only way we can make our product in the USA and price it within reach of the average American.

In Conclusion

We challenge you to find a brand that produces a line of clothing of the same quality, exclusively in the USA, at a lower price.  We know our prices are higher than some widely distributed brands, but we’ve done everything possible to keep our pricing as low as possible while still making a world-class product.

More than any other, sweaters fall into this “difficult to produce in America” category.  Machines make sweaters today, and most of those machines are in Asia – American manufacturers have been unable to invest in such machines (an example of outsourcing’s effect).  

In the United States, there are two shops that have these sweater-making machines. The challenge with these shops is price. Despite relatively low demand, lack of competition means that if we make our sweater in either of these shops, it will retail just below $200. That’s not much for some, but not everyone wants to pay $200 for a sweater, and we’re sensitive to that too.  

So how else can we still make in the US?  The other option is a “Cut & Sew” sweater. The challenge for Cut & Sew sweaters is that while their seams are stronger than machine-knit sweaters, some may think they’re not as “refined” (because the seam is not as flat/smooth).

I was speaking to a friend of mine (her profession is sweaters) recently, communicating my concern about “Cut & Sew” seams. She said, “but that’s what an American-made sweater is…”.   And as she said it, I realized: she’s right, it’s about craftsmanship and heritage.

My coming to terms with how this sweater should be constructed and a lengthy sampling process delayed our sweater launch.  But it’s my responsibility as a designer to ask every question I can before releasing a product.

We’re moving forward with “Cut & Sew”.  Look for our sweater in early 2011.

If you’re interested in “Made in the USA”, you already know we’ve lost the ability to produce the many things we once could.  Sweaters may be one such casualty.  American clothing makers have faced such troubled market conditions the past two decades; they’ve had no flexibility to invest in new machinery or facility upgrades.  The makers that remain are small and their machinery is non-modern.  But is it modern machinery that makes clothing meaningful?  Or is it the people and their traditions in craftsmanship?    

Last Spring (2009), we decided it was time to develop a wool sweater for the Todd Shelton brand.  We knew it would be one of the biggest manufacturing challenges we’d faced in America; the infrastructure (machinery and skill) had exited the country over 10 years ago.  Two shops in our area remained open (shells of what they once were), but they only produced cotton knits – not wool.  These shops had the experience, they’d made wool sweaters years ago, but the machinery and the market were different now.   

Could the non-modern machinery and the vintage construction that made American sweaters for generations compete with the quality of the modern machines in Asia?  The modern machines make a “fully-fashioned” sweater; the machines knit the entire sweater in one piece.  The shops we are loyal to make a “cut & sew” sweater; the body, sleeves and neck are cut individually from knitted fabric and sewn together. 

It’s been fully fashioned sweaters that have taken over the market.  Asia has the machinery. Fully fashioned sweaters are in stores from Target to Barneys – the construction is modern and clean; considered by buyers to be the most desirable.  Cut & sew (in contrast) was the method considered “old hat”, but it had two advantages:  stronger seams (think no holes under the arms) and the spirit of American heritage. 

Starting in Spring 2009 we worked on refining our knitting and “cut & sew” construction techniques, we were making progress weekly, with the hope of releasing our first sweater for Holiday 2009.  But we missed that release, we needed more time for development.  Nearly a year after the project started, we are meeting this Saturday (5/22/2010) to see our most advanced sample (being made this week).  This sample brings together one year of development. 

We plan on having good news to report.  The sample we receive Saturday will determine the future of this project.  If the news is not good, we do have a backup plan, unfortunately it would delay any release until Fall 2011.

Below is an excerpt from the article at Cleveland.com:

Workers United said Hugo Boss told labor leaders early in negotiations that it wanted to move suit production to low-wage plants in Turkey, Romania and Bulgaria.

“The only plan they offered to save the plant was a one year trial experiment which was grounded in the reduction of wages by 35 percent – from $12.80 an hour to $8.30 an hour,” Workers United said in its rally flier.

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