How I Built Resilience: Bayard Winthrop of American Giant

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 businesses over this past year. And today my conversation with Bard 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 Bayard in twenty twelve 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 Twenty One and H M. Now, almost ten years later.

Bired 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 ten year old business that uh really was founded on a very simple idea that we could still make great things in America, great clothing in America and Uh, we started the business ten years ago with the sweatshirt you're wearing, actually. It was a single product that we kinda poured our life and soul into and uh the business is bigger than that now and and a wider product line, but it basically was built on an idea that

Everyone at the time was saying it wasn't possible that we you could build a good, healthy, vibrant clothing business entirely in the United States and the customers would respond to it. And so uh start out online only and Now we've got some retail stores, but uh But it's a pretty basic idea that I think the customer customers out there had been uh looking for and wanting for a long time and no one had really I think taken the leap to try it.

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