Donald Trump has entered his second presidential term on the “America First” trade agenda, which already maintains a global supply chain. But changing the ambitions of “Made in America” from soundbites to reality for fashion is not simple.
Industry-wide brands bring manufacturing back to the country for years, motivated by a combination of growing trade tensions, concerns about workers’ rights and sustainability, and appetite for faster, more agile supply chains We’ve been talking about that. That’s not happening.
Certainly, some retailers make small batches of clothing domestically, but the US supports large amounts of apparel manufacturing at competitive prices, without major infrastructure investments and incentives from regulators. It cannot be done.
Lost skills
Until the early 2000s, the United States was a hub for clothing production. The pair of jeans contains cotton grown in the Southern United States, spun in Carolina, cut and sewn in California. However, it loosened trade rules that opened the country to quickly and dramatically reduce imports from low-cost apparel manufacturers. The factory was closed, workers lost their jobs, and young people stopped learning skills such as sewing and patterning.
As a result, brands looking for land today face many limitations, including a lack of skilled labor, high costs, and unavailable materials.
For example, when LA-based Cool-Girl brand reform first launched in 2009, they used Deadstock Fabric to create most of their products. However, the supply chain has not been able to support brand growth. Currently, about a fifth of its products are made in the United States. This is because many processes that are essential to the operation of the brand are not available nationally.
“We’re committed to providing a great opportunity to help you,” said Kathleen Talbott, the leading sustainability officer for reform and vice president of operations. Even in LA, the skills needed to produce clothing with complex fabrics such as leather and silk are not easily available.
“If you look at most of the competencies available in Los Angeles, they’re not sophisticated and relatively small shops,” Talbot said. “The average employee count for LA’s suppliers is 30. Some of our larger facilities elsewhere are over thousands.”
Citizens of denim makers who also produce them in Los Angeles have encountered similar problems. The company has spent the last few years overhauling its cotton supply chain to minimize its environmental footprint. Today, many of the ingredients in jeans are sourced directly from US farms that apply regenerative farming practices to ensure that cultivation practices are restorative rather than extractive. However, to convert raw materials into yarn, cotton must be shipped to overseas factories, mainly in Turkey and Europe.
“The United States is clearly known for its high quality cotton,” said a citizen of Amy Williams, CEO of humanity. “But finding a factory in the US is difficult. That’s not possible.”
The value has been lost
In recent years, many brands seeking to add manufacturing capabilities in the US have done so to increase supply chain flexibility and bring their products to market more quickly. Still, these efforts are usually supported by support from much larger factories overseas.
Sheng Lu, professor of fashion and apparel studies at the University of Delaware, said that while the majority of US-based apparel producers have fewer than five employees, there are 2,000 comparison factories in Bangladesh and Vietnam. . Saitex, a Vietnam-based denim manufacturer, opened its factory in Los Angeles in 2021, to help brand partners catch up with fast moving social media-driven trends, and new cleaning and style consumers with small batch drops provided the ability to quickly test appetite. . For example, if a brand needs 5,000 units immediately, they can be produced in LA. However, if the product is successful and a larger order is placed, it will be produced in Vietnam where the land and labor are cheaper and the capacity is greater.
“The model works because it’s built into the Vietnamese backend,” Saitex CEO Sanjeev Bahl said. “This allows some of the high-cost operations to be offshore. Here we keep the model really light.”
Similarly, the reforms are leaning towards the LA factory that it owns and run for speed and agility. Still, large production runs are processed overseas.
“If you want to be a source of US brands and retailers, you need the ability to serve them,” says Lu.
I lost my investment
Natalie Chanin, who pioneered the concept of slow fashion locally in America, said that her lack of value and investment in the skills needed to produce clothing and other basic essentials has led her to run the company. They say it makes it difficult to find the workforce they need. For almost 20 years she owned Alabama Chanin, a vertically operated brand in Florence, Alabama, and the business environment was not more friendly to domestic production.
“If America can’t produce food, clothes, shelters, etc. for itself, that’s a national security issue,” Chanin said. “Our job as an organization was to find ways to keep those training paths alive, to keep our skills alive. But to regain more production, we train, value and build our supply chains. We will rethink and rethink how to do it.”
Adding scale is not currently being done on a large scale due to a mix of government incentives, infrastructure investments and private sector buy-in.
“I think sometimes it’s fantasy. Having a conversation about scaling without infrastructure is a paranoia,” Burle said. “We need a blueprint, we need an incentive.”
New opportunities
Lu pointed out that one of the most promising new avenues for American apparel manufacturing could be clothing made from unnecessary fabrics. California recently passed a law requiring that it funds infrastructure that prevents brands from getting caught up in landfills. It could inspire innovations around upcycling and recycling.
Several textile-to-textile recycling startups are building the first large-scale plant in the United States. Still, the recycled raw materials they produce can be shipped overseas, sewn into products and sewn into products unless the domestic manufacturing landscape changes dramatically.
Changes in trade winds could also change the economy of apparel manufacturing. The rise in tariffs has already prompted many brands to diversify their sourcing from China. Still, high costs and limited capacity means that America is not the first choice for most brands as an alternative.
“The ‘Made in the Usa’ won’t go away, but I don’t think tariffs will fundamentally change that,” Lu said. “Asia is a balanced source that can meet the demand of many factors: capacity, speed to the market, minimum order quantity.”
In other words, companies that want to manufacture in America need to find other ways to seduce consumers and justify higher prices.
“If you can’t compete because you’re cheap in the US, you have to serve consumers who want to care about the supply chain or support the community,” Lou said. “The goal is not just to sourcing orders from Asia.”
