Made In America
“Made in America, 1959 / Born down by the factories, cross the Jersey City line”
I hate to disappoint fans of Richie Sambora, but this post will not contain a critical exegesis of his Made In America track.
Instead, I’ll explore consumer sensitivity surrounding products’ country of origin, as well as something that we do make in America now.
During the latter half of the 20th century, my hometown and the surrounding areas were heavily dependent on two major employers: a copper mine (closed in 1987) that employed many, including my maternal grandfather and a Levi Strauss & Co. plant that closed up shop in 2002. I remember the departure of the dungaree manufacturer vividly.
The SFGate article I linked above showcased a remarkable degree of empathy from the chattering classes toward the hardscrabble hillbillies in North Georgia’s Appalachian foothills:
From its hospital and schools to its Little League teams and nursing homes, rural Fannin County life is, in nearly every aspect, interwoven with Levi Strauss & Co. For 43 years, the company has reached out to this isolated patch of North Georgia from Levi's red-brick headquarters in San Francisco.
Now, 400 factory jobs are disappearing in a town of 1,200 people where Levi's have been made since 1959.
The silencing of Blue Ridge's sewing machines is shaking up the lives of many mountain residents who have been making barely $20,000 per year and felt fortunate to have that. Some never finished high school.
This article is 18 years old. One can imagine how differently the Appalachian idyll would have been rendered in 2020.
Already, about 300 non-Levi factory jobs have disappeared from Blue Ridge during the past year. The county is aging as retirees and vacationers buy up mountain homes and drive up property values. Antiques stores and restaurants geared toward tourists have replaced longtime Main Street businesses.
In the countries that make clothes once produced in the United States -- such as Mexico, Malaysia and Guatemala -- garment-industry wages in the late 1990s ranged from 10 cents to $1 an hour, according to the National Labor Committee.
Blue Ridge's Levi employees make at least $8 an hour, some more than $10. Those with the skills and stamina to work at a good clip could expect to pull a $30,000 salary out of the piece-work production system. Some years, overtime boosted salaries considerably.
The textile industry has all but given up the ghost in Blue Ridge, and abandoned copper mines, retired coal-burning plants and empty factories dot the surrounding hills -- bygone pieces of Appalachia's economic travails. Steep declines in tobacco and timber production have derailed thousands of families.
My hometown executed a reinvention in the wake of the Levi departure, and it is now a tourism-oriented destination; this is a consequence of fortuitous geography - the town is among the first mountain communities that travelers from Atlanta or Florida encounter while driving north to escape heat, humidity, and population density. The downtown shopping area predominantly caters to visitors and transplants, with stores selling pricy outerwear, bamboo fly fishing rods, artisanal olive oil, and so on. Local independent restaurants charge out-of-town prices for mundane, mediocre food because guests have low expectations and locals inclined to have a nice(r) meal would have to drive nearly 100 miles for something superior.
Locals folks typically take the scenery for granted and patronize Wal-Mart:
The Levi's worker can't see herself working in a motel or selling fishing rods at the edge of the forest. The world-famous, 2,160-mile Appalachian Trail begins in the county where she lives. She says she has never seen it, nor cared to.
She's hoping instead to land a job at one of the Wal-Marts in the nearby town of Ellijay or across the state line in Murphy, N.C., or at the Home Depot that just opened in another town.
However improbably, the textile industry has experienced a modest resurgence in my hometown. Just as the town has moved up-market, so has the locally made denim:
Academy Award-winning actress Reese Witherspoon created a women’s clothing brand called Draper James in 2015; some of the brand’s jeans are produced in a factory in my hometown. A quick perusal of the website offers scant few pairs of jeans for sale, and many of the brand’s offerings hail from “Imported.”
Nevertheless, I canvassed a half-dozen women with whom I grew up about Draper James: Were they aware of the brand? Were they aware of the brand’s manufacturing presence in our hometown? Could a consumer purchase the locally made product, um, locally? Would it be appealing to own a pair of jeans made in your hometown / location of your vacation home, especially a town that not so long ago had a proud legacy of textile manufacturing?
All of my friends - who are roughly 30 years old and represent a diversity of educational attainment, employment, and spending habits (big law associate, physician, paralegal, radiology technician, photographer, etc.) - were aware of the brand and its association with Witherspoon. Only one of them knew that some of the brand’s output came from our hometown, and she confirmed that it wasn’t available for sale locally.
I have not yet reminded loyal readers that my hometown is a Republican stronghold, or that President Trump enjoys considerable admiration with locals. Among the themes of Trump’s campaigning and subsequent presidency is distress surrounding the erosion of manufacturing jobs, and Trump supporters are frequently encouraged to buy products that are American made in a bid to support the domestic economy and local communities. When it comes to Draper James, there is apparently no local supply and limited, if any, local demand for a pair of women’s jeans made nearby. One can, however, drive 90 minutes to Atlanta and pick up a pair at the Draper James boutique.
I am personally quite conscious of the country of origin for products I consume, in particular clothing. Whereas the Trumpian exhortation to buy American is tantamount to mercantilist jingoism, my consumption is motivated by a desire to receive value (read: longevity) for money:
I would rather purchase a pair of shoes made in America (or England, or Italy, or Australia) than a pair made in China, rather own a cashmere sweater knit in Scotland or Italy than one created from the equivalent of mystery meat in “Imported,” rather buy a pair of jeans with origins encompassing Tennessee, Japan, and Los Angeles than a pair of Levi’s from Mexico or wherever.
In each of those examples, I am using country of origin as a proxy for value, for quality, for longevity. Products made in America, Scotland, Britain, France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, Australia, etc. are more desirable, at least ceteris paribus, in this mindset.
Perhaps I need to reconsider my consumption habits:
I distinctly remember when the tags on the Knickerbocker MFG clothes that I scrimped and saved for ceased to read “Made in USA.” When I first noted the new “Made in Portugal” tags, I felt robbed. Like many of us raised in this clothing sphere, I had come to consider MiUSA as the zenith of manufacturing.
Preoccupied, as I was, with my Red Wings and White Oak Cone Mills denim, I had deluded myself to believe that a product made in the United States was innately better than one made almost anywhere else. I had also overlooked a move made by many highly-esteemed brands to Portugal. A transition that continues to draw high-end brands, seeking the very best in scale and production.
A rather thought-provoking article from an author confronting the same biases that I am.
So what do we make or create in America these days?
Let’s visit a terrific Bloomberg article with that question in mind: “Welcome to Your Bland New World”, the headline intones; the subtitle provides the reader a roadmap - “Why do disruptive startups slavishly follow an identikit formula of business model, look and feel, and tone of voice? Because it works, sort of.”
All startups seek to disrupt and disintermediate a smug status quo, or originate and dominate an entirely new niche. But what makes a brand a bland is duality: claiming simultaneously to be unique in product, groundbreaking in purpose, and singular in delivery, while slavishly obeying an identikit formula of business model, look and feel, and tone of voice.
Despite hiding in plain sight (and plain recycled packaging), this “slight of bland” has won the wallets of a generation that considers itself above marketing, and created some of the buzziest companies of the age.
If you listen to podcasts you’re probably familiar with many of these startup, consumer-facing businesses. Curiously, their status as podcast sponsors seems to come and go frequently … I wonder why?
The Bloomberg article outlines this blueprint for the space:
Blands are D2C - The target of bland disruption is The Man — who has had it too good for too long at your expense.
Blands are underdogs - Although funded by angel investment, venture capital and private equity, blands present as scrappily un-corporate.
Blands need a narrative - Rarely do blands declare: “We were founded to exploit a niche and leverage venture capital until the target of our disruption buys us out.” Instead they proffer origin stories that mash up indie-movie “meet cutes” with aspirational “grail quests.”
Blands have values - Bland values are simple and uniform: The customer “comes first” (obvs), with the environment and community close behind. Because of this — and because there’s absolutely “no judgement” about sex, gender, race, ethnicity, age, faith, looks, or ability — blands appear to lean politically liberal, albeit from within the ideologically timid DMZ of consumer capitalism.
Blands are aspirational - The one liberal value blands tend to elide is inequality, because while blands are, by definition, not opulent, neither are they bargain-basement. For the rich, blands are an ironic normcore trifle; for the aspiring middle, blands offer a fleeting facsimile of prosperity; and for the poor, blands are either the products they make, or the services they provide.
Blands are bland - Because they target consumers allergic to marketing, blands strive tirelessly to be engagingly unobtrusive and convincingly inevitable.
Blands are ineluctable - Despite embodying the vanguard of consumer capitalism, blands tend to be subtly Soviet — quasi-post-apocalyptic. Even within a saturated market, every bland’s message is somehow a post-choice, totalitarian inevitability:
Blands <3 Apple - Despite being the brand to which blands aspire (“Monos is the Apple of suitcases”), Apple has too long and complex a history to be a bland itself. For 44 years, Apple has painstakingly concealed code (from WYSIWYG desktop to voice activation) and stripped back design (from logo shadow to headphone jacks) until its entire proposition is encapsulated in a crisp silhouette glowing from a gleaming screen. Blands that want nothing more than to be icons on your iPhone simply set off at the point of Apple’s arrival.
Blands are in it to exit - Rather than settling in for the long-haul, most bland founders aspire to accelerate customer acquisition to launch velocity before spinning off an IPO or seeking acquisition from a competing bland (Uber + Postmates), a complementary business (Lululemon + Mirror), or a victim of their original disruption (Petsmart + Chewy).
So how many of these products are made in America? Few, if any. That would hinder the various blands’ noble missions to pass on as much value as possible to their wonderful consumers, of course. However, the ideas (“disruption”, “disintermediation”), the marketing, the VC-funded growth aspirations, the stiff competition within each niche, etc. are all as American as apple pie. This is a fascinating look at a highly visible sector of our economy circa 2020: High stakes, potential riches for founders and VCs, and limited rewards for hourly workers. But just like everyone hailing from my hometown - and everywhere else, I suppose - has been able to purchase slightly cheaper Levi’s blue jeans at the local Wal-Mart since production moved to lower cost nations, there are vast consumer benefits for everyone in the market for a mattress, pillow, subscription meal plan, razor blade subscription, hair loss prevention drugs, or anything else that your favorite podcast host is peddling this week.
I really enjoyed the Bloomberg article and strongly suggest you read it.
For more in this vein, see what The Verge had to say about Away luggage last year.