USA-Made Companies Face More Challenges Than Ever

(Photo: Amelia Arvesen)

How’s a Small, Made-in-the-USA Company to Survive These Days?

Published: Jan 28, 2025

Brands like Youer manufacture their gear exclusively in the United States for environmental, ethical, and practical reasons. Will that be enough in the face of rising costs and potential new tariffs?

New perk: Easily find new routes and hidden gems, upcoming running events, and more near you. Your weekly Local Running Newsletter has everything you need to lace up! .

On a brisk weekday in October 2023, three sewing machines hummed while experimental indie pop played quietly inside a warehouse near the airport in Missoula, Montana. Three sewers had their heads down, assembling eggplant-colored jumpsuits, as Mallory Ottariano, the 34-year-old founder of the women’s outdoor clothing brand , squinted into a dizzying spreadsheet. The Youniverse—what Ottariano, a queen of puns, calls the factory she opened just eight months earlier—smelled like the sugary candle that had been burning that morning, and soon it would be fragrant with garlic.

“What kind of pizza do you guys like? Or not like?” Ottariano shouted from the lofted office that a handy friend helped her build. Staring at numbers was making her hungry.

“No olives!” one of the sewers shouted between stitches.

“Any meat?” Ottariano asked.

“I like pepperoni,” said another.

You couldn’t tell from the employees’ nonchalance, but Youer was in the middle of its latest supply-chain crisis. Actually, two. First, it couldn’t find a specific purple thread in all of the U.S. to sew together 300 pairs of leggings, 30 of which had already sold to customers eagerly awaiting their arrival. Any other color would look weird, and dyeing was too expensive. Second, inventory slated to be ready in a month for a Black Friday drop wasn’t even underway at a contract factory in Los Angeles, California. Unless Ottariano found a fix fast, Youer’s customers would be disappointed, if not angry.

Since Ottariano started out back in 2012 with a $100 sewing machine from eBay, her brand has amassed a fanatical following among active women. Signature garments like the best-selling ($179) and stretchy ($94) sell out quickly. The vibrant prints are hand-designed and cheekily named by Ottariano, like a floral pattern called OK Bloomer.

Prodded about her stress levels, Ottariano shrugged as if to say, What’s new? After all she’s been through—including contemplating bankruptcy following losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to unreliable factories in 2020—not many setbacks phase her anymore.

“I’ve proven to myself that we can figure it out,” she says. “It’s not really fun, but I think that’s just the reality of business. If I want to stay in this industry, that’s going to happen all the damn time.”

It’s especially the reality for small outdoor businesses like Youer that have chosen to manufacture domestically despite countless challenges such as higher costs, fewer resources, more regulation, and now potential new tariffs proposed by President Donald Trump on U.S. imports from China, Canada, and Mexico.

These obstacles pose such a threat to small businesses that doubt lingers: Is having more control, greater transparency, and better ethics by manufacturing in the U.S. worth it? And do American consumers care enough about those things to keep the few American-made gear brands alive?

Inside an office building — Inside the Youniverse in Missoula, Montana, with a painted mural by local artist Sophia Matthis (Photo: Amelia Arvesen)

Factory workers sewing — A few of Youer's employees working in the old Youniverse building (Photo: Amelia Arvesen)

Ottariano’s blond hair curls loosely around gold dangly earrings. She talks directly to the camera from her living room and poses a question in an Instagram video: “Do you think we can make this T-shirt for $10 in America? Let’s see.” The post is part of Ottariano’s “slow fashion math” series breaking down the costs of ethically producing garments in the U.S. A few of have even gone viral.

She adds up the expenses to make a single shirt: $5 for the buttery-soft T-shirt fabric that’s made in the U.S.; $1 for cutting the fabric into pieces; $1 for shipping those pieces from Los Angeles to Montana; and $12 for sewing them together in her factory. The total comes to $19.

“So no, we can’t make this shirt in the U.S. for $10,” she concludes. And that’s Youer’s least-expensive product out of about 25 styles.

The basic math is evident, even without getting into all the nuances: Making gear in the U.S. is more expensive, sometimes drastically so, than manufacturing abroad. And it’s not just materials that cost more. The biggest-budget line item for U.S. manufacturers is labor.

In Bangladesh, the minimum wage for a garment factory worker is $113 per month, roughly $5.65 a day if you factor in days off on weekends, according to . On the other hand, a U.S. garment factory worker makes an average of $25 an hour, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). (If Youer sells one of those T-shirts for $48 online, that leaves $29, enough to cover an hour of labor.)

The U.S. has lost 6.7 million manufacturing jobs over the past four decades, according to the BLS, due to globalization, recessions, growth in other sectors, and policies like the 1992 North American Free Trade Agreement, which lifted tariffs with Canada and Mexico. Some blame NAFTA for eliminating jobs and encouraging outsourcing. Mostly, the mass move overseas comes down to higher wage expectations in America versus countries that pay much lower incomes. Overall, America has gone from producing 95 percent of clothing worn in the U.S. in to just 2 percent today.

As a result, finding skilled labor can be challenging. For Ottariano, hiring someone who knows how to expertly operate an industrial sewing machine or sew by hand has been a lengthy and sometimes despairing process.

“We’ve only had one person on our undulating team who had experience in production,” she says. “Everyone else has either not known how to sew, and we’ve trained them, or only had home or mending experience.”

As if high wages and labor shortages aren’t enough, other deterrents to making in America include tighter regulations, less flexibility with sourcing parts, greater competition for factory partners, and limited access to advanced materials and equipment, some of which aren’t even available stateside. It’s why most of the gear in your garage—from your Gore-Tex jackets to your Black Diamond carabiners to your Tecnica ski boots—was made somewhere else.

Historical photos of the Danner factory — A historical image of Danner factory workers in Portland, Oregon (Photo: Courtesy Danner)

Even when brands keep their manufacturing in the States, they still rely on global markets for raw materials. Take zippers: with only a few manufacturers remaining in the U.S., brands are forced to look elsewhere for supply—like Japanese stalwart YKK, which produces roughly half the zippers used around the world, making it the largest zipper manufacturer in existence.

For Ottariano, sourcing fleece hasn’t been easy. She used to get the fabric from Polartec’s American-made line, but the supplier recently scaled back distribution. Instead, she has to use a Chinese-made alternative, which faced a 47 percent tariff in Trump’s first term.

Youer is just one of many American-made brands that must confront these challenges. Out of 30 components needed to make a DPS ski in Utah, the sintered race base is only produced in Europe, and the lightweight paulownia wood is only grown in East Asia. And despite how hard Vermont Glove’s owner, Sam Hooper, has worked to ensure 99 percent of his supply is domestic, he’s still using yarn from Mexico, “because it was the only yarn we could get our hands on” at the time, he says.

There is a glimmer of hope on the horizon, in the form of the Americas Act. The proposed bill would provide tax breaks and incentives for companies looking to reshore to the U.S. or near-shore in the Western Hemisphere. Sponsor María Elvira Salazar, a Republican congresswoman from Florida, says it has the potential to —which also happens to be Trump’s goal with tariffs.

Tariffs are likely to be a hotly discussed topic in the outdoor industry for the next four years, as they were from 2016 to 2020. Back then, brands that could afford it moved their factories from China into other countries to avoid the financial blow, and they could be forced to reevaluate once again. “It’s going to hit the smallest businesses the hardest,” Hooper says. “We don’t have the economies of scale and efficiencies to blend it out—to have the impact on margin be less significant on units sold.”

On a , Eoin Comerford, former CEO of Moosejaw, chatted about how global trade will impact the outdoor economy.

He mentioned Youer as an example of a small brand threatened by the levies. He also talked about how the outdoor industry faced an “affordability crisis” because gear is already priced at a premium even while brands face slimmer profit margins. In 2022, he pointed out, prices increased by 20 percent. “I don’t think the outdoor consumer can absorb another hit,” Comerford said.

Numerous consumer-behavior studies show that shoppers are, in fact, willing to spend more on goods that are sustainably produced or sourced, or are better-aligned with their values, even amid inflation concerns. A found that nearly two-thirds of U.S. consumers routinely sought out products marked “Made in America” that year.

Small U.S.-made brands such as Youer, Vermont Glove, and DPS, as well as larger manufacturers like knife-maker Gerber Gear and boot-maker Danner—both in Portland, Oregon—believe their customers appreciate that their products are made in America. Whether it compels the purchase or is just an added bonus is unclear, however.

On the podcast, Comerford offered a contradictory opinion: “Consumers will tell you that they value Made in the USA, just like they’ll tell you that they really value sustainably built product. But at the end of the day, those things are, you know, items like five and six on the list of reasons why they buy.”

Further up on a shopper’s priority list, he also said, is price. And if prices get too high, rather than rationalizing the investment, shoppers might just look elsewhere for a cheaper alternative.

A man making a shoe — A Danner factory worker finishing a boot in Portland, Oregon (Photo: Courtesy Danner)

But, as Ottariano learned, cheaper doesn’t always mean better. Before bringing most of her production in-house in 2024, she would receive batches of poorly sewn garments from contract factories. She had to have the garments totally remade. With her team fully in the U.S., and her core team at the Youniverse, production manager Vicky McCarthy and head of product Sarah Cabral can monitor things and problem-solve in real time if anything isn’t up to standard. “I trust us,” Ottariano says.

Quality is the same motivation for Hooper, who bought Vermont Glove in 2018. He says $20 work gloves from the hardware store won’t last a tradesperson nearly as long as ones that cost $115 with superior wool and leather, reinforced high-wear areas, and double-stitched seams.

Other advantages of vertical integration include paying liveable wages and providing jobs to the local community; offering better customer service and providing tours of the warehouse; lowering transportation costs and, therefore, carbon footprint; and working on a company’s own timeline.

Neither Youer nor Vermont Glove have to wait for a sample to arrive by cargo ship, nor do they have to schedule a video chat in a different time zone to discuss changes to that sample. They can just walk out onto the factory floor.

“If we have an idea, we can just make it happen,” Ottariano says. And it’s fun to be in the driver’s seat.

Should they encounter an obstacle—as they did during the pandemic when supply chains snarled—Youer, Vermont Glove, and DPS can shut down their factories in an instant. When business is holding strong, as it did during the 2024 holiday season, they can crank production up a notch.

“Everything is your own headache, and that’s the downside,” says Thomas Laakso, senior vice president at DPS. “But the upside is you’re in control of your destiny. It’s yours to fix, and it’s yours to win.”

A woman works at her computer in an office — Ottariano works at her computer in the previous Youniverse building (Photo: Amelia Arvesen)

At Youer, they’ve become really good at fixing things. To avoid filing for bankruptcy in 2020, Ottariano laid off two of her four employees at the time and closed the office space. In 2021, she launched a Community Supported Apparel campaign (a riff on the agricultural term CSA) to raise $100,000 for a first-of-its-kind factory in Montana so she could better control production.

Moving Youer’s manufacturing out of the U.S. was never on the table. Having grown up in New England, once a textile epicenter, she wanted to be part of bringing the apparel industry back to America. After searching for four years in and around Missoula for property—including a tempting historic church with stained-glass windows—she finally found somewhere that checked all the boxes.

“My vision for it is whimsical, almost like a Willy Wonka factory for clothes,” she told me in October 2023. “Except you won’t fall in a chocolate river or turn into a giant blueberry at our factory.”

A year later, in September 2024, she moved her team and production from the bare-bones, personalityless warehouse by the airport to a Quonset hut closer to downtown. The cement floor is speckled with the history of past owners, but the biggest wall in the warehouse is freshly painted by a local artist with a vibrant mural of a female astronaut, dragonflies, and flowers. A soft sculpture of a whale, made by a former employee out of fabric scraps, hangs from the ceiling over the cutting station. A lofted space will soon be a cozy, collaborative lounge. And pictures of a shirtless Jeremy Allen White decorate the light switches. It’s hardly what comes to mind when you think “factory.”

And it’s only partially one, anyway. As of January 2025, only a few products are being made there. The rest are still sewn in the U.S., now in Los Angeles, by a new contractor Ottariano trusts as much as her own team. (Her fingers are crossed that they don’t shut down.) Being in business for 40 years means that what gave Ottariano a headache—hunting down purple thread, for instance—is trivial to the partner factory.

They’ve dealt with every fiasco imaginable and have the longtime manufacturing connections to keep things running smoothly for Youer, freeing up time and energy for Ottariano, McCarthy, and Cabral to focus on wholesale fulfillment and the creative side of the business. Collaborations and brand partnerships, industry events, and community-building pop-ups at the Youniverse—the fun stuff—can fill the calendar again. Perhaps Ottariano will even organize a third annual cross-country treasure hunt for the signature Treasure dresses. As for the products, no more delays, no more inconsistencies in quality, and no more relying on partners who don’t care about her brand as much as she does. She hopes her customers also continue to care.

“Every morning, I wake up and think: This is a really fun journey, but there’s an expiration date to everything. Is this the day when people decide that Youer is no more?” Ottariano says. She will endure whatever happens under the new Trump administration and beyond because, for her, it’s not a matter of will Youer survive—it’s how.

“I am so obsessed with this work, but I don’t really know what else I would do,” she says. “It’s so much more than a job or a business to me. It’s actually me and my identity.”

Want more of ��ԹϺ��’s in-depth longform stories? .

Comment

Filed to:

Lead Photo: Amelia Arvesen

�����ԹϺ���

How’s a Small, Made-in-the-USA Company to Survive These Days?

��ԹϺ��