American Giant

In December of 2012 a writer at Slate published a review of a hooded sweatshirt under a headline that has followed the company ever since: this, he wrote, is the greatest sweatshirt known to man. The hoodie was made by a year-old San Francisco startup called American Giant, and within hours of the story going up the orders arrived faster than anyone could fill them. A contractor working on the website called the founder to tell him the site was taking twenty orders a second. The backorder stretched into months. It was the kind of break a company dreams about, and it nearly broke the company, because the one thing American Giant had promised was that the hoodie would be made in the United States, and there was no overseas factory to call.

The Man Who Went Looking for a Better Hoodie

Bayard Winthrop did not come to American manufacturing as a true believer. He had spent a career making consumer products, running the bag maker Chrome Industries and working in footwear, and like nearly everyone in those businesses he had built his goods offshore, most of it in China. What he wanted, when he started American Giant in February of 2011, was simpler than a movement. He wanted to make the kind of everyday American clothes he had loved as a kid, the Levi’s and the Champion fleece and the Red Wing boots, garments that were built to last and made at home, and he had come to believe that selling straight to the customer, with no department-store markup in the middle, was the trick that could make domestic production pay.

The first product was a single hooded sweatshirt, designed with Philipe Manoux, an industrial designer who had worked at Apple. It was heavyweight fleece with reinforced elbows, a double-lined hood, panels cut for movement, and custom hardware, and it cost seventy-nine dollars, which put it within reach of a mainstream shopper while costing American Giant roughly twice what an imported equivalent would. Then the Slate writer, Farhad Manjoo, got his hands on one.

When you wear this hoodie, you’ll wonder why all other clothes aren’t made this well.

The Spark, and the Long Tail of It

The Manjoo review did what almost no piece of writing does for a physical product: it created a stampede. The waitlist ran for months, and American Giant, refusing to move the work overseas to keep up, simply let the orders pile up rather than compromise the thing that had made it interesting in the first place. In the years since, the company has sold more than one million of those hoodies. In early 2026 it did the unthinkable and redesigned the garment, softening the famously stiff, canvas-like fleece into something with more drape, and relaunched it at one hundred and sixty-eight dollars. Winthrop was candid about the risk of a New Coke backlash, and just as candid about what the sweatshirt means to him.

That sweatshirt is almost like a child of mine. So much of my life went into that.

What the hoodie bought American Giant was time, and a thesis worth chasing. One famous product is a stunt. A business is what you build next.

From One Hoodie to a Wardrobe

American Giant grew the way the strongest single-product companies do, by widening slowly and refusing to leave the country to do it. The hoodie was followed by tee shirts, sweatpants, a full women’s line, flannel shirts, and the Roughneck line of heavier workwear. And in 2018, after years of development that the company describes as the better part of a decade, it added the product that puts it in this publication: a blue jean, made in America.

The denim is where the honest accounting lives. American Giant does not weave its own cloth. It buys it from Mount Vernon Mills, the one-hundred-and-eighty-year-old Georgia weaver that is the largest denim mill left in the country, and has the jeans cut and sewn in the Los Angeles garment district. The cotton is American grown. What comes off the Georgia looms, though, is not the raw selvedge of the bespoke makers in these pages. The Dakota jean is a washed, comfort-stretch denim, roughly sixty-eight percent cotton with the balance in polyester and a little spandex, built to move and to look broken-in on the first wearing. The women’s Sedona adds a measure of Tencel for softness. It is a different proposition from a fourteen-ounce loomstate jean, and it is meant to be: an everyday American jean for a person who is not chasing fades, woven and sewn at home.

The Hard Part Is Everything After the Hoodie

Making one celebrated garment in America is hard. Building a company on it is harder, and the supply chain Winthrop needed had been hollowed out for decades, scattered across rural mill towns and a few surviving urban cut-and-sew shops. The economics never stopped being a fight. In 2022 a controlling stake in the company changed hands, bought by the WeWork co-founder Miguel McKelvey for a reported ten million dollars, a reminder that conviction and a viral hit do not by themselves make domestic apparel easy to finance.

Then came the most ambitious swing of all. In July of 2024 American Giant began selling a cotton tee shirt, grown and made entirely in the United States, through Walmart, at twelve dollars and ninety-eight cents, in roughly seventeen hundred stores. The following year the partnership grew to include sweatshirts. The price is the whole point. American-made apparel has long been a premium product by necessity, and Winthrop’s bet, riding Walmart’s pledge to buy hundreds of billions of dollars of American-made and American-assembled goods over the coming decade, is that real volume can finally bend that cost curve. It is the difference between selling a few people a seventy-nine-dollar hoodie and selling everyone a thirteen-dollar shirt.

What the Whole Thing Is Really About

Winthrop tells a version of the same number in nearly every interview. In 1980, the great majority of the clothing Americans bought was made in America; today the great majority is imported, and the figure he reaches for is around ninety-five percent gone the other way. Everything American Giant does is an argument against that arithmetic, conducted one product at a time. It is why the company partners with a mill like Mount Vernon rather than a cheaper one abroad, why it keeps the cutting tables in Los Angeles, and why Winthrop spends as much of his time evangelizing reshoring, for the sake of national security, of middle-class jobs, of the towns that lost their mills, as he does selling clothes.

That is also why American Giant belongs in this publication alongside the raw-selvedge purists, even though its jeans are washed and stretchy and sold by the thousand. The bespoke makers prove that the best of American denim can still be made by hand. American Giant is chasing the harder and arguably more consequential proof: that American-made does not have to be a luxury, that it can be a tee shirt on a Walmart shelf. If the revival only ever produces four-hundred-dollar jeans, it stays a boutique. Someone has to try to make it ordinary again.

The Bottom Line