Pete Roberts was in the business of jiu-jitsu. He sold gear, and he had his own line of gis, the heavy cotton uniforms the sport is fought in. Then the factory in Pakistan that made them for him copied his designs and began selling them out from under him. The lesson Roberts took was not about one stolen product. It was about who controls the making. In 2011 he cut down the trees behind his house in rural Maine and, with a few friends, built a timber-frame factory to make the gis himself.
I cut down a forest in the woods behind my house in Maine and built a timber-frame factory with my friends.
What began as one stubborn product became a manufacturing company. The gis came first. Then boots, Goodyear-welted, from American cowhide and bison. Then, in 2019, denim. Today Origin employs more than three hundred people across its Maine and North Carolina plants, one of the largest private employers in its corner of Maine. The denim alone is roughly a quarter of the business, cut and sewn in a one-hundred-and-seventy-thousand-square-foot factory in Asheboro, North Carolina, where 267 people on seven lines and a full wash house turn out around seven hundred and fifty pairs of jeans a day.
Where It Is Made
It starts with American cotton. The denim is woven at Mount Vernon Mills in Trion, Georgia, the country’s last full-scale denim mill and the one now bringing the historic White Oak shuttle looms home. The jeans are cut, sewn, and washed at Origin’s own factory in Asheboro, North Carolina. And in Maine, Origin’s own looms weave the heavy cotton cloth for the jiu-jitsu gis, the one textile almost no one else in America still makes.
The Numbers Got Loud
On a single Black Friday in 2024, Origin shipped around thirty thousand pairs of jeans and roughly six million dollars in product in one event. That is more than the brand sold in all of 2019, the year it started making denim at all. Roberts’s partner in the company is Jocko Willink, the retired Navy SEAL and author, whose podcast helped turn Origin’s made-in-America story into a following as much as a business. The company has been an Inc. 5000 honoree for years running, and is now expanding into heavyweight and selvedge denim, a first women’s jean, and professional goods.
It is not just being able to create the garment one time. It is being able to create it a million times consistently.
A Working Person’s Price
Here is the part that matters most to anyone tiring of disposable clothes. Origin’s jeans are not a three-hundred-dollar heritage flex. They run around a hundred and twenty-eight dollars, often less, a made-in-USA jean priced to compete with the imports rather than to sit above them. That is the rarest thing in this whole census. Not American manufacturing as a luxury good, but American manufacturing at a working person’s price, at volume. If the rebuild is ever going to be more than a boutique movement, it looks like this: a real factory, real wages, and a jean a normal person can actually afford to buy on purpose.
The Delta 68 Jean
The whole argument in one product: an American-made jean at an import price. The place to start, and the cheapest way to own this story.
The Boots
Goodyear-welted in Maine from American cowhide and bison, built to be resoled rather than replaced. The long-haul buy.
The Jiu-Jitsu Gi
The product that started the company, on the only American-woven gi cloth there is. For the people who train.
Heavyweight & Selvedge
Heavier 100 percent cotton denim, a selvedge line, and a first women’s jean are all in the works. Worth watching.
Go Further
The Bottom Line
Origin, in one honest sentence: a jiu-jitsu guy who refused to let someone else make his product built an American factory from the trees up, and is now proving the thing the rest of the industry calls impossible, that you can make a good pair of jeans here, at scale, for the price of the ones made anywhere else.