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All USA Clothing steps out of its comfort zone, producing garment-dyed sweatshirts in four colors, as well as custom ribbing, woven labels, screen printing, and more.
When a young client arrived at Cary Heller with plans to launch fashionable streetwear brand Bad Hamster, the VP of sales at Keego Harbour, Michigan-based All USA Clothing (asi/30171) wasn’t sure his company could meet the challenge.
The client wanted garment dyed, heavyweight hoodies and sweatshirts in four very special colors, as well as woven labels and custom ribbing on the back pockets to match the screen printed trim colors.”These garments really don’t exist,” Heller said.”You can’t just go buy them and do a quick private label.”
It’s easy to reject or steer a client in a less complicated direction.Instead, Heller decided to give it a try.”The fastball among us is the guy in Carhartt,” Heller admitted.”This is coming out of our cab. … But it kind of stirred my creativity and woke me up.”
To create the custom rib the client wanted, All USA had to deconstruct the stock sweatpants and re-sew them with striped fabric on the sides.
Heller knew that All USA could not complete the project alone.Too many moving parts.Plus, the company has never worked with Rib before.His first attempt — ordering custom fabrics from an online craft store — proved he could get the color right, but Heller said the fabric samples he received were “a million percent wrong.”So he decided to use the many connections he had made in the industry over the years to call friends who run large U.S. manufacturing plants to see what insights they could offer.
Heller is associated with a Pennsylvania company that makes 100% polyester ribbing in the correct color.The next step is figuring out how to add ribbing to the sweatpants.For streetwear startups, the running cost of custom clothing is simply too high, as it requires large orders of four different colors.So Heller sourced the blank garments the client wanted in pastel shades, then worked with a tailor in Detroit to deconstruct the sweatpants blanks, then re-sew them with ribbing along the outside seams.
Once that hurdle was crossed, the rest of the project went smoothly – everything from the hang tags to the woven labels came in a matching color scheme for a cohesive product.All USA has built thousands of units for Bad Hamster and expects to have a large-scale garment customization run after customers close their first sales.
“It really resonated with the younger generation,” Heller said of the collection.”There’s a lot of people wearing hoodies these days since the pandemic started. Everyone loves hoodies anyway. It’s like people live in hoodies right now.”
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Post time: Apr-11-2022
