What it means to be “A Genuine American Brand”
March 4th, 2010I actually spend a lot of time thinking about what we do on a day to day basis to live up to our slogan. Since founding Rupture Clothing two years ago, it sometimes seems that we deliberately did everything right the hard way. And although many things have changed as we’ve grown, our four founding pillars still remain the same:
- Make better quality gear than anyone else in the market.
- Offer it at a better price than anyone else in the market.
- Deliver greater value than anyone else in the market.
- Produce everything in the USA, under ethical working conditions.
Believe it or not, it’s relatively easy to enter the clothing business. Try finding a company that manufactures rash guards. A quick search on alibaba.com or tradekey.com gives you instant gratification from many foreign countries. You’ll get promising emails, guarantees of satisfaction, desires of “long lasting relationships”, even free samples. It is a statistical fact that between 95-97% of clothing sold in America today are made overseas. Why is soft goods importing so attractive? In a word, cost. But what’s the price we really pay?
We all know the US economy hasn’t been great, so let’s take the US unemployment rate first: It’s currently hovering at around 10%. Then, there’s this:
“The number of child workers around the world remains extremely high with 73 million children from 10-14 years old now employed worldwide, more than 13 percent of all children in this age group, the International Labour Organization (ILO) announced today in Geneva.
These figures only tell part of the story, warns the ILO. No one really knows how many children under 10 are working and no statistics are available on the number of girls engaged full-time in domestic work. If all were taken into account, the total number of child workers around the world today might well be in the hundreds of million.”
These are staggering statistics. Can you imagine sending your 7 year-old to work in a factory instead of going to school? Here’s a video of a child working in the Hanes factory - I could not make it halfway through. Global competition for cheaper commodities feeds this vicious cycle. Someone said to me once: “My clothes come from China, and my tax money go to weapons factories. I don’t like either one, but that’s reality.” Unfortunately, there’s a lot of truth in that statement – it is up to us to change that.
A lot of you know the reason behind our company’s name. It originated from a torn pair of board shorts, incidentally made in China. Our slogan, however, is an entirely different story. Being “A Genuine American Brand” is something we take extremely seriously. And it comes at a price, both monetarily and from an opportunity standpoint. Finding overseas manufacturers is easy. Now try finding a decent cut and sew facility that does the same in the United States – your luck starts running out quick. Anything from grappling shorts, T-shirts, hoodies, even packing accessories and hang tags. Your choices are extremely limited, because soft goods manufacturing in the USA is close to extinction. And, just as in every other industry, there are the good companies and the not so good companies. Finding the great ones from a smaller sampling is quite a bit more difficult.
US-based manufacturing is not only more expensive, it limits the products we can offer. Expanding our product line is our most difficult undertaking. We receive hundreds of requests a month for sparring gear (gloves, shin guards, etc.), gi’s, even shoes. We could probably triple our business overnight and cut costs in half by outsourcing the manufacturing of our products to a third-world country. The monetary incentives are there in black and white. So why haven’t we sold out?
Well, because of this: We’re pretty damn proud of the fact that every time we sell a product, an American gets to keep their job, or an American family gets to send their son or daughter to school rather than to a factory. We have dealt with the same US-based suppliers and manufacturers since we have been in business, and everything we make is proudly made in the USA. We also take an enormous amount of pride in the quality of the products we make. To date, we have had two single returns in two years out of the thousands of products we have sold, and only one was due to a manufacturing defect. Every day we exist, we prove that America can still compete, even in an industry where it’s outnumbered by over 9 to 1. And not only compete, but crush the competition. We not only promise uncompromising quality and durability, we deliver it – day by day, garment by garment. Our gear constantly rates higher than every other company, and we’re the fastest growing brand in athletic apparel, specifically in MMA and grappling.
It’s not easy to do the right thing. It hardly ever is. But the feedback we get from our customers for being a true “Made in the USA” company is overwhelming. We can’t change the way our government spends our tax dollars, but we don’t have to perpetuate the problem of importing goods made under unethical conditions. On the contrary, in the coming months we will announce efforts sponsored and funded by Rupture Clothing to combat the problem of child labor. After all, we’re a company started by fighters. And we’re not about to back down from this fight.
