FROM OUR AUGUST 2024 ISSUE: A MADE-IN-AMERICA TRUE STORY

The entire MR team proudly presents our August 2024 issue. If you haven’t received a hard copy, please page through a digital version at  Issuu, and we’ll continue to post individual stories here on  MR-mag.com. If you haven’t been getting MR in print, be sure that you are on our mailing list for future issues by completing  this form.

Five years ago, in those heady pre-pandemic days, my wife and I made the most critical decision to date for Brit & Blue, our young Kentucky-based tailored clothing brand. With an inkling of the challenges before us, we concluded that for Brit & Blue’s brand ethos (tailored elegance melded with blue-collar work ethic), it was crucial that production of our signature duck cloth sport coat be moved from Asia to the United States.

In the two years prior to this decision, Brit & Blue had mushroomed from a one-off MTM jacket for my own personal use to the production and sale of several hundred RTW and MTM units. Individual clients, as well as an enthusiastic cadre of fine clothing merchants across the southern states, had
fallen in love with our jacket’s refined look and rugged versatility. The wick was lit, and we were becoming ever more intent on extolling the virtues of Brit & Blue to a broader base of the country’s top haberdashers.

But before doing so, our country-of-origin equation had to be solved. Fortunately, early on in our search for a U.S.-based production partner, an industry veteran referred us to John Martynec at Hickey Freeman in Rochester,
New York. Now called Rochester Tailored Clothing, the facility that John shepherds is well known as the oldest tailored clothing producer in the United States. It crafted the venerable Hickey Freeman clothing for over 125 years until the brand’s sale in 2023 and subsequent move to production in Mexico.
With John, we were immediately on the same page. It took very little time to work through the challenges of making our duck cloth sport coats in Rochester.

Fast forward to the present and Brit & Blue is thriving. Our retailer network continues to expand, and we’re very proud of the increased number of jackets we’ve produced and sold. Our relationship with Rochester Tailored Clothing is stronger than ever with much work currently being done on jacket variations
and the development of new product types.

In this era of so many established brands transferring production out of the United States, I often wonder how unique is our journey in the opposite direction. We feel tremendous pride when telling prospective retail partners that our garments are designed in Kentucky and crafted in Upstate New York.
But in this 21st-century global economy, how important is this really to retailers and their clients? Only time, along with an extra-large helping of good old-fashioned American moxie, will tell.

Eric Adams is the founder of Brit & Blue, a Kentucky-based tailored clothing business known for its signature duck cloth sport coat. He can be reached at eric@britandblue.com. Editor’s note: To share your thoughts on U.S.-based clothing production: Karen.Alberg@wainscotmedia.com.