Summary
American Flannel author Steve Kurutz spent years researching the founders who rally teams to bold frontiers, the evolution of tariffs, and the challenge of making one impossible shirt today now. He describes what he learned about how—despite huge headwinds—they set and achieve daunting goals.
As a Styles reporter for The New York Times, Steven Kututz’s beat is a surprise: “I don’t go to the shows in Europe,” he says. “I find stories where fashion and culture happen in unusual places.” Starting in 2016, Kurutz has reported on the American apparel and textile industry—or what remained of it. He’s written stories on Bayard Winthrop, the founder of American Giant on a quest to bring flannel back to the U.S., and Gina Locklear, who was determined to save her family’s sock business in Alabama.
Kurutz showed how they were taking big swings toward seemingly impossible goals. While neither mentioned “OKRs,” these founders set clear North Star goals, faced down daunting obstacles, and repeatedly demonstrated that execution is everything.
Kurutz’s stories grew into American Flannel, a 2024 book that introduced other founders and tackled larger questions around free trade and the consequences of outsourcing manufacturing.
The book seems even more relevant today. So we spoke to Kurutz about what Winthrop, Locklear, and other mission-driven founders have in common and what we can learn from them.
[This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
Can you speak to how these entrepreneurs are achieving radically ambitious objectives when the odds are against them?
I can think of no one who embodies the idea of OKRs more than Bayard Winthrop of American Giant. He left finance and came into the textile industry where the belief was “We can’t make it here anymore.” And Bayard just set about figuring out how to build in America the products that he wanted to make. He’s just very mission driven.
American Giant’s very first product was a hoodie. No one in the company, including Bayard, had experience in apparel. But he was like Steve Jobs boring in on tiny little details: grommets and drawstrings. Slate called it the world’s greatest hoodie and sales exploded. So when Bayard says, “We’re going to make a flannel shirt. It hasn’t been done in 20 years, and I don’t care what people are telling me, I’m going to do it,” people believed him. He wasn’t going to quit. He was going to work tirelessly until he achieved his goal.
That was inspiring—not just for his employees. Bayard had to resurrect the entire supply chain in an industry that had been beaten down. If you’re a textile or apparel person, in 2018, you’re just trying to get through the day. The people Bayard brought into the project found it exciting, because they were doing something new and ambitious. And I think that ambition was infectious.
You mentioned Gina Locklear who decided to start a new sock line to revive her family’s sock mill. Like Bayard, she is trying to reinvent her industry from the ground up—and execution plays a big part. How so?
If you want to make the most beautiful socks you can—and that is Gina’s goal—you need to be on the factory floor. In a sense, she’s painting with thread. One day I watched her make a new pattern of a Scotty dog with a collar that was three or four threads wide. She sat there and kept popping socks out of the machine until she got the exact design she wanted. She can’t live with the imperfections we’ve all become accustomed to. Gina won’t accept anything other than her vision.
Can you talk about the sense of mission these entrepreneurs share?
Bayard wants to prompt a dialogue about manufacturing in America. The towns that have lost their industries are not doing well. One of his missions is to honor and respect and bring life back to places in America that made things. Gina’s a quiet person, but she is made of iron inside. She grew up in a town that was the sock capital of the world until the early 2000s—with over a hundred mills, almost all of them now closed. She is someone who decided in their twenties to come back and said, “I’ll find a way to make it work.”
What do you say to people who think, “What’s so vital about a sweatshirt? What’s so important about Scotty dog socks?”
The example I always use is when the pandemic happened: What was the first thing we had a critical shortage of? It was PPE. Masks and gowns are a special kind of clothing, but still clothing. Nurses and doctors in the wealthiest country in the world were wearing garbage bags and hockey masks and raid ponchos from the New York Mets into hospital wards. It was completely absurd. But it shows the consequences of outsourcing manufacturing. We saw it with computer chips, prescription drugs. If a country cannot make essential things for its own people, it puts its citizens in a vulnerable position. The quest Bayard goes on to make that flannel shirt brings up so many questions: What have we lost as a country in terms of the ability to make things? What can we bring back? What’s worth bringing back? What are we even capable of bringing back?
A lot has changed since the book came out—how has that affected these founders?
From a business standpoint, an American-made apparel company is in a very good spot. I started writing in the first Trump administration, and it was clear the pendulum was swinging away from the “go-go globalism” of the previous 40 years. He completely reset the conversation—and that continued under Biden. For the first time in half a century, we were aligned on the importance of American manufacturing. Bayard, Gina and others in the book—they were in the wilderness for a lot of years. They’re no longer in the wilderness.
