Bringing Back the American Hoodie

Published Dec 8, 2022, 5:05 AM

Bayard Winthrop is the founder and CEO of American Giant. Bayard's problem is this: How do you make clothes in America -- and compete in a global economy?

Today's show is about the future of American manufacturing. But it is also about something very simple: A sweatshirt made in America. It costs $138, and it is wildly popular.

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Pushkin. Today's show is about some very big, very timely ideas, globalization, supply chains, the future of American manufacturing. Today's show is also about something very simple. A sweatshirt. A plain cotton sweatshirt with a zipper and a hood and a pocket to put your hands in when they get cold. The sweatshirt is made in America, it costs one hundred and thirty eight dollars, and it is wildly popular. I'm Jacob Goldstein, and this is what's your problem. My guest today is buyered Win, founder and CEO of American giant. Byron's problem is this, how do you make clothes in America and compete in a global economy. I grew up in the East Coast, and I grew up in a wealthy town in southern Connecticut where all the successful parents that I was around worked on, at least in my imagining of it, worked on Wall Street. And I got pretty fixated on that as a young kid and wanted to wanted to figure out a way to make money, I think, and kind of put my head down and did that for als of my college years and eventually got a job on Wall Street and realized pretty quickly that it was the wrong thing for me, and I had always grown up I always loved consumer products. I love clothing, and I have these very strong memories as a kid of my first pair of blue jeans and my first flannel shirt, my first Champion sweatshirt, all these things that these very sort of strong associated memories I was young, and I think that sort of informed for me an idea that I wanted to make something. So Bayard started working at companies that made stuff that sold physical products, and that was great for him, but those companies, like a lot of other American companies at the time, were moving production overseas, and that created a new problem for byired. The more I did that, the more I became really clear about both a disconnect from the product itself and there was a real loss attached to that, and a feeling that I couldn't control quality as well, and I didn't feel that sense of responsibility and stewardship over the stuff that I was making. And then there was also a human part of that that I felt that these people that had built relationships with that we were providing jobs for, that we were picking up and leaving. And as I got older, that really started to wear on me, and I began to contemplate the idea of American giant with a really simple idea, which was, I'd grown up around these great American brands Levies and Wrangler and wool Rich and all these amazing brands that had built very high quality products stood for something in my imagining of it, and I felt that the particularly an apparel, there were no brands like that left, and I wanted to do something different. I felt that not only could we make beautiful product here nearby, but also do it in a way that was consistent with our values, that respected environmental laws and human rights laws. And I thought the moment was right. E commerce was emerging, there was a bunch of advancement that happened in manufacturing and technology and data that I felt could build sort of a new American brand. And so in two thousand and twelve, we launched with a single product, a sweatshirt, a full zip sweatshirt. I'm wearing it now actually, and that sweatshirt we kind of poured my life into. I sort of everybody I spoke to told me it could be done in the United States anymore, and we battled our way through that. In real partnership with a bunch of people that remain suppliers of ours today. And late that first year, Slate magazine wrote an article about that sweatshirt. They called it the greatest hoodie ever made, and that kind of changed everything for us. I looked up that Slate article. It was published on December fourth, twenty twelve, so pretty much exactly ten years ago. So I don't know. Congratulations your ten year anniversary of making it as a company. Thank you. We're gonna do We're gonna do something special for that anniversary, by the way, So I appreciate you noticing that. Okay, So like tell me about seeing that article, Like someday, what happened? You get up to somebody email it to you. What happened? Yeah, So the article hit and I got a phone call on the fourth at about five pm from the people that were managing our website and in a panic, and they said, you see what's happening here. I had no idea. I said, know what's going on? They said, we are getting orders now, we are getting hundreds of orders a minute. We would you get in a typical day, one hundred orders in a day? Probably not even actually back then, this is like a good news bad news situation. You're like, great, but oh my god, we don't have the sweatshirts. Well, so in the in the short time it was it was sort of unfettered great news. I mean, it was really what you hope for dream about as as an entrepreneur starting something. It really was wonderful. There was a there were tins of challenges like could we get the servers, could we get the site loaded the web? Yeah, yeah, so there's some short term crises, but but big picture it was really great. But pretty soon what happened is, you know, by the next morning, we'd sold out of everything we had. We had a bunch of stuff that was in the supply chain coming, yarn and fabric coming that would carry us all the way through till about June. So six months ahead we said, boy, why don't we put up a blog post and say we're sold out. But you know, Jacob, if you want a sweatshirt, you can give us your name, in your size, and your preferred color and we'll ship one to you and it may not get there till May or June. And that blog we sold out of everything in the pipeline within a day. Or two. And so that's when things got really challenging. I mean, I think we then had to sit down. Here we were in December sixth or seventh. We thought, the article has just hit. It's Christmas. Everybody's in a kind of a holiday buying mood. We're not going to get back in stock at the earliest until July. Is anybody going to care? Then? Should we order a hundred sweatshirts or a thousand or ten thousand? I mean that was a fool's errand to try to predict that well, and we were no better about it than you know, you and I might be trying to predict the future. And so we made decisions, we said, and by the way, those were scary decisions, because if we decided to bring in ten thousand sweatshirts and we only sold a hundred, and we would have bankrupted the company. Right, You've got to you've got to pay for the materials. You've got to pay for the materials now, and you don't know if you're going to sell a thousand or ten thousand. Yeah, And going through our head was in July, it's going to be ninety five in New York City, and no one's going to be buying a sweatshirt and this article is going to be old news. And so just to wrap the story up, what happened was that demand kept going. And one of the things I think we did in retrospect that was smart is we reached out to our customers and and we sort of have been this since the beginning. We were just very honest with them and we said, look, this is what's going on, and this is one of the challenges about domestic supply, and this is the situation that ran and all of our I mean maybe not all of them, they seemed like all of them were like cheering us on, saying that is the best. I don't worry. As soon as you can. If it's a year from now, I don't care. And people sat in lists wait lists that lasted for months. And then here's the kicker. In June or July of that year, I don't remember when, and far How checked back in with the business. I don't even know if you talk to me about it. But he wrote a follow up article that was titled the only problem with the greatest hoodie in the World is you have to wait six months to get it, And that did it again. It like tipped us back into this chaos. And so anyway, we were in this rhythm of trying to predict the future, probably being conservatives, so we didn't get too far of our skis financially, and we were constantly trying to catch up with demand without over committing to inventory. And that went on for long time and actually outship our capacity of our facility that we were making the sweatshirts in at that time, which was out here in California. We purchased a facility in North Carolina and had to scramble to get that up and running. So it was a chaotic time, but incredibly grateful for it because I don't think we'd be here today without without that, you know, that year of insanity and then all the demand that followed. And so when you're in that position of being essentially having demand massively outstrip your supply, you have some set of choices. Don't sell a sweatshirt to everybody who wants one, Tell people they're gonna have to wait a long time, raise the price would be a classic response to that. I mean, which of those do you wind up doing over the course of that year or so well, we talked about all of them. I'm talking about all of them. I mean, yeah, there were people that were saying, like, go to China, Like what are you doing? Like go go get on the phone and have the switcher made overseas. There was every option you could think. I was on the table and and but to your question, I think we put a couple of stakes in the ground. We haven't. We did this with the pandemic too. It's always clarifying to me to figure out, what do you what are your core principles, what do you believe in One was that we were not gonna we won't go sacrifice quality, We weren't going to change our philosophy about how we made things, and we were gonna be honest with our customers. And and that looked like big, big delays. And you know, people ask me a lot like co did you do that on purpose? And boy, it's great to be backward And I'll tell you that um with the business was great. But but but having customers have to wait for that long, he is asking an awful lot of customers And that was not Uh. I wouldn't want to repeat that again, but that's the route. And it was just to sell sweatshirt, said, you can't swell all the sweatshirts people want. It's got to be a very mixed kind of blessing. Well, there's that, and there's the there's just the reality of the deep sense of trust that a customer puts in you and they decided to spend their money on something you make. And when you do that and you can't fulfill it and you're asking them to wait and it's gonna be another month, and this just changed it. Just you don't want to be in that situation. So it was a it was a it restored a lot of my faith in humanity and um and as I said earlier, I think we were totally honest about the whole process and that helped. But it was a it was a rocky couple of years there, for sure. So okay, so that's the that's the dramatic beginning. UM I wanted to talk about the present now. I would imagine in the long run, to make clothes for any significant market in the US, you have to do a lot of innovating, right Like you have to figure out how to be efficient, how to use technology. And so I'm curious what you have learned yeah, I mean, I think it just if I may just to kind of frame it up a little bit, because I think it's important to kind of contextualize it somewhat. I think if you, as a framing principle, say we are going to make things in the United States, Let's say, as a country, you make that decision, we're gonna we're gonna make We're gonna be a bit more protectionist in our leanings. And I would suggest that company countries like Japan, South Korea, Germany, Switzerland have adopted slightly more protectionist policies than the United States have, and as a result, they have to turn inwards to say, how do we remain competitive in a highly competitive world. The United States, on the other hand, largest marketplace in the world. The cost of entire United States is very very low. We've we've made a decision to have trade barriers be very low. And the result is is that there's overstating this. To make the point, there's less incentive to invest in capabilities domestically if there's an alternative right around the corner for apparel companies, let's say to say, why don't I go overseas? Sure? Well, I mean it's also the case though, if you look at Germany or South Korea, basically other rich countries that are more protectionists and have manufacturing, they're not making a lot of clothes, right like those companies. They're making high tech things where you have highly skilled workers using fancy equipment. They're using their sort of natural international advantage, right, and so clothes seem particularly hard. Tell me how you do it, like, so, I'll give you a couple of examples and maybe want to go a little bit deeper on. In a typical apparel manufacturing facility, what you'll see is what it's called batch sewing. So you'll see a line of operators made five operators in a line, and they'll be sewing a sweatsher and each operator will have a single task. It might be Jacob's task to sew a sleeve onto a body, it might be mine to attach a hood to a body. And the next person's going to attach the zippers, and the final person's going to attach the labels. There's a bunch of ancillary problems with that. One is is that you've got a massive amount of inventory tied up and in working process, and so you are you're the amount of inventory that's sitting on the floor is huge. You've got quality control problems. So let's say Jacob had a long land out in the town last night and he's attaching sleeves to bodies. He's doing incorrectly. Catching that qualities problem oftentimes takes hours, might take the next operator after a thousand units have moved down the line to him or her where they get caught. So there's a whole bunch of things there that are maybe a bit harder to see. I call them soft costs or hidden costs. And so one response that we've done there is we've moved that batch approach to sewing into what we call module or sew or bump. So and that is getting those same operators. First, they've got to stand up. That's a big, big change. To get operators to get out of their seats and stand all day, that's a big ask. And then have operators to cross trains, so that Jacob doesn't only know how to attach sleeves to bodies, but he now knows how to attach sippers and hoods and labels. He can do every function. One thing that that does is it eliminates a vast amount of your working process that's a big deal. It implements quality control that every step. That's a big deal, so you catch quality cotrol issues the minute they happen. The other thing is if you are productive as a team, which most of our teams are, and you beat your expected output, you get bonused for every additional unit you make in a given day. They're they're making more money, they're learning more, they're not just doing a single operation that's kind of a deadening on one thing all day, every day. So that that's an example of one of the changes that we've made. The reason why you don't see that more in the US is that the capital investments big. You've got to you've got to invest in the equipment. Number one, the stand up couldn't cost a lot of money. Number two, you've got to train your operators, cross train all your operators. That takes time. So let me ask you this, I mean, why couldn't someone at a factory in Asia do that? Or could theyre they you could? You could, yeah, and you and you do see that sometimes in Asia. The paradox is that there isn't a ton of an incentive to do it. But you do see it. You see it domestically too. You see it in Asia. You see some of the some of the facilities in Asia modernizing and using TOTA systems. I'm not sure I'm right about this. I think there's less of the sentive to do it in textiles because you can throw cheap labor at the problem. In place like that, there's less of the capital equipment. I guess part of what I'm looking for is, like, you know, besides sort of branding and price, which are clearly important, like what advantages do you get out of being in the US, And maybe one of them is, you know, more access to capital so that you can buy the fancier machines and a more highly skilled perhaps workforce that can you know, respond to this innovation. I don't know. I think that's I think it's one. I think I think the more profound ones are proximity to market, right, So, I think I think that you when you're close by from a manufacturing standpoint, your ability and my judgment to have higher quality control standards, closer relationships with your suppliers and is enhanced. So having spent a lot of time manufacturing things overseas, I can just tell you when you're five time zones away and a language barrier in between. It's much harder to on top of quality. I don't care what anybody says, it's just hard. You spend a lot of time on planes and trying to figure out what's going on, and oftentimes you find stuff when you know, too late, when it's on a truck or on a boat, and you're you know, you've got quality failures on their way to you. But look, Jake, the bottom line is it costs more money to make stuff. Here's what's sort of the frontier now, like on the manufacturing side, Like, what's the kind of frontier problem you're trying to solve now? So we are working really hard now to take some of our learnings and pushing them up stream into our fabric providers and our dyers and our finishers and stuff, and getting them to work with us in inventory and responsiveness. So for example, you know, using working with let's say Carolina Cotton Works, one of our key suppliers in Gaffey, South Carolina, so that we can when we need another six thousand yards, we can let them know, pick them up a day or two later, and move them up the road by you know, in a few hours and be going again and constantly trying to lower work in process and increase response times that we can be into market much faster. So that is a game of increments. That really is a game of increments. And it seems like that's sort of abstractly how you get manufacturing clusters, right, you have these related businesses. I mean, if you go to lots of places in Asia where they make everything, there's like a million different companies that do each other stage and they all work with each other. I mean it seems like that's what you're trying to build at a regional level, basically in the southeast US. Yeah. Yeah, if you begin to build a let's say a fabric supply capability that is supplying American giant quickly high quality, they can pivot that and look at a poulstry for furniture. They can pivot that and look at a poultry for automobiles. And so there is this spidering out that happens, is that capability develops. It really does build, to your point a network of suppliers and capability regionally. So if you look like places like Gaffe, South Carolina or Spartanburg, South Carolina, they are becoming manufacturing centers. Gaffney place where we get a lot of our yarn out of Gaffey, we get a lot of our fabric out of Gaffney. Gaffey has got a really vital and vibrant little manufacturing textile industry that's growing. And the more people that work there, the better they get, the more customers they attract, them where they can expand outside of specific industries. So that's absolutely right. In a minute, Bayern and I will talk about the costs and benefits of free trade. We'll also talk about why the cost of his American Giant Classic hoodie went from seventy nine dollars to one hundred and thirty eight dollars. Now back to the show, I think it's worth talking about cost and price for a minute. In that article ten years ago, it said your classic hoodie was seventy nine dollars, which adjusted for inflation, is right around one hundred dollars today. The Classic hoodie costs one hundred and thirty eight dollars today, so it's a lot more expensive even adjusting for inflation. Tell me about tell me about the price, Like, how do you how do you arrive at that price? So I think a few things. I think for starters, you know, one of the things is, as when you start off a company and you have an idea you probably can relate to this is that you make a product, you pour your soul into it, and there's an inherent insecurity about gosh, is it really worth what we're investing in this thing? And will customers pay for it? And so we had underpriced the garment in the beginning, and I think a lot of that was frankly just insecurity. In my part, I just feeling like, you know, maybe we don't need to make much of a margin here, because if we charge, you know, one hundred and nine dollars for this thing, will people ever pay for that? And I think that was my reference about the Slate article in the beginning, about really kind of taking me to give me a boost a confidence that I feel like you needed. Now. At the same time, one of my board members said to me, congratulations, you've just sold a bunch of under margin products a bunch of people and so and so he was, in a not very subtle way saying, you think that you're what you're standing for that supporting US jobs and US communities and that level of quality is worth something. Prove it whether your customers will pay for it. It's a good question, good point, good challenge. So that's part of the answer. Part of the answer to is that is that over the last couple of years, cotton, our inputs have increased a lot. Really, two things have increased. The cost of cotton got very, very expensive over the last couple of years, number one, and the cost of domestic labor got a lot of expensive. We couldn't get people to work in the supply chain, and so those two inputs drove our costs up a ton, and cottons come down a bit, labor is not. So it's accombination of all those things. And you know, I think my hope is is that there's an opportunity to bring that one thirty eight down if input costs come back down. But the reality is we are you know, we are subject to to things like domestic cotton prices. So you mentioned labor costs going up. It's obviously been a tight labor market nationally. You know, one of the things I was curious about is what would it mean for your business if Congress raised the national minimum wage to fifteen dollars. My answer to this is always it's an incomplete question, because if if what you're saying is, should Congress raise them in wage to fifteen or twenty dollars an hour, but at the same time allow every textile business to avoid those minimum wage laws and make stuff in China, All you're doing is you're putting out a bunch of people and businesses out of business. You're just making it incredibly difficult digging textiles to compete. So so would it if the Congress raised the minimum wage of fifteen dollars an hour and didn't change it, would it would basically put you out of business? Is that? What? Is that? What? Now? I don't if it puss out business, but it would. It would It would increase our input costs, and so we would then have to you know, we we can just absorb that right. But to answer your questions, simply, if midium waves laws go up, our input costs go up, it means that we have to pass those costs onto our customers. And so do I my favor of mindum ways laws. Absolutely do I think that they should get higher. Absolutely. I think we should just have trade agreements that reflect that. That provides some measure of protection to the men and women that are trying to build you know, good working class jobs and communities all across the country and not get just hammered by competition for places that are not compliant with those rules. And so in that universe, we have a higher minimum wage in the US and new rules that either impose tougher labor standards, say on China, or or impose a higher tariff on imports from China. And so what we have in the end then is more expensive sweatshirts made in the US. Your sweatshirt is more expensive, and so are sweatshirts imported from, say China. Yeah. So I think forty years ago we said, hey, listen, we're gonna trade to everybody. And by doing that, what's going to happen is China is going to be dragged into the modern world and they're going to be a really good partner to us. And in fact what's happened is over the last forty years we've had a massive transfer of capability and capital to China, and China's become a more intractable foe, not the Chinese people, the Chinese government, a more intractable float for the faux of ours today when they were forty years ago. On the other hand, had our trade agreement been based on what I think Janet Yellen is referring to as friend shoring, meaning we're we're gonna do business with people that share basic values with us, things like freedom of the press, freedom of speech, rule of law, minimum wage standards. Then you have access to the United States marketplace. That would include everyone from Israel to France, to Germany, to South Korea to Japan, all countries that basically adhere to a set of standards that we view as being basically human values. I think that is the type of trade agreement where if you want to have access to the American marketplace, you've got to adhere to a set of standards that would translate over time, hopefully into consumers operating a bit more maybe European or Japanese or South Korean, where there is a bit less consumption, a bit higher emphasis on quality. Things cost a bit more, but they last to think a bit longer. And if you look at the underlying data in the textile worlds, it's discompanying. I mean, you know, the average I'll just bore you as statistics for a second. The average American family today spends about sixteen hundred dollars on apparel and footwear per family. In nineteen eighty, in today's dollars, the average American family spent about sixteen hundred dollars per family, So that in dollars to dollars has not changed much. But in nineteen eighty it represented about eighty items. Today it represents about one hundred and eighty five items. And the average American family throws away about eighty pounds of clothing a year, and so there's been a structural shift among the American marketplace towards cheaper stuff that we throw away, and I think that's got terrible implications for the environment for us as consumers, for our ability to provide good jobs to places that need them, and so I would advocate for that. I think you have to do it over time, and you get through it slowly. My preference as a consumer would be to be able to buy clothes that are made in the developing world ethically, basically right, because I do feel like lots of people in the developing world, like more than a billion have gotten out of poverty in that forty year period because of trade, and that that is basically good, and I agree with you that lots of bad things have come along with that. And I'm curious, like, are there any apparel companies that you think manufacture in the developing world and do so in an ethical fashion? It's very very hard. Yeah, So I appreciate your your not being Yeah, yeah, I appreciate the dream. Yeah. What about Patagonia, Like I kind of believe Patagonia, Like, am I right to believe Patagonia? I think I think you are right to believe Patagonia. But if if you if you read what Patagonia says, they recognize that they operate in an imperfect manner. I mean they say we try to do more more good than harm. And I think inherent in that statement is we make things in China, and inherently making things in places that are far away means they have to sit on container ships for long distances. To me, either way, I agree with you. By the way, I think trade and capitalism lift people out of poverty. No no better way to do it than I'm aware of. But I think that we also have to reconcile to what extent are we are we comfortable with trading with countries that maybe practice things that are you know, our human rights violations or that environmental violations. Do we care? And if we care, what do we do about it? And I would suggest that what you do about it is that you make trade deals with countries that that respect basic standards of behavior. Those would include, for me, democratic elections, free and fair, freedom of speech, free, free a good and functioning judicial process, and they're Unfortunately we trade with a bunch of countries that don't. Don't Are there countries in the developing world that meet those standards? For you? Yeah, I think a lot of countries in our hemisphere. By the way, Mexico are much better, Yes, much better, hunt us El Salvador, Mexico. There's a lot of good and that that that reshowing to this hemisphere is happening quite quickly, and that is a very good thing. It's environmentally good, doesn't have to travel so far, doesn't to go on containerships forever. And those countries by and large are genuinely trying to have good institutional functional norms that we can so yes, absolutely there are yep and I and just to be clear, I think the one end of the spectrum is a you know, total protectionist that that doesn't work for anybody. I just think we have to ask some questions about what should be in our trade agreements, and how do we think about domestic capability. And you know, I think the counter to your argument about I would love to have textiles in a developing world, me too, But I also want to have good vibrant jobs for people. You come from my supply chain. Some time, go to some of these rural communities in the Southeast, and you know, you see lots and lots of towns that have no jobs. And that's a that is a tough thing to reconcile too. That you know, we've we've got a responsibility there as well, that we've got to figure out ways for young men and women, maybe they only have high school degrees, that are looking for jobs to help, you know, help chip in, help pay their way. We've got to prove I think we've got to provide good, viable, dignify jobs to those people's safe jobs, jobs where they can move up. And I think it is a shame that we let our biggest companies ignore that. And I think they are ignoring that. I think they're they're they're choosing a cheaper way that is, we're turning a huge amount of value to their shareholders, and they're not wrestling with a lot of the things that I think societally we need them to be wrestling with. Right now, we'll be back in a minute with the lightning round. Now it's time for the lightning round. Let's close with the lightning round. Just a bunch of questions somewhat lighter in tone than this conversation we've been having. Are you ready to pivot to the lightning round? Ready? So? I know you used to work at a snowshoe company, and I'm a big fan of skiing and cross country skiing and sledding, but I never really got into snowshoeing. Can you like briefly sell me on snowshoeing. Oh that's an easy one, Jacob. Yeah, snowshoeing is it requires? If you can walk, you can snowshoe, no lift ticket required. There's nothing quite as magical as parking on the side of a road and putting on a pair of snowshoes and walking really twenty yards into a snowy forest and suddenly it is silent and you are immersed in wilderness and quietude. Unlike anything you look experience, and so I think you can do it with families, young people, old people. You don't need to pay to do it. I just think it's magical. I think it's magical and it's a it's a great fun activity for the whole family. If you were going to start another company that didn't make clothes, what would you do? Uh? I love to make pizza, So I want to start a pizzaia in some beautiful spot. What. I don't care about making money anymore. That's your dream and that's your escape. Your escape fantasy has moved to Napa. I don't think it's Napa. I don't think it's the North. I think it's getting back home. Yeah. Well, last question, Uh, what's one piece of advice you'd give to someone trying to solve a hard problem? I don't give up. I really think that the mistake that that that entrepreneurs make a lot is that they don't keep their legs pumping against the blocking sled. I think that you know, eventually things start to break your way. It's not always the case, but I think I have found that when I'm at my most tenacious and I hang in there, the longest things break you away eventually good. I got one more. What's it? What's a tip to what's a tip to make clothes last longer once you've bought something like, I like my clothes to last a long time. I don't like getting buy good stuff by good stuff, I know. But once I've bought good stuff, what do I do? Buy good stuff? Were wash them less? Huh? I mean, I don't know if you got kids or not. I got kids. You know, they will wear a sweatshirt and it's in the it's in the laundry pile. It's like, no, no, no, that that sweatshirt does not need unless you pitch your spaghetti on it. If the pitch that's my advice. Ask me a question again, And the next time I masted, I'll say, sniff the pits. Don't wash you need to? Yeah, buy good stuff and and wash them. Don't wash them that often. That that I don't make your clothes last a lot longer. I try and hang dry my stuff. Am I fooling myself that that helps? No? No, no, no, no, that's right. I mean that's right. I mean you put you put fabric, you have cotton, You have cotton to be caught in garments and and synthetics. You know, they are under high heat. Not it's not great for them and they get banged around a lot. So yeah, hang, drawing is great, Okay, yeah, but just wash them less and you'll be doing a good for the environment while you're at it. Byard Winthrop is the founder and CEO of American Giant. Today's show was produced by Edith Ruslow, edited by Robert Smith, and engineered by Amanda k. Long. I'd love to get your suggestions for who else I should talk to for the show. You can email us at Problem at Pushkin dot fm, or you can find me at Twitter at Jacob Goldstein. I am Jacob Goldstein and we will be back next week with another episode of What's Your Problem.

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