This menswear mecca has something strange—perhaps more singular than standard—to share with the denim market and apparel retail sector at large: experience with Trump‘s taste for trade wars.
For context, Standard & Strange’s journey began in 2012 with a 200-square-foot shop in an Oakland, California back alley. This is where founders Jeremy Smith and Neil Berrett were producing Merino wool cycling jerseys for their line of biking apparel. Upon grasping the breadth of the market’s gap for “rugged basics and quality jeans,” however, the two switched gears to tap into this (presumably) more lucrative vertical.
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“We’ve grown quite a bit since then,” the co-founders said of the brand’s bootstrap founding to current global online presence. “We still believe in and stand for the same ideals as when we started: great products set in an inclusive environment.”
The indie retailer has since become a bicoastal menswear mecca, continuing its focus on USA-made goods and rare brands out of Japan and Europe across three brick-and-mortar stores. As Smith previously spent 20 years in technology before textiles, the retailer reflected on some lessons learned last time Americans were “getting yippy.”
“The idea of ‘we should make stuff in the USA’ is sound; unionized factory jobs created a strong middle class,” Smith told SJ Denim. “I grew up in a mill town—paper and steel—and, while most people weren’t affluent, most were comfortable and economically secure.”
Saving a retrospective on the benefits of equipping large swaths of skilled laborers with adequate infrastructure for a rainy day, Smith walked back his early days in the apparel industry. He hoped their brand, Cedar Cycling, could function as a tried-and-true, made-in-the-USA operation but hit sourcing blocks once beyond sewing.
“Our wool blend started in Australia,” he said. “Then to Korea for spinning, then Thailand for knitting and dyeing, with [additional elements] from Japan.”
Though the exact breakdown of just how many brands, exactly, are exclusively repped in the United States by Standard & Strange, many of those brands only have one or two other stockists in the country outside of the brand’s three brick-and-mortar outposts.
Those shops (in West Berkeley, Santa Fe and New York City) already run quite lean, Smith said, on the topic of any potential operational adjustments that Liberation Day may render relevant.
“We’re always looking for ways to lower fixed costs without damaging customer experience, but there’s a finite limit to how much we can carve out,” Smith said. As it stands, the bicoastal brand will continue business as usual, including working with vendors to “share the costs imposed by these unfair tariffs.”
His reasoning for why these blocks were, simply, not solvable was “not particularly sophisticated” at the time. This was informed by Smith’s salad days in the electric scooter sector’s C suite, running Unagi’s global logistics from 2017-2021.
With that former viewpoint in mind, Smith believed that “USA factories are cleaner, safer, and come with better pay.” He said this is “not always true,” however, as the garment work sector’s global nuances are not black and white. Case in point? Earning minimum wage is not always the equivalent of a living wage.
“Shorter supply chains are better for the environment,” the next creed reads. This too, Smith said, is complicated.
“Spending years on the road visiting factories, learning how things are made, setting up a factory,” Smith continued. “All of that taught me that, no, there’s not a simple answer to where we should make things.”
To quote an essay published by Temple University Press in 2005, the San Francisco Bay Area provides a good case study on industrial decentralization. In 1998, meanwhile, Karen Chapple’s “Economic Development for a Bipolar Industry” looked at endogenous economic development in practice using the case of apparel manufacturing in San Francisco.
The sewing factories Smith used around the Bay area, too, are gone and not coming back.
“The owners retired; their children have gone onto other careers,” he added. While there are fabrics made in the states from USA-sourced fibers, Smith said, they’re usually of the Berry Amendment variety or very expensive. As a result, he said, many made-in-USA brands sew imported textiles using imported machines. To have a true “made-in-USA” clothing industry, per Smith, the sector needs significant scale across the supply chain—something that cannot be fostered quickly. Presumably, all the required equipment would have to be imported, which is now “prohibitively expensive.”
“We could go on to build our own machines but then we need the electronics—the boards, the chips, so on,” Smith said. “You can see how this turns into turtles all the way down very quickly.”
Take, for example, the apparel manufacturer TAL. With Southeast Asian factories, the Hong-Kong based company can “turn out a woven button up shirt in 12 minutes for an extremely good price,” primarily driven by the amount of automation TAL has invested in, Smith said. He noted it’s “entirely possible” to do this here, though securing equipment alone isn’t enough.
“We need the skilled labor and production management infrastructure that simply does not exist here,” Smith said.
To that end, he highlighted a few success stories in reshoring. Los Angeles label Buck Mason, for example, bought a 150-year-old knitting mill in Pennsylvania in July 2023 to produce made-in-USA garments, according to an article published by Primer Magazine he had read. However, as the magazine mentions, the resulting T-shirts are $45—a price Smith agreed is “a hard sell to the average American.”
Smith said he found similar patterns when trying to counter-source or reshore electric scooter production during his Unagi Scooters stint.
“The timelines and costs were overwhelming,” Smith said of the struggling startup. Its access to components and subassemblies was “extremely difficult.” However, Unagi’s China-based factory was in the “center of an industrial ecosystem” and thus able to swap suppliers with greater haste than most.
At the time, there were “huge” tariffs on Chinese goods, per Smith, putting Silicon Valley’s (motorized) darling in the crosshairs of the first Trump administration’s trade war.
The resulting 25 percent tariffs—which threatened to “hobble” the nascent mode of hyper-local transportation—went into effect after Unagi was up and running, so the scooter startup hadn’t placed some $16 billion worth of Chinese e-bikes, give or take, into its financial model.
As such, Smith investigated counter-sourcing, a notably tricky endeavor on the low-startup level, “without much luck.” His extensive research on final assembly in the USA “turned out to be more expensive than just paying the tariffs,” he found.
“After reading all of the relevant Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTC) codes, I eventually found a loophole that got us through until the bicycle industry successfully lobbied to remove tariffs on e-bikes,” Smith said, noting Lime and Bird were able to use their scale and finances to get electric scooters included in that category.
“To summarize the feasibility problem: Without massive government intervention and funding, we cannot build the infrastructure needed to on-shore everything,” Smith said. “With the new tariffs at their current levels, we, effectively, need to start from scratch to build the tools to build tools to build products. It’s a decades-long process.”
