Hey, It’s Just a Hoodie… Right?

Maine apparel manufacturer American Roots turns 10 this month and here’s hoping you’ll bookmark them. Co-founded by married couple Ben & Whitney Waxman, the company’s first decade in business is an eye-opening tale of grit, a yarn expertly spun by journalist Rachel Slade in her new book, Making It in America. “They would build a community around making,” Slade writes of our heroes’ mission and theirs is a beautiful do-the-right-thing story. It’s also bananas-level stressful. As the Sharks say, the Waxmans go “all in,” cashing in their retirement accounts, mortgaging the house, and raising friends & family money to launch in earnest with eight sewing machines. Confidants said they were nuts; they were. Never mind how hard it is to sell a premium product by tapping into your prospects’ supposed value system, there are potholes at every turn: low-quality raw goods, language barriers, machine failures, on and on. It’s a white-knuckle ride.

One of the threads (yup, ongoing puns fully intended) throughout is the fair treatment of staff, with the Waxmans even hoping to one day bequeath the company to their employees. But a funny thing happened on the way to the future: to turn a profit, the sowers must be robotically efficient. Enter a Southern gentleman as consultant, who along with his decades of manufacturing experience and Kentucky drawl introduced Taylorism to the American Roots factory floor. In the 19th Century, Frederick Winslow Taylor “regarded people who worked with their hands – laborers – as machines.” With a stopwatch and incentive pay, you too can employ this one person/one task model such that productivity can be “uncoupled from the messiness of humanity.” Ugly stuff adopted by Ford, Lenin, and Stalin and here’s the thing: it’s wrong but hardly inaccurate. To make clothing and margin, one must count on employees with laser focus whose mindless habits contribute to the elimination of wasted movement, motion, and time. I’ll go there so you won’t have to: Chinese laborers seem good with this. Do ours?

Slade began this project at the onset of Covid with a piece in Down East magazine. (Not familiar? Stop by my in-laws’ in Cape Neddick. There’ll be a dozen issues in the bathroom.) With encouragement from its then editor, the book was born and you’d be hard-pressed to find a work today that’s more topical. She takes us to mills where we hear the clack-clacking in the corner of a nearly empty building. We go on road trips to source cotton from dirtbag middlemen all too happy to rip off wide-eyed neophytes. We ride shotgun in interviews alongside interpreters, crucial when building a multi-lingual team. And naturally tariffs. The author is pro on this controversial matter, as in the best time to plant a pine tree and invoke substantial tariffs on imports was decades ago, and the next-best time is now. The final sentence sounds like she’s planning a run for office or a side hustle as political speechwriter: “[T]he rebirth of manufacturing,” she writes, “offers immigrants, New Americans, high school grads, skilled workers, tech savants, and fiercely independent-minded entrepreneurs an opportunity to forge new, more resilient American dream.” It’s complicated but commands debate. Read it, then decide.

If you have anything to say about this – or book recommendations – kindly post below (rather than emailing me) to spark conversation. Thank you!