Domestic Apparel Manufacturing, Supply-Chain Logistics, & More

GEAR:30

BLISTER

Arts, Design, Skiing, Snow, Snowboarding, Sports, Outdoors, Bike, Technology, Gear

4.9 • 809 Ratings

🗓️ 29 July 2022

⏱️ 66 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A few years ago, Kitsbow undertook an incredibly ambitious plan to move to Old Fort, North Carolina, and bring all of their apparel production to the United States, after years of working with overseas factories. In doing so, they not only found a way to adapt to today’s challenging supply chain logistics, but they also trained an entirely new workforce and spearheaded the revitalization of their new hometown, which had been losing manufacturing jobs for decades. So we talked with their CEO, David Billstrom, about how they did that while weathering a global pandemic; how doing so has been a boon to the brand, their customers, and their local community; and how they hope to be a blueprint for other companies to do the same.

TOPICS & TIMES:

Covid shields and facemasks (4:57)
Moving to North Fort, NC (10:34)
The Toyota Way (25:15)
Domestic manufacturing & efficiency (31:53)
Revitalizing a community (38:05)
Employee purchase as a Public Benefit Corporation (52:54)
David’s Big Idea (1:00:28)
What We’re Celebrating (1:02:20)

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everybody, welcome back to Gear 30 on the Blister Podcast Network. I'm Jonathan Ellsworth,
0:11.2	and you can check out everything we're doing and reviewing over at blisterreview.com.
0:18.8	Last week on Gear 30, we re-aired a conversation that took place over on our
0:25.0	off-the-couch podcast.
0:27.7	And honestly, I got so much feedback from that and people talking about how much they
0:33.2	liked that conversation and sort of thanks for getting them to check out a running podcast,
0:38.9	even though they don't necessarily consider themselves like die hard runners.
0:43.6	So it made me think, well, let's do sort of a similar thing where we repost here on Gear 30
0:52.9	a fantastic conversation that originally aired over on our Bikes and Big
0:59.6	Ideas podcast.
1:01.3	Now, I went through this with our Bikes and Big Ideas podcast host, David Gowley.
1:07.3	David is also our bike editor.
1:09.3	We talked to Luke Kappa about what he thought would be
1:11.9	the best bikes and big ideas episode to pull over here onto Gear 30. And we all settled on
1:18.2	this outstanding conversation that David had with the CEO of Kitsbo. Now, this conversation
1:26.8	has maybe only become more timely, since supply chain issues
1:32.8	are absolutely still something that all manufacturers are facing. And in this conversation with
1:40.6	Kitsbo's CEO, David Bilstrom, you're going to hear some conversations about
1:46.0	supply chain issues and domestic manufacturing and all of the logistics of these things.
1:53.8	Whether companies want to be thinking about these things or not, well, they're currently
1:58.8	kind of being forced to. And for those of us who
2:02.6	just love gear and wonder why it's been so difficult to get a lot of gear, well, then this
	...

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