Carhartt to bring rugged brand to trendy Midtown

Carhartt, the 126-year-old Michigan maker of rugged jeans, jackets and work apparel — yet now also finding new fans in hipsters who value authenticity — will open its first Detroit retail store in late May or early June.

Dearborn-based Carhartt will announce plans today to lease a three-story building at 5800 Cass Ave. in Detroit's Midtown area, just south of the I-94 freeway, which will house the flagship retail store and an attached parking garage with 75 spaces.

"We have long had a desire and need to open a store in our company's birthplace and what many of us at Carhartt consider our own hometown," said CEO and Chairman Mark Valade, the fourth-generation head of the family owned company founded by Hamilton Carhartt in 1889.

Carhartt's plans are the latest in a string of retail and construction activities in the Midtown area, ranging from a Whole Foods Market to the HopCat craft beer bar, Selden Standard restaurant, Shinola watches and bicycles and the entertainment district taking shape around the Ilitch family's new hockey arena project.

Carhartt, with 4,900 employees worldwide including more than 400 at Dearborn headquarters, has long sold the vast majority of its products through wholesale outlets, but began establishing Carhartt-owned retail stores about five years ago — and now has 16 such locations nationwide.

"We had a lot of people asking when we would have a Michigan store," said Tony Ambroza, Carhartt's senior vice president of marketing, "and since the beginning, we've been trying to find the right location. We always felt the first one in Michigan should be in Detroit."

The long-vacant, 51,000-square-foot art deco structure in Midtown was built in 1928 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 1986. It housed the Marmon Motors auto dealership and later Cass Motor Sales. Carhartt will use the first floor for retail; plans for the second- and third-floor renovations haven't yet been decided.

Carhartt has experienced strong growth of late, adding 1,300 workers in the past three years. The private company does not usually make its financial numbers public, but said in late 2011 that total sales then exceeded $500 million — and Ambroza told me Tuesday that it has continued to achieve year-over-year sales gains since then.

Part of Carhartt's growth has come from a rebound in construction and manufacturing activity, but a big factor has also been adoption by urban hipsters of the brand best known for sturdy work clothes. Example: Carhartt has collaborated with New Holland Brewing on a new craft beer, Carhartt Woodsman Barrel-Aged Pale Ale.

After more than a century of focusing sales efforts on farms, ranches and construction sites, Carhartt licensed the brand name to independent retail shops in Oregon and Salt Lake City, then opened its first urban retail store in 2011 in Chicago. Its most recent retail locations have opened in Indianapolis and Cincinnati.

"We're excited to be part of the Midtown neighborhood, with so much development going on around Wayne State University and the cultural center," Ambroza said. The retail store itself will employ 12-15 full-time workers, he said.

Noting that Carhartt also is a sponsor of the Detroit Red Wings and the Detroit Tigers, the new retail location also made sense as construction contractors will be very busy nearby in the next few years, working on the $650-million Ilitch entertainment district, plus M-1 Rail and other projects along the Woodward corridor.

The opening of the new Detroit flagship store will coincide neatly, Ambroza noted, with a new national advertising campaign for the Carhartt Force brand of warm-weather work clothing such as self-wicking shirts.

All in all, it's a pretty clever approach, hooking all kinds of customers, from hipsters and techies to the country-club tennis set by suggesting that Carhartt's clothes are tougher than what you probably need, as one recent ad did, proclaiming that Force wasn't designed for a 90-minute tennis lesson, but rather for a 12-hour workday.

Contact Tom Walsh: 313-223-4430 or twalsh@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @TomWalsh_freep.