It used to be a sweatshirt was just a sweatshirt—something we grab from the depths of our closets and throw on when we’re feeling lazy and sartorially uninspired. And technically, a sweatshirt is still just a sweatshirt, though if you ask someone from American Giant, they’d politely disagree. “The sweatshirt is the second most iconic silhouette behind the blue jeans,” says Bayard Winthrop. “But for a long time, no one was really passionate about sweatshirts.”

Winthrop is the founder and CEO of American Giant, a San Francisco apparel company that makes basics like t-shirts, hoodies and most recently, varsity jackets. He started the company in early 2012 after leaving a position with fellow SF apparel brand Chrome, with a simple, ambitious goal: Make the world’s best sweatshirt, and make it totally in the United States. “To me, the sweatshirt category has been filled with a bunch of poor quality product. It’s all about churning and burning and cranking out a bunch of sloppy looking stuff,” he says. “We wanted to reset expectations about what a sweatshirt could be.”

In the two years American Giant has been shipping hoodies, it’s organically garnered an unbelievable amount of hype. The sweatshirts have been called the “greatest hoodie ever made,” “the world’s best sweatshirt,” and are perhaps best described by a customer who wrote, “it feels like I’m wearing a hug.” It’s true—American Giant does make a damn fine hoodie, and for a reasonable price ($69-$89). But it makes you wonder, what’s behind all of this praise? If you ask Winthrop, it all goes back to the company’s fastidious design process.

The varsity jacket up close. Image: American Giant

>'It really does take a mechanic to make something fit right.'

An Apple Vet Behind the Scenes ——————————

When Winthrop talks about American Giant’s design process, he likes to talk in metaphors. “It’s not that different from making a great meal,” he explains. “If you buy great basil, great tomatoes, great pasta and olive oil, it’s going to taste good. If you buy shitty stuff…”

If Old Navy is the Olive Garden, American Giant is positioning itself as the tiny trattoria tucked away in Little Italy. The company prides itself on a quality, not quantity mindset, which begins with materials. For example, the heavyweight cotton used in most of their products is picked in the U.S., which is then processed and knitted in American factories by local workers. Sure, American Giant’s sourcing and design process is charmingly wholesome, but a piece of clothing begins well before a seamstress threads her first needle.

Back when the company was an infant, it hired its first creative director, Philipe Manoux. Manoux had previously worked at Apple on the first iPhone and brought with him a technologists’ mindset, which Winthrop found could be easily applied to clothing design. “It’s almost the way you would design an iPhone,” he says. “You go deep on all of the little details that collectively make it a great product.” In an iPhone that might be things like interaction intuitiveness, back lighting, the bevel on the edge of the glass.

For a company that makes clothes, the considerations are different. Fabric, paneling, construction and fit are the main focuses, explains Winthrop. “All those components feel really mechanical to me,” he says. “It really does take a mechanic to make something fit right and build it correctly.”

Added details like double-needle threading mean seamstresses are able to take much longer on each piece of clothing. Image: American Giant

Assessing Needs —————

Manoux has since returned to industrial design, but in his place he left a workflow which has informed the company’s expansion into other products like sweatpants and jackets. “We first start by asking, what does this article of clothing need to do for the consumer?” says Winthrop. “You break down your design approach to almost a needs-assessment level.”

For the company’s newest piece of clothing, a limited-edition varsity jacket, the team of designers was most concerned with creating a piece one step up from the hoodie that a man or woman could wear to a nice dinner without eliciting an eye roll from their significant other. It’s dual-colored riff on their baseball jacket, and like all of American Giant’s pieces, it’s goal is to feel good on.

Winthrop says the company looks to unnoticeable design details—things like double needle stitching, a calculatedly-stretchy cuff, reinforced fabric at the elbows, shoulder and torso panels —to set their products apart from that of other apparel companies. It's the small things, like the way a garment fits you around your wrist or how closely-cut the shoulder and waist silhouettes are, that denote quality.

>It's the small things like the way a garment fits you around the wrist.

If you look closely, you'll notice a necktie-looking patch that runs up from the wrist through the elbows. This is a reinforcement measure, explains Winthrop. "The chevron elbow patch was developed to add durability to the full zip," he says. "The back of the forearms are subject to a lot of wear and tear when doing physical work, and we wanted to make sure our full zip held up to that."

I have to admit, American Giant's pieces do feel sturdier and look more streamlined compared to my poly-blended counterparts. A design touch is only added if it provides a functional value. “I don't care about my customer getting the sweatshirt and saying, 'Oh look these guys put a flare on their zipper pull so I can grab it when I have gloves on,'" Winthrop says. “I don't expect them to see that. I do expect them to put on a sweatshirt and say someone was paying attention."

Winthrop says that level of detail isn't going away, even as American Giant grows. The company has expanded from a single factory south of San Francisco to another in Southern California and three more in North Carolina, where they oversee more than 400 seamstresses. "We had to explain to them [workers] that they had an hour to finish a garment, not two minutes," he says. "At the end of the day we have to build great stuff, or we don’t have a business.”