2 days ago
Inside Walmart's ambitious plan to make your clothes in America again
On a crisp day in May, Josh Blackman, a third generation cotton farmer, is sitting atop his 14-foot tall John Deere planter on his family farm in Littleton, North Carolina. The planter is an engineering marvel. Its 10 arms create neat rows in the soil, then drop cotton seeds at the right depth, allowing one man to do the work of 50 laborers. By October, this field will be blanketed with fluffy white bolls of cotton that never fail to take the 34-year-old Blackman's breath away. 'Cotton is so pretty at harvest time,' he tells me.
Blackman's grandparents established Warren Farms in 1941. Until the 1960s, roughly 95% of the clothes Americans wore were made domestically, so cotton from Warren Farms would travel by truck to nearby mills and factories to become Fruit of the Loom T-shirts and Levi's jeans. But over the past five decades, the U.S. apparel industry has been decimated. Today, 97% of the clothes that Americans buy is imported, largely from China, Bangladesh, and Vietnam. The majority of Blackman's crop will be shipped to Asia where it will be turned into fabric, then cut and sewn into garments at low-wage factories.
Blackman often feels he is at the mercy of geopolitical forces. He's competing with farmers in developing countries who produce more cheaply because they pay lower wages and have weaker environmental protections. China, the world's biggest cotton importer, has an outsized influence on the commodity's price. This year, Blackman expects to lose money on his harvest because the price of cotton is less than 70 cents a pound, down about 10 cents from 2024, which was already considered a bad year. 'The weather determines the crop, and the market determines what we get for it,' he says. But Blackman believes that if apparel manufacturing returned to the United States, there would be more demand for domestic cotton, allowing him to earn more. 'Bringing the factories to America—opening them back up—will create a market for my cotton right here,' he says.
For years, the idea of breathing life back into American clothing factories, reversing half a century of off-shoring, seemed like a pipe dream. But the plate tectonics of the apparel industry are shifting. Over the past decade, dozens of American-made labels like Buck Mason, American Trench, Imogene & Willie, and Duckworth have sprung up, tapping into the skeletal remains of the domestic supply chain. This was a small-scale effort: These high-end brands make clothes for affluent customers who care about sustainability, ethical labor, and durability. But everything changed last summer, when Walmart—the largest company in the world—entered the picture. The retailer dropped a $12.98 T-shirt made end-to-end in the U.S. just in time for the Fourth of July.
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