In a very transparent blog post, Founder & CEO of GORUCK, Jason McCarthy took a deep dive into his brand and the reasons why they’re moving the manufacturing of some of the very popular packs overseas.
BLUF – They want to control consumer pricing, but they’re not abandoning US manufacturing altogether. They are quite clear on that.
There are plenty of benefits to American manufacturing: communication with vendors is easier, quality oversight is easier because they’re closer, there are low minimum order quantities (~75 units vs. 1,000 units), moving to market is quicker, and there’s the support of American jobs, which has always been important to me. We intend to continue to support and utilize our American vendors (we have four), but not for the items that represent real scale for us.
This is a dilemma that everyone who manufactures textiles here in the US eventually faces. Unfortunately, our industrial base just isn’t that large. Additionally, labor is much more expensive here in the United States than elsewhere. Hopefully, we will see additional growth in our capacity to manufacture textile products are in the US, alleviating the need to go overseas at least to deal with capacity issues.
GORUCKS’s path forward is all summed up here:
• We’ll continue to build limited edition GR1’s in the USA; Black GR1’s and a couple other colorways will be built overseas (specifically in Saigon) moving forward. Rucker and GR2: same deal. The price on rucks built overseas will be less, so this is in essence an announcement of some (but not all) overseas manufacturing and a price decrease to our core rucksacks.
• For example, GR1’s Built in the USA version has been at $395. The models built in Saigon will be at $295.
• The model for us, USA vs overseas is this: where we can provide more value through customization and limited edition colorways and features, we’ll build those in the USA. We’ll build classic versions to scale, at quality, overseas.
The big post is well worth the read. Check it out here.
