American Alternative

Product Description:

It’s impossible to talk about the American clothing industry without at least mentioning American Apparel.  The company’s success has been based on manufacturing trendy clothing in Los Angeles and selling them with hyper-sexualized ads.  The brand is well-known and you’ve probably see their flashy stores and advertisements at least once, if not daily.  With its edgy fashion combined with the CEO’s numerous scandals, American Apparel evokes a love it or hate it reaction from many people.

Surprisingly, American Apparel was started by a Canadian, Dov Charney, who is still the Chairman and CEO.  Though it was officially started in 1989, American Apparel didn’t move to their current Los Angeles headquarters until 1997. They have only grown since then.  I remember noticing that all the band T-shirts at concerts were American Apparel during the mid-2000′s.  Now, the company has over 250 stores worldwide on top of a huge online presence (but they still do band T-shirts).

The company is very vertically integrated.  They have facilities across Southern California, including dye houses, knitting mills, and packaging spaces.  Their two main buildings in downtown LA employ over 4000 people, and there are over 7000 employees making American Apparel goods across Los Angeles.  Almost all of their products are made in these facilities.  For items they don’t make in-house, they try to partner with other US manufacturers.  These goods are sold all over America ad the world; the company sold over $150 million worth of US-made goods internationally in 2011.

American Alternative Review:

American Apparel puts a lot of emphasis on hiring and manufacturing in America, but there isn’t much from them about sourcing American textiles.  We reached out to their customer support to see if these socks are made in the US.  Their representative confirmed that the socks are dyed in-house and manufactured in their LA factory.  She was also able to confirm that the cotton, nylon, and spandex are from international sources.

We applaud American Apparels efforts to maintain domestic manufacturing while providing their workers with living wages and benefits.  Most of the company’s products are made in the USA, including their socks. They may source their materials from US suppliers for some of their goods, but unfortunately, they don’t for their socks.

4.5/5 stars

If you don’t happen to live near one of the hundreds of American Apparel stores, you can see Calf High Sock in any of its 16 colors on the company’s Amazon store.

Product Description:

I’d bet good money that if you see a pair of khakis in an office, it will have the Dockers logo on it.  Dockers has been successful in capturing the American business casual pants market, and they have used that success to expand their brand to other areas of clothing, like socks.

Dockers is a relatively young brand.  Launched in 1986 by its parent company, Levi-Strauss & Co., it initially only sold men’s clothing.  Within a year, it had expanded to also sell women’s clothing.  In fact, Dockers’ khakis really helped Levi-Strauss’ financials in the late 1990′s.  Levis tried to sell off Dockers for what was expected to be close to $1 billion in 2004 when they were having financial difficulties, but not buyer was found.

Dockers and Levis are known for making pants not socks, so like many other big companies, they license out the right to use the Dockers logos on non-pants items.  In this case, Royce Too LLC is a company that licenses the Dockers brand to make and sell socks.

Royce Too is a small company that recently moved their headquarter from inside the Empire State Building in New York City to Winston-Salem, North Carolina.  Many large clothing companies like Hanes and Gildan have laid-off workers in the Winston-Salem area, so Royce moved in to capture this talent.  They were bought by the Japanese sock manufacturer Okamoto Group in 2008, giving the large Japanese firm a US presence.  The group employs around 1,500 people worldwide and makes socks under license from companies like Nike, Mizuno, Dickies, Nautica, and Dockers.

American Alternative Review:

It’s amazing how complicated the history of a sock can be.  The century-old Levi-Strauss company created the Dockers brand and eventually licenses it to Royce, a small US manufacturer.  Royce is then bought out by a large Japanese company and ends up making socks all over the world to be sold in America.

Levi’s customer service representative was not able to confirm where Docker’s socks are made or where the materials or sourced.  Looking through the catalog of Dockers socks, it seems like the vast majority of socks are made in China, with some socks being made in Pakistan or Korea.  We expect most brand name licensed socks are similar – a small company licenses the logo and imports the socks from abroad.

With the licenser owned by a foreign company and almost all manufacturing done overseas, at least Dockers gets some points for being parts of Levis, an American company with a lot of history.

0.5/5 stars*

Dockers has a few products on Amazon’s ten best selling men’s socks. Are you into argyle, ribbed, or flat knit socks?

*While Dockers may have multiple licensers for socks, we were only able to find Royce Too LLC, so scoring is based off this company.