T-Shirt Company Partners With Knitting Mill for Growth
The rows upon rows of cardboard boxes stacked like building blocks inside a warehouse-size building in downtown Los Angeles are the lifeblood of US Blanks.
With 300,000 blank fashion T-shirts, sweatshirts, knit dresses and tank tops in stock, the 4-year-old apparel company is able to fill orders quickly.
“We are totally vertical, from the knitting and dyeing [of fabric] to cutting everything in the U.S.” said US Blanks President Kevin Kelly, strolling through a tall corridor of cardboard.
In a separate building, hulking metal machines produce fabric that is then put into oblong metal cylinders that dye as much as 4,000 pounds of fabric at a time.
US Blanks, which used to be headquartered in Gardena, Calif., was acquired nearly three years ago by Antex Knitting Mills, one of the largest knitting and dyeing operations in Los Angeles.
The two entities combine their strengths to produce a completely “Made in USA” product line whose wholesale prices range from $3 for a T-shirt up to $16 for a dress.
Currently, US Blanks uses five contractors to sew the premium fashion blanks, sold principally to wholesalers who put their own graphic imprint on the pieces. Garments come in cotton jersey, poly/cotton jersey, slub jersey, cotton fleece, sponge fleece, MicroModal, 90/10 Modal silk, silk Modal and recycled polyester.
In the next few months, US Blanks will bring some of that cut-and-sew operation in-house with the addition of 60 sewing machines that will occupy a sizeable portion of US Blanks’ 45,000-square-foot building, located across the street from the mammoth Antex headquarters on South Broadway.
“Right now, four of those five contractors are dedicated to our product, but we wanted to have a little more control to make sure things are done correctly,” Kelly said.
Kelly started US Blanks in 2008 with the idea that the “Made in USA” cachet would sell well in the United States, Europe and Japan. His first year in business, sales totaled around $1 million, he said. By 2013, he expects to see sales hover between $15 million to $20 million, about double what they will be this year.
Kelly has a long history in the blank T-shirt business. He started working in 1996 with Dov Charney, founder of American Apparel, who had started a new T-shirt business in South Carolina. After that venture went bankrupt, Charney moved to Los Angeles, and Kelly followed to do sales and, later, production for the budding T-shirt label.
Kelly left American Apparel in 1998 to co-found Bella, (now called Bella + Canvas) in 1998, a blank T-shirt and tops business acquired by Color Image Apparel, located in Commerce, Calif.
Ten years after starting Bella, Kelly launched US Blanks, which now has 1,500 SKUs and 50 employees.
Kelly is dedicated to the “Made in USA” concept, particularly since he has seen other manufacturers complain about rising costs in China. He also believes his partnership with Antex Mills will position the label to grow. “We are like a toddler getting ready to run,” Kelly said.
—D.B.
