Thirteen-year-old American Giant has been at the forefront of the conversation around apparel manufacturing in the U.S. since before tariffs brought the issue to the forefront. The company, founded by Bayard Winthrop in 2012, built its name on its made-in-America products, especially the Classic Full Zip Hoodie, which became its most popular item. As of 2025, American Giant has sold more than 1 million hoodies, entirely made in the U.S.
Now, the company is relaunching its hoodie with new materials, a new design and a slightly higher price point. Releasing on Tuesday, the new version of the Classic Full Zip Hoodie will be sold in American Giant’s direct channels.
According to Winthrop, the hoodie was “the reason the company made it” through the early years of its existence. It has been widely praised in fashion and apparel media publications, with both Slate and Forbes calling it “the greatest hoodie ever made.”
“I sort of think of the hoodie as a child of mine,” Winthrop said. “It’s a symbol of trying to reclaim textile manufacturing capability in the U.S., and it’s really taken on a life of its own. It was my vision of the perfect sweatshirt 13 years ago, but it was time for an update.”
The motivation for relaunching a product so central to the brand’s growth came down to improving the materials and bringing it in line with American Giant’s newly centralized domestic supply chain. While the cotton for the hoodies is still grown in the Southeast, nearly every other part of the process has been moved to a single factory in Los Angeles. Winthrop said L.A. is a region that has emerged as one of the best places in the country to make clothes, and revamping the hoodie and its construction allows the brand to make the best use of its vertical supply chain.
“Quality craftspeople are the name of the game,” he said. “There are pockets all over the country where you get really good needlework, and you have to bring your production to where the quality is, not the other way around. Los Angeles is great for that, particularly if you’re working with fleece.”
The price point of the new hoodies is $168, higher than previous iterations, which were priced at around $138. That’s a function of using higher-quality cotton, which is still sourced from the U.S. — it doesn’t require as much time to break in and soften as previous iterations of the hoodie, Winthrop said.
To market the new hoodie, American Giant is relying more on media appearances than paid marketing. Winthrop said traditional digital marketing can lead brands toward one-track paths like heavy discounting, which the team would rather avoid. Instead, both podcast advertising and media appearances by Winthrop himself are a greater priority. He told Glossy he has made appearances on Fox Business, NPR and other media outlets, “talking to anybody who wants to talk about U.S. manufacturing.
According to Winthrop, tariffs have encouraged more U.S. businesses to rethink U.S. production, but one challenge has come from that change: There’s more competition for the high-quality manufacturers in the U.S.
“Good factories are always in high demand,” Winthrop said. “We need factories with high-quality needlework and the capacity to handle our Walmart business volume. We’ve bloodied our knuckles over the years trying to figure out the good factories from the bad ones in the U.S. I hope there’s more re-shoring that happens, but right now, the tariff environment is so unstable and unpredictable that a lot of people have not entirely decided what path they’re going to take.”
After American Giant revealed that its Walmart partnership had turned a profit, the brand’s U.S.-based supply chain has continued to draw in new collaborators. In the spring, it started working with Jason Kelce’s apparel brand Underdog Apparel to co-produce its made-in-America goods.
