We chatted with the owner of USA Brands — which includes companies like All-American Clothing, the Vermont Flannel Company, Vermont Teddy Bear Company and Gusset Brand — about his commitment to Made in America.
Joe Van Deman was a seven-year veteran at the tech giant Google when he decided to leave the corporate world, move back to Indiana, and begin investing in small businesses. After a short stint working with early-stage tech companies, he decided he wanted to champion small businesses that manufactured their products in the United States.
The 40-year-old Indianapolis native used his technology and marketing skills to scale company growth after acquiring All American Clothing Company. He now is the CEO of USA Brands, which has four established Made in America brands under its umbrella.
Question: How did you get involved in the apparel business?
Answer: I don’t have a background in the apparel business unfortunately, but in 2019 I was looking to purchase an existing business and I came across All American Clothing Company. It was started by Lawson and B.J. Nickol, and because of Lawson’s health issues, they decided it was a good time to sell the business. I thought the business was a good fit for me based upon my interests and my strengths and I really liked the American-made component of that. One thing that was really appealing about the All-American brand is they made real great quality, functional clothing, and they have been making American-made blue jeans for close to 20 years.
Q: Would you say that you are more of an investor rather than a hands-on owner?
A: No. I started out running a small business with just a handful of employees and on Day 1 I did a little bit of everything. I was running the marketing campaign, working with suppliers, ordering our raw goods, and handling our finished product.
Q: What prompted the jump from a promising career at Google to overseeing these American-made clothing brands?
A: I met my future wife, we got married and we decided we wanted to raise our kids in a place that was a little more friendly than being somewhere in New York City or the San Francisco Bay area. We decided to come home to Indiana, and I worked for a couple of years with early-stage tech companies, and I decided that road really wasn’t for me, that’s not what I like doing. You work for some of these large companies and it’s just a big corporate environment and I look at what I do now. We make things with our hands. I have a shirt or a pair of jeans that I can feel and hold and show someone what we made. I love going to the airport and seeing people wearing our products. I like having something to show my kids that’s really tangible. It’s a good feeling.
Q: What are the brands that are now under the USA Brands label and what is your role?
A: Well, of course All American Clothing was the first company I acquired, and we formed USA Brands after I took over the Vermont Flannel Company. We have since added Vermont Teddy Bear Company and recently acquired the Gusset Brand jeans and apparel. I am the CEO of USA Brands. The way that we operate is that I act as CEO across USA Brands, and then within our organization we have functional leads, so we have someone who leads marketing, someone who leads customer service, someone who leads retail operations and someone that leads production. That goes across all the different brands, and I think of it as a matrix. We have a brand director who makes sure that everything is being done to highlight that brand and keep it special and unique. That person makes sure of the authenticity of each brand.
Q: What is your commitment to Made in America?
A: Our commitment is that our products are going to be manufactured here in the U.S. We stand by our commitment. Made in USA is what we stand for as a company. Really that is why people are interested in joining us. I think that’s why we had these different brands deciding to join us because making it here is very important to those company founders and those owners and the next generation of the company to make sure it is made here in the U.S.
Q: Is your sourcing from American manufacturers?
A: We source most materials in the U.S., [but] we can’t always source in the U.S. There are some materials in our product line that are just not manufactured in the U.S. At Vermont Flannel, we work with mills in Europe to produce the finest flannel because we don’t have the capacity to do it here in the U.S. That’s the way it always has been done at Vermont Flannel. Everything is sourced and manufactured here in the U.S., but we can’t find that high quality flannel domestically. We are working on trying to bring back that flannel manufacturing back to the U.S.
Q: How did you come to acquire Vermont Flannel?
A: I met Mark Baker, the owner of Vermont Flannel, because I was looking for additional American-made products to sell to our customers at All American Clothing. I said I am selling a lot of blue jeans, but I can sell your flannel shirts, too, and that really kicked off a relationship during Covid and I got to know him over time. It got to the point where he said he was nearing retirement and just wanted to make sure where the company was going in the future, and he just wanted to make sure the manufacturing was going to be in the U.S. He had been approached by a number of private equity firms with investors who said they want to buy the brand and take the manufacturing overseas. He was adamant. He didn’t want that to happen, so we decided to create USA Brands together. By bringing those two companies together we could operate with a little more scale.
Q: Are you able to retain the personal service these companies are known for?
A: We absolutely do, but while the companies have come together, our entire customer service team is now six people. It is not a huge organization, but we still have to make sure you receive a high level of service and support. One example is what we are doing right now with Vermont Teddy Bear, who joined our team recently, we are going through an eight-week series of what we call Teddy Bear University. It’s for employees across the board to just learn the history of the brand. That brand has been around for more than 40 years and there a lot of things that go into that to make it special. We want our people to know how the product is made, how it’s marketed, what’s worked in the past, why did the company grow and why the lifetime warranty is so important. Our intent is to preserve that legacy.
Q: Both All American Clothing Company and Gusset Brands manufacture American-made blue jeans. Is that sustainable?
A: Yes. I operate two denim brands as part of USA Brands, and we are going to fight every day to win more market share, but we are a long ways from being a Wrangler brand. Gusset Brands is based on its American-made blue jeans and All American Clothing Company has also been selling domestically produced jeans for many years. At Gusset, we use denim that is made here at Mt. Vernon Mills in Georgia. We do pocketing from the U.S., rivets, zippers and all the different components. Both those brands are 100 percent made in the U.S.
Q: Can these blue jean brands compete in a market that is crowded with jeans that are made overseas and sell for a low price?
A: Our All American Clothing jeans start at $65 and at Gusset they start at about $85. We want to focus on trying to keep our products affordable. A lot of American made jeans for men are probably $150 to $300 a pair. We recognize there is an audience for that, but again that is not the good American working class. People who are buying our jeans are choosing our jeans over a jean you might buy at Walmart or Kohl’s. Our quality, our thickness for our jeans is going to be more like a Carhartt or a Dickies type of workman jean where it is heavy duty. It’s usually 15-ounce denim we use for most of our jeans. You probably wouldn’t be comfortable going to the office in them but if you are working in the yard, they are a great jean for that. A lot of our customers are those plumbers or electricians, people who are on their knees a lot, people that need that durability. A lot of customers buy them five pairs at a time, and they wear them as part of their uniform Monday through Friday. We have people that put on our jeans and say they haven’t worn a pair of jeans like this since Levi’s in the ’70s or early ’80s, when they were a lot better before they started going offshore.
Q: Where is apparel by USA Brands manufactured and sold?
A: We have 10 retail locations and a large majority of those are Vermont Flannel brand locations. We do have one that is a Vermont Teddy Bear Company store and one that is a Gusset brand store in Tennessee. For our manufacturing, we are currently producing at three different locations and all of those are in the state of Vermont and the remainder of our manufacturing is done through contract manufacturing partners. Our denim is done with contract manufacturing partners in Kentucky and Illinois, and we occasionally do some in Texas and California. We have T-shirts made in California, Texas, North Carolina, and New York. Our T-shirts start at $13.95 and they are Made in America. If you are paying $10 for a T-shirt at Walmart, you can justify paying $14 for something that is American-made and is going to last pretty long.
Q: You now have four companies under the USA Brand umbrella. Do you worry about getting too big with employees spread out across the country?
A: I do worry about getting too big, but I think we are pretty far from that right now. We still operate as a small business. Yes, we have more than 100 employees, but each and every one of them has my cell phone number and they can pick up the phone and call if they ever need something. We are expanding but still try to keep that family-business type of feeling. I had two brands call me within the last two weeks that said how do I join what you are doing. For me, that really showed there is value in what we are doing if other companies recognize I could be part of this and that’s good for my brand, good for my employees.