Textile Mills are slowly becoming a thing of the past in the U.S., particularly in the Carolinas, but one North Carolina company may have found the answer innovate or die.
DeFeet has been producing top line socks for the cycling industry for 12 years. The combination of new design, materials, and graphics started a fashion trend in the sock world that is still gaining momentum.
“We were to cycling what Andre Agassi was to tennis when he came in with his wild looks,” Shane Cooper, founder of DeFeet, said to a local paper.
Local industry experts agree with Coopers strategy. “There is no hope in commodity production,” said Roland Stephen, a faculty fellow with the Institute for Emerging Issues at North Carolina State University. “The way out is to innovate, to reinvent the processes, to keep coming up with new fibers there will be a place for entrepreneurial, specialized firms in the U.S., and the place for mass market production is overseas.”
Very few other local textile firms have been able to find a niche like DeFeet. It is estimated over half of the domestic textile firms have either gone out of business or moved overseas in the last seven years.
“I worry that these companies will shut down or move offshore,” Cooper said about his suppliers in a published report.
