The End of US Manufacturing is Nigh: New Era's Outsourcing and How We Got Here
Note: Somehow the text color is messed up; I will try to fix it at some point. Once upon a time, New Era Cap Company was synonymous with American manufacturing. However, slowly since the 1990s, New Era's American manufacturing began to slowly disappear piece by piece. How did this happen? How did we get here? The First Step Let's go back to the early 90s. New Era's then-biggest competitor in headwear was Sports Specialties, a company driven by the business savvy of David Warsaw, the man who invented modern sports licensing. Sports Specialties had entered the headwear fray in 1983 and became a powerful force on a very short period of time. Instead of using American manufacturing (which was still common at the time for headwear), they went with a South Korean-based company called "YoungAn Hat Co.", who had their name behind the Sports Specialties label. YoungAn was a South Korean-based private label manufacturer. Soon, big brands at the time such as Starter and the...