About the time the U.S. economy crashed in 2008, Bill Amos was in his 20s, teaching at community college in Oregon to support his climbing habit. He started looking into the state of the U.S. economy and realized there wasn’t much manufacturing happening in States.
That’s when he became interested in business.
Unhappy with much of the technical apparel on offer, he decided to start his own brand that was made in America.
“How hard could it be, right?” Amos said.
The Beginning of a Brand
Amos went on Craigslist and found a woman who had experience in the manufacturing field. She helped him source a tiny workshop in North Portland.
With its first pair of soft-shell pants, NW Alpine was born in 2010. The initial run was about 100 pairs.
Amos launched a website and developed a grid-fleece hoodie that’s still in the product line after several iterations.
“Things started to take off a little bit,” he said.
Some of Amos’ friends were good climbers who wore his apparel on first ascents around the world, including the northwest face of Mount Dickey and the 6,400-meter Hispar Sar in Pakistan. Outdoor media, including Gear Junkie, started paying attention to the brand.
By 2013, he had found a new manufacturing partner who had worked with Patagonia, Columbia, Spyder and other brands that were making some products domestically.
His new partner had closed her factory but was cutting fabrics in her house then bringing the cut pieces to seamstresses with shops in their garages.
“That’s a way to get started,” Amos said. “But obviously it’s not really scalable.”
Opening His Own Factory Business
That led Amos to start his own factory to make products for NW Alpine and for other brands that wanted to manufacture domestically.
By late 2014, he had launched Kichatna Apparel Manufacturing in Newberg, Oregon. For the next nine years, the factory was “keeping the lights on,” Amos said.
By 2016, Outside and Climbing magazines had featured NW Alpine pieces in their gear roundups.
At one point, Kichatna had about 25 employees and outgrew the Newberg space, so the business moved to Salem.
All the while, despite more positive press, the NW Alpine brand was languishing.
Pandemic PPE Push
When the COVID-19 pandemic hit in 2020, Kitchatna’s customers started canceling as wholesale orders stalled “and no one knew what was going to happen,” Amos said.
That was a “scary moment” for Amos, but then they started getting orders to make PPE, and they went from having the worst month ever in March to their best month ever in April.
“We were cranking out thousands and thousands of masks, then started working on gown contracts,” he said. At one point, Amos and his team were overnighting up to 80 boxes of gowns to hospitals that needed them. At the peak, they had some 75 workers in the factory, according to Amos.
“It was kind of a crazy time,” he said.
The factory landed some “big” hospital contracts that looked to be long-term business opportunities, but when imports to the U.S. opened back up, the domestic manufacturers couldn’t compete with the flood of cheaper products.
Back to NW Alpine
The end of the PPE business around spring of 2021 reset Amos’ focus to the NW Alpine brand. He hired a sales manager and started getting into wholesale accounts as part of the COVID-19 boom, he said.
“People were really resonating with the story,” Amos said. “A lot of specialty retailers were unhappy with the brands because they weren’t getting allocations. So we were trying to fill in some of that need.”
At the same time, the factory had lost a major source of income when the demand for masks and gowns fell, which caused serious financial problems.
In September of 2022, Amos shut the factory down.
“We just couldn’t recover from expanding our overhead during the PPE boom,” he said. “Having to lay everybody off and deal with the aftermath has been pretty tough.”
Amos can still have NW Alpine product manufactured elsewhere in the U.S., but he said it’s a grim time in the industry because so many other factories have gone out of business.
“The factories we’re working with now are solid, and they’re really good,” Amos said. “We were able to transition our production to them, and our fulfillment to 3PL. We’re going back to our original roots, which was using contract manufacturers to make our stuff. It’s been a crazy, full-circle journey.”
Regaining Footing
After the factory closure, NW Alpine is wrestling with what to do next. During its wholesale push in 2022, the brand was in about 30 stores. It was selling about 70% wholesale and 30% direct-to-consumer.
Amos said the brand had some delivery issues during the closure and the inventory overhang retail was also working through didn’t help.
Now NW Alpine is only in a handful of key accounts, according to Amos.
Before the contraction, retailers were excited about selling U.S.-made products, he said.
“I really felt like when we could get the staff in the stores trained on our product and telling our story, and get them excited about it, that the product would sell through,” he said. “And I still believe that it makes sense for us to work with small specialty retailers.”
For now, the brand is going to regroup and reevaluate its wholesale business. As a small company with limited resources, Amos said it’s difficult to operate on a normal industry schedule. For one, showing samples and sending out reps is resource-intensive and expensive.
“We’re trying to reevaluate how we can work with retailers – if there’s a way that’s outside the box and not the traditional, pre-book system,” Amos said. “We would love to find partners that are willing to work in a little different way with us.”
One of NW Alpine’s key lines is its Fortis apparel, made from ultra-high molecular weight polyethylene and nylon. It’s intended to be worn for rock climbing, backcountry skiing, paddle boarding, backpacking, and more.
“We’re trying to do more market research and survey our customers and see what they want,” Amos said. “Our goal is to be super purposeful about what we’re making in the future and not just try and rush product out because we want to get it on the market.”
Bart Schaneman can be reached at [email protected].