See a piece of Battenwear today and it’s difficult to distinguish it from something made fifty years ago. In a world of fast, throwaway fashion, consider that the highest compliment. The New York City-based outerwear brand takes its aesthetic cues from the surf and outdoor culture of the ‘60s, ‘70s, and ‘80s, creating timeless jackets, anoraks, and anything else you might need for the journey ahead in updated fabrics for today. Battenwear’s design ethos is of a similar vintage: you’ll find “Made in America” stitched in practically all of their wares, harkening back to a time when things were made closer to home.
It’s the vision of owners Shinya and Carrie Hasegawa, who founded the company in 2011 with the purpose of creating gear that’s as well-suited for the Appalachian Trail as it is for the streets of SoHo: versatile modern classics that are only as limited as the plans you make while wearing them. Battenwear combines Shinya’s experience designing for the iconic Woolrich Woolen Mills with his life as an urban resident and an avid outdoorsmen, surfing the East Coast come sun or snow. With Carrie at the helm of the business details, together, the husband-and-wife team spread the Battenwear gospel.
Following the exciting launch of their first brick-and-mortar store in New York City, we talk to Carrie about the limitations of producing in the States, innovating in a progressively saturated market, and a surf break with a view of Manhattan.
Bond Street
What were you and Shinya doing before Battenwear began?
Carrie Hasegawa
My husband, Shinya, started the brand in 2011 after four years working on the Woolrich Woolen Mills project run by the Italian company WP Lavori. He was Assistant Designer first under Daiki Suzuki (Engineered Garments) and then briefly under Mark McNairy (New Amsterdam).
Before that, Shinya had a variety of fashion sales jobs both in Tokyo and New York. The WWM project was actually his first design gig, and once he’d tried designing, we both realized he would have had a hard time going back to sales. He’d been collecting and studying vintage clothing—particularly American casual—since he was in junior high school, and suddenly he was using all of that accumulated knowledge to make great clothing, in NYC’s historic garment district no less! It was like a dream come true for him. His mentors, Daiki and Mark, both really encouraged him to take the plunge and start his own brand, which after some thinking and planning, Shinya decided was worth the risk.
At the time, I was an Administrative Director at Columbia Business School. We decided that I would be the breadwinner while Shinya started Battenwear. Fortunately I had just gotten a promotion. Slowly but surely, though, I started spending more and more of my nights and weekends on Battenwear, doing most of the back-end work like bookkeeping and HR as well as our PR, sales, etc. I was lucky to have a boss at Columbia who was not only supportive of me when I needed to go part time, but also gave me lots of good advice for the company.
Eventually, when my Battenwear duties got too large to be doing part-time, Shinya and I decided that I should quit Columbia and be at Battenwear full-time. It was exciting because I really liked what I was doing with Battenwear, but it was also terrifying to know that we had nothing to fall back on should something go wrong—sort of like jumping out of a plane, not knowing for sure if our parachutes were there and fully functional. It still feels like that sometimes, but not as frequently. We’ve been fortunate that the business is doing well and growing.
Bond Street
How are you using funding from Bond Street to help grow your business?
Carrie Hasegawa
When we launched the brand, we had some great early success in Japan and the UK, but we had very few accounts in the US. We weren’t discouraged by that at first, especially when we kept adding accounts in both of those countries, plus Korea, etc. Indeed, it was a good sign in a lot of ways since some of the strongest emerging brands and clothing trends have experienced a chain of migration from Asia/Europe to the US. And [the brand’s popularity in Japan] wasn’t surprising either, since Shinya has a lot of contacts there—buyers who knew him from the work he did with Daiki on WWM.
We feel really lucky to have birthed and raised the brand that way, but as soon as the dollar started getting stronger, our business started suffering. We have since refocused our efforts to establish more wholesale accounts in the US, but we strongly feel that in order to be truly effective domestically, we need to be doing a better job selling our own items. And that means we need to build stronger brand awareness in the US and create a more cohesive and attractive brand image.
So, we are using funding from Bond Street to 1) support our efforts to grow our online sales and to further develop our website and social media network as a platform for people interested in our niche of clothing/gear and 2) to launch a brick-and-mortar retail space that can serve as one of the strongest image drivers for the brand.
Bond Street
What brands do you look up to and/or influence your work?
Carrie Hasegawa
Engineered Garments has been a big influence because they also make everything in Manhattan’s Garment District, and since Shinya worked under their designer for years, our two teams are close and friendly. They’ve been around a lot longer than us and are way more successful, but they never act snooty when we go to them for advice. They’ve been great supporters. They also have a brick-and-mortar store in the Garment District—it’s a lot different than our store will be but their success has been a wonderful encouragement to us.
Bond Street
What was the tipping point when you decided to move from only creating menswear to expanding your offerings to women?
Carrie Hasegawa
Even from our debut season in Spring/Summer 2012, we were noticing that women were buying Battenwear. Certainly not as many as men, but a strong-sized group. The feedback we were getting is that there just weren’t enough women’s brands that were making good-looking active wear—items that women wanted to wear not just for hiking and camping and sports but also for everyday life. For example, a brand like Patagonia has really awesome clothes for women, with great technical fabrics and details, but not all women are interested in that kind of style for their everyday fashion.
So, we wanted to better reach the market of women who wanted more versatility out of their outdoors clothing/sportswear, but rather than starting a women’s line (which is a whole different endeavor and something that will take a bit more research before we consider) we decided to start offering a unisex size scale, with the idea that Battenwear sizes XXS-S would fit most women. We started trying it out in Japan in 2014, with some limited offerings in the US, and the reaction was good. Our first real season offering unisex on a large scale will be Spring/Summer 2016. We’re really looking forward to seeing how it goes so we can determine what should be the next step.[/answer]
Bond Street
How do you think the outerwear space has evolved since its early years?
Carrie Hasegawa
When we launched Battenwear, sportswear and outdoors style was still kind of a new trend. Of course, outdoors outerwear has never totally gone out of fashion, but, for example, incorporating a mountain parka into an outfit you would wear to a business function or a night out on the town was a new thing back then. Most fashion-forward guys were still wearing workwear/heritage-style clothing.
Since then, outdoor has become a major trend. There has been close to an oversaturation on certain categories of outdoor outerwear, like 60/40 parkas and insulated jackets, so we have had to be really creative and innovative when making our outerwear, while staying true to the vintage inspiration for Battenwear. Also, since we make all our outerwear in the US, we also have limits on what kinds of details, fabric, and sewing techniques we can use without sending the price through the roof.
It’s an exciting field to be in because it keeps developing and changing and we have to be really creative because there is so much competition. Each season, Shinya comes up with at least one new jacket and usually more, and I’m always super excited to wear them and start pitching them to our customers.
Bond Street
How does NYC, as an urban environment close to nature just beyond, position itself as a unique place to create outerwear?
Carrie Hasegawa
We take the subway to work every morning, and while I usually mess around on my phone or read a magazine, Shinya just looks at people and thinks. He notices trends in colors and fabrics and accessories that would never get onto most people’s radar and turns his morning commute into a kind of market research to inform what he’s going to make any given season. So that’s the first reason why being in NYC is useful for creating outerwear. Every day you get to see a really large, dense, and diverse group of interesting looking, fashion conscious people.
Another reason why NYC is a great place to make outdoors outerwear in particular is that, especially since the outdoors trend really took off, a lot of people in the city are interested in identifying their weekend passion for the outdoors through what they wear during the week. I don’t think a lot of these people get to actually camp or rock climb or surf as much as they would like (we certainly don’t), so, in some ways, it becomes even more important to use the canvas of your everyday outfit to remind yourself and others that an outdoors lifestyle (aka getting out of this crazy city of ours) is an important part of your world.
Bond Street
What are city dwellers looking for in their outerwear?
Carrie Hasegawa
Useful pockets. A lot of our jackets have traditional outdoors utilitarian pockets like the map pocket on the back of our Travel Shell Parka or the game pocket on the back of our Scout Anorak. People use these pockets for newspapers and magazines, and really love how they don’t need to carry a bag as a result. Somebody told us they had used the game pocket to sneak a beer into a movie theater! Not that we condone such things…
Shinya also makes sure that there are lots of great pockets for wallets, notebooks, pens, etc (and passports since we travel a lot). We get great feedback on our pockets.
Bond Street
How does creating clothing only made in America impact your business?
Carrie Hasegawa
Starting with Spring/Summer 2016, we’re actually using one factory in Canada, but everything else is made in the US. Making in America means our price point is higher and, depending on what you are looking for, you could actually argue that the quality is sometimes lower with US factories. After all, if you make something in China or somewhere else in Asia, it’s usually at a mass production factory where they have really incredible machines, many more highly trained workers, and superior technical capabilities. In the US, the contracts are smaller and the capabilities are limited. There are a lot of good reasons why brands make clothes abroad.
However, we have a lot of good reasons why we choose to make clothes in the US. First of all, we like the product we get here. It’s not perfect, but it has enormous character and is part of a rich history of American made garments. Since our main factories are basically within a three block radius of our office, it means that Shinya can bring his hand-drawn designs to the sewers, spend the necessary time working with them to get the intended effect, and keep going back to work with them until he produces the item exactly as he wants it. It almost always involves a lot of idiosyncrasies and work-arounds, but this contributes to the character and stylistic integrity of the Battenwear items.
We also like the fact that making Battenwear in the US contributes to the local economy, cuts down on our carbon footprint, and enables us to know that all of our items are made under humane working conditions.
That being said, with the strength of the US dollar and the gradual weakening of the domestic garment industry, it’s making less business sense to produce in America. We are going to have to be realistic about our options in the future.
Bond Street
If you were to do it over again, is there anything you’d do differently?
Carrie Hasegawa
We’ve been thinking on this one for days and just don’t have a good answer. It doesn’t mean we did everything perfectly, but there’s nothing that stands out as particularly regrettable. Even our mistakes (of which there were many) were important because we learned from them and they led us to new opportunities.
Bond Street
Where do you see Battenwear in 20 years?
Carrie Hasegawa
We’d like to build the business more in the direction of a lifestyle brand, with different label options and different kinds of products. It would be great to make kids clothing and more travel and camping accessories, for example. And by then we’d like to have a several regional retail stores with a strong web-sales infrastructure.
Bond Street
What book should every entrepreneur read?
Carrie Hasegawa
The two books that made the biggest impression on me as we were starting: Growing a Business by Paul Hawken and Beer School by the guys behind Brooklyn Brewery.
Bond Street
What’s the best piece of advice you can give someone considering starting their own business?
Carrie Hasegawa
Pick an industry that you love, have a LOT of experience with, and really want to spend all your time, energy and money on. Also, be careful not to start a project that you don’t have enough resources to finish.
Bond Street
Lastly: Any secret East Coast surf spots we should know about?
Carrie Hasegawa
There are few secrets left in the internet age! Shinya mostly surfs Long Beach in Long Island. On occasion, when he has a bit more time, he’ll go down to New Jersey for a change of pace. There’s a great break at Sandy Hook, New Jersey that if you have just the right conditions and timing, you can see Manhattan on the horizon through the barrel of a tube as you ride. That’s pretty special.
About Us
Stories on Bond Street is an interview series in which we aim to reveal the real work that goes into running a small business. For more interviews, check out the archives and follow us on Twitter.