Jason here. Up front, thanks for the support on the
Tactical Gear. About ⅔ of what we had on hand is already gone, less than 24 hours later. Also, fun fact is that we can’t call it “Firearms Gear” without raising red flags all over the interwebs including social and inside of our Shopify account, so from now on it’s Tactical Gear. Any business always has the freedom to Improvise, Adapt, and Overcome.
GORUCK TEES NOW BUILT FROM THE GROUND UP
Anyway, maybe you’re wondering what Chance C’s 2024 shitty review of one of our t-shirts is doing at the top of our national email. Because of this review, which I saw when I was scrubbing our site in 2024, we started building all of our own shirts, from start to finish. We’ve always built our USA apparel in Spokane, Washington from the ground up. But for graphic T’s we used to use blanks. We explicitly do not do this anymore, which is at odds with how pretty much everyone else does it. They take stock inventory from a distributor (like Next Level or Gildan) and they rip the tags off and print their logo on it and sell it as “theirs”. We have found too many problems with this flow:
- We can’t control the quality, which is a major problem for us when we’re obsessed with quality
- The shirts just keep getting worse. The fabric is cheaper than it was a decade ago, and the sewing is worse, too, and they seem to permanently smell bad way sooner. I hate it when my favorite shirt stinks too bad to wear. This is what happens when bankers and non-product-obsessed people run companies.
We don’t care to go down that path, so we build everything Tri-BlendX from the ground up, adding Anti-Stink “X” to the fabric at the mill, and seeing it through to completion, to our standards. Then we use it hard.
