Dickies and Vans were and are both units of VF Corporation.[1][2] VF also owns The North Face and Timberland, and a bunch of other "lifestyle brands". They have headquarters all over the place.
VF corporate HQ is Denver. Vans HQ is in Costa Mesa, CA. There's a HQ in Shanghai, which manages manufacturing. Timberland HQ is in New Hampshire. North Face HQ is in Denver. And for some reason, there's an IT unit in Greensboro, NC.
Too many HQs. Looks from their job listings like they're consolidating apparel in Costa Mesa, except for North Face and Timberland.
Despite the fact that they manufacture work-wear, I'd hazard to guess that most of the "innovation" - like with any other apparel type - is in taste-making and branding rather than any improvement in work-wear materials or functionality, and the talent pool for taste-making is likely much stronger in Southern California than Forth Worth, TX.
The consolidation probably means they'll just add most of the Dickies brand workload to the existing employees in Southern California rather than hire/transfer 120 workers there. So a net reduction in labor costs and elimination of real estate costs, despite moving to a higher CoL area.
Note that this is the Dickies that makes workwear [1], not the similar sounding but spelled differently Dickey's BBQ [2] or The Dickies band [3][4] who are one of the longest tenured punk rock bands having started in 1977 and are still performing.
Of the three the workwear maker is the only one I've never dealt with. The BBQ was pretty good several years ago, but I ended up just not going for a couple of years, then when I tried to the ones nearest me had all closed and the number a medium distance from me had greatly diminished and their ratings had tanked.
I've seen the band live twice and both had interesting interruptions. The first interruption there was a problem with an amp and they had to pause the show while it was fixed. The singer walked over to the keyboard and said that to entertain us while we waited he would play and named a Bach piece. I don't remember what piece it was other than it is one considered to be difficult piece, and he played it perfectly.
The second interrupted show was one where the crowd at the front of the stage was urging the singer to crowd dive. He asked them if he could piss on them instead. They shouted "YES!".
Big mistake. He then stopped singing, the stage crew quickly got a spotlight on his crotch, we got to see him unzip and whip it out...and he then proceeded to urinate on the people in front.
The show resumed but the people who had been pissed on kept trying to get onto stage, and security was having trouble keeping them back and the show had to be cut short.
> Note that this is the Dickies that makes workwear [1], not the similar sounding but spelled differently Dickey's BBQ [2] or The Dickies band [3][4] who are one of the longest tenured punk rock bands having started in 1977 and are still performing.
Why would anyone be confused about this? The first sentence of the article reads:
"The workwear apparel brand Dickies is moving its headquarters from Texas to California."
Many people check the comments before they take a look at the article, so I thought it might be useful to have a comment mentioning which Dickies the article is about.
> It's funny that a company actually choosing to live in California now is so unusual
Says who? California is one of the most desirable places to live and work. It's a headline because moving the HQ of a huge established corporation is a daunting undertaking and rare event.
in general, most corporate HQ moves are headline generating, because you are talking about hundreds of people going from A to B and disrupting the affected communities.
This particular headline is because KABC serves Los Angeles and Southern California, which is where this company is moving.
We probably don’t care about these jobs. But the political and cultural care over manufacturing jobs is twofold (1) manufacturing in America ensured we can sustain ourselves in a war with another manufacturing nation (eg china) and (2) it’s a politically savory thing.
Today, we have pretty low unemployment so jobs isn’t as big a concern as other times. BUT jobs are not evenly distributed across the nation. If you visit the rust belt, those cities and towns are losing population as they lose jobs. That makes for an angsty population - staying in your hometown means fighting over the shrinking job pool. No one really wants to be a coal-miner or factory worker, but when that was the last big employer in your shrinking town, you get nostalgic for “good days” of high employment numbers, and a growing population.
Garments aren’t coming back unless American shopping habits change. We’ve started spending a smaller % of income on clothes, while buying more units of clothing per year. That favors clothes made by fast fashion under terrible work conditions - which will never be local. Unless you want to buy a $200 pair of ethically made jeans, you’re not getting it American.
Origin Maine/Origin USA might have some interest to you. They've been buying back clothing manufacturing equipment that was sold overseas decades ago and using 100% USA labor and materials to make a range of clothing and boots.
People look at all manufacturing jobs disappearing as part of the reason the middle class is dead. Unfortunately, even if all of these jobs came back, few people want to pay $70 for a made-in-America shirt.
While you can get T-shirts made in USA for reasonable prices, there's not a great selection out there, and you might want to check to see where those American Apparel T-shirts are being made. While they were known in the past for being USA made, they heavily outsource now.:
in the 1970s or 1980s if a nice dress shirt was $10-15, then it's not entirely a different thing from $70-100 today.
it's not a question of "want to pay $70", we'll want to pay the lowest price possible for the equal goods. if the cost of shirts doubled, you might buy less of them and wear them longer. i remember my dad probably had 5 nice dress shirts, two suits and a sport coat.
i'd rather have $70 (or $100) shirts and a functioning middle class.
Because it's a job for people who aren't good at math and science can do. It's great that people can be doctors and chemists and software engineers but people who don't have those kinds of smarts to do those things, still need to have jobs. UBI ain't happening, so without jobs that don't take an advanced degree, the people without them don't have jobs. Without a job, how're you going to survive under capitalism?
Looks like the owner VF Corp is consolidating campuses and wanting Dickies to be collocated with Vans in Costa Mesa.