Outlier is a clothing company owned by Abe Burmeister and Tyler Clemens, based in Brooklyn, NY. Since they produced their first garment — pants — in 2008, Outlier has carved out a niche in two highly-saturated markets: fashion and cycling. Their company tag line, “tailored performance,” refers to their primary inspiration and motivation as urban bike commuters. From pants, they’ve worked to expand a line of clothes they consider “future classics,” incrementally adding to their catalog rather than reinventing itself each season like traditional fashion companies who release new products while discontinuing previous ones.
Outlier in some key ways is a departure for the WORKING series. Only Tyler currently works full-time for the company and they have yet to establish a permanent, dedicated physical office. Regardless, we were drawn to Outlier’s story because it underscores so many of the challenges involved in running a small business, especially in New York City. Because they produce locally, we were particularly curious to see how their production process worked when so much of New York’s once mighty garment industry has been offshored and lost. Visiting the garment district today is a clear reminder of that past; it still remains a hive of small-business activity, albeit smaller and less visible. Our visits with Outlier over the course of six months to the garment district showed us a network of small businesses, a microcosm of the city at large with its layers of interdependencies. As they will readily acknowledge, Outlier is a business born of and reliant on New York’s resources. Outlier proves how despite knowing little about clothing, good ideas and resourcefulness can go a long way in establishing a business.
And still , Outlier represents a paradoxical bind many manufacturing companies face who market a “local” brand while depending on the internet for sales. In some ways, Outlier has no choice but to use the city’s garment factories. Because their mission of “tailored performance” promises a base-level of quality and because their production runs are relatively small, what cost savings that may be gained by offshoring production are minimal at best. Local garment factories, only a bike ride away, can be easily monitored and more importantly, relations easily formed. A paradox, however, emerges on the income-earning end of Outlier’s business, where the retail industry’s standard mark-up structure makes traditional sales outlets cost-prohibitive for small businesses that operate on already slender margins. And so while being able to locally produce high-quality goods, Outlier finds itself unable to fully benefit from the abundance of New York’s retail street scene. Instead the company experiences a strange inversion of globalization’s supply chain by boasting of a hyper-localized manufacturing system while having to depend on the internet’s placeless-ness for sales.
That said, for small companies like Outlier, while it makes good sense — business, personal, political even — to produce everything locally, we wonder how long this production model can be sustained. Already, in the course of our filming, Outlier’s locale expanded, slightly yet meaningfully, across the Hudson River into New Jersey. And while this WORKING video series likes to champion the local guy, we will be very interested to track their growth to see how new challenges affect their business model. As it stands, we think the situations Outlier currently tackle are highly intriguing and compelling.
The video posted here is a short trailer for a much longer feature-length profile documenting the development and production of a garment — a shirt. The full-length feature learns about Outlier by observing the company at work, following Abe and Tyler as they figure out how to make a shirt that meets their own exacting standards. Much of the time is spent on location at the garment factories they collaborate with to design and produce their clothes. By focusing attention on a specific product and showing some of the unseen effort that constitutes its development, this next edition of WORKING hopes to offer a nuanced and complicated look at the practices of a small business.
Look for the full-length feature to be posted in January. Send an email here to be notified.
text by Micheal from Tramnesia
The video focuses on the Outlier Pivot Sleeve Shirt!
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