When a young client came to Cary Heller with elaborate plans to launch Bad Hamster, a trendy streetwear brand, the vice president of sales for Keego Harbor, MI-based All USA Clothing (asi/30171) wasn’t sure his company was up to the challenge.

All USA Clothing worked with a young client to create the Bad Hamster streetwear line.

The customer wanted garment-dyed, heavyweight hoodies and sweats in four very specific colorways, plus woven labels on the back pocket and custom ribbing to color match the screen-printed decoration. “These garments really don’t exist,” Heller says. “You can’t just go and buy them and do a quick private label.”

It would have been easy to say no or to steer the client in a less complex direction. Instead, Heller decided to give it a go. “Our fastball down the middle is the guy who wears Carhartt,” Heller admits. “This is stepping way out of our wheelhouse. … But it kind of stirs my creative pot and wakes that up in me.”

In order to create the custom ribbing the client wanted, All USA had to deconstruct sweatpant blanks and resew them with the striped fabric along the side.

Heller knew All USA wouldn’t be able to pull off the project on its own; there were too many moving parts. Plus, the company had never worked with ribbing before. His first attempt – ordering custom fabric from a craft store online – proved that he could get the colors right, but Heller says the fabric sample he received was “1 million percent wrong.” So, he decided to leverage the many contacts he’s made in the industry over the years, calling friends who run larger manufacturing facilities in the U.S. to see what kind of insights they could provide.

Heller was connected with a Pennsylvania company that was able to create 100% polyester ribbing in the correct colors. The next step was figuring out how to add the ribbing to the sweatpants. A custom garment run would have been too expensive for the streetwear startup, since it would have required large order sizes in four different colors. So, Heller sourced blank garments in the pastel shades the client wanted, then worked with a cut-and-sew shop in Detroit to deconstruct the sweatpant blanks, then resew them with the ribbing down the outside seam.  

“It’s super labor-intensive, but we tried it and it worked,” Heller says.

Once that hurdle was crossed, the rest of the project came together smoothly – with everything from the hangtags to the woven labels in matching colorways to form a cohesive product. All USA has already created several thousand units for Bad Hamster, and is expecting to be able to do a large custom run of the apparel once the client has sold through his first batch.

“It really resonates with the younger generation,” Heller says of the collection. “There’s a whole lot of hoodie-wearing going on these days, since the start of the pandemic. Everybody likes hoodies anyway. Now it’s like people are living in their hoodies.”