Jeremy Priest didn’t watch Hillary Clinton’s speech to the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, but he started hearing about it almost right away.
“I got a lot of texts from our investors and our staff, saying, ‘I think they’re talking about us,'” said Priest, president and co-founder of Knotty Tie Co.
The Democratic nominee for president didn’t call Priest’s small Denver-based custom neckwear company by name, but among a laundry list of criticisms of Republican nominee Donald Trump, Clinton made mention of the decision to “make Trump ties in China, not Colorado.”
Ties made in Colorado? It’s not just oratorical flourish as many Americans may have thought.
Two companies in the Denver area — one a startup and the other nearing 30 years in business — are manufacturing ties right here in the Centennial State, although maybe not at the same volume as the Donald J. Trump Collection, whose ties are currently for sale on Amazon.com.
“Why she would say Colorado, that’s so interesting. You would think she’d say New York,” said Neil Borin, owner of Carrot & Gibbs, a longtime Boulder County manufacturer of bow ties, neckties and formal accessories now based in Lafayette. “I don’t know who makes ties in this country anymore. I think we’re one of the few.”
“We’ve been around for nearly 30 years, believe it or not,” Borin said. “We make everything here in Colorado.”
Best known for its brightly patterned bow ties, Carrot & Gibbs recently moved its manufacturing from Boulder to a smaller, 1,400-square-foot studio in Lafayette. There, workers cut, sew and finish bow ties and other products, using Italian fabric and sewing on by hand the bow ties’ signature mother-of-pearl buttons.
“There’s a lot of products around made in Asia, and I hear that there isn’t much resistance to it,” Borin said. “But there are a lot of stores around the country that do want to support ‘Made in America.’ There’s not a nicer bow tie that you can find anywhere on the planet than our tie. The care that goes into our product is amazing.”
A crew of seven sewers produces about 25,000-30,000 bow ties a year, which Carrot & Gibbs sells online and in 300-400 high-end men’s stores nationwide, Borin said. Retailers include menswear boutiques, among them Homer Reed and Andrisen Morton in Denver, and department stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus.
“We’re not a huge company, although we’re capable of getting orders for hundreds of ties,” said Borin, who founded Carrot & Gibbs in 1987. “We’re not making one tie at a time, but we’re a little company.”
At Knotty Tie Co., making custom neckwear is a vehicle for a larger social mission — providing job opportunities for resettling refugees, Priest said. Launched in 2013, the company currently employs nine refugees on a staff of 21, working closely with the African Community Center’s We Made This program, which teaches sewing skills to recently resettled female refugees.
“Some of our refugee staff make more than executive staff,” Priest said. “We are a business that creates extremely high-quality products, but we’re really built to create that impact in the refugee community.”
This year, Knotty Tie expects to produce “close to 50,000 ties and scarves and other things,” Priest said, with plans to expand to other apparel and home goods in the future. Their top niche markets are organizations and companies, which average orders of about $1,000, as well as wedding parties, which typically order closer to seven ties, or about $300.
The sky’s the limit when it comes to patterns — one recent order wanted “cats with laser eyes floating in space,” he said. Customers are paired with a designer and then the textile is printed in-house, with no minimum order.
“If you consider what a Chinese company does, they have minimums, they take months and they really just make a product really inexpensively because of the labor rates,” Priest said. “There was an absence in the marketplace for fast turnarounds, no minimum orders and high degrees of customization.”
As for whether Clinton was really alluding to his company in her speech, Priest said Treasury Secretary Jack Lew did make a visit to Denver earlier this year and toured Knotty Tie.
On Friday, the design team was busy creating a new custom pattern for the Clintons, with plans to make and send a lightweight scarf for Hillary and a tie for Bill.
“I do hope that she knows the work we’re doing,” Priest said. “I think she would find a lot of similarities in her mission with what we’re already practicing here on the ground.”