Bayard Winthrop of American Giant — The Modernist Society Ep.15

Published in

The Modernist

2 min readApr 30, 2021

Bayard Winthrop, founder & CEO of American Giant

We catch up with Bayard Winthrop. He’s the founder and CEO of American Giant, a San Francisco-based clothing company that specializes in a) making stuff really well, and b) making it in the USA. American Giant has been going for about 10 years now, but before that Bayard ran Chrome, Freeboard, Atlas Snowshoe, and in the heady days of the dot com boom, was the President and CEO of WebChat, which was a big online community that was acquired by Infoseek right before AOL started dominating that space. That’s all to say that in addition to producing the “the greatest hoodie ever made,” he’s a super interesting, super smart guy who’s been an incredible innovator not only in direct-to-consumer businesses, but in breathing new life into at least on area of American manufacturing.

LISTEN to The Modernist Society now via your favorite podcast provider (and don’t forget to subscribe):

The Modernist Society on Apple Podcasts
TheModernist Society on Spotify
The Modernist Society on Google Podcasts
The Modernist Society on Stitcher

Here for your convenience, and in no particular order, are links to some of the things we talked about (and some we didn’t):

Bayard’s lunch schedule

Chrome Industries

IMAX

Made in the USA: inside one company’s all-American supply chain (Financial Times)

The Annals of Flannel (New York Times)

I’m Running My Multimillion-Dollar Business Out of My Car Because of Coronavirus (Marker)

We Need Leaders: An Open Letter

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business

WebChat