Why Thorogood’s new flagship has windows looking into its factory

You’d expect any brand that manufactures products in the US to highlight that fact in their stores, but it’s hard to imagine one doing so more emphatically than Thorogood is.

Thorogood, which has been making work boots since 1892, recently completed a $14.5 million factory in Marshfield, Wisconsin. It reserved a section of the building for its first flagship store and, in a decidedly literal twist on supply chain transparency, the store has four large windows that look directly into the factory.

For Thorogood, which has increased the portion of work boots it makes in the US from about 50% a decade ago to nearly 80% today, the factory-viewing store is meant to highlight the brand’s commitment to domestic production.

“We viewed it as almost like a tourist attraction,” Jeff Burns, president of Weinbrenner Shoe Company, which owns Thorogood, told Retail Brew. “With other brands, nobody’s going to Vietnam to see how their shoes are made. Someone from Chicago…or from Minneapolis could come here and see how their shoes are made.”

Befitting a store with museum aspirations, artifacts from the company’s manufacturing history are displayed in the store, including a hand-crank sewing machine from its original 1892 factory. A company timeline runs along the wall above the windows that look into the factory, including one milestone, in 1942, when the company switched to producing footwear only for the military until WWII’s end three years later.

While stores with windows into manufacturing floors are rare, it’s not unprecedented. In 2016, outdoor gear brand Filson built a flagship store under the same roof as its manufacturing facility with what Metropolis magazine described as “expansive” windows that look into its sewing room.

A more common antecedent is restaurant kitchens, which typically were hidden from diners until 1982, when Wolfgang Puck opened Spago in Beverly Hills. Spago’s open-kitchen plan, then a novelty, has since “infiltrated the restaurant industry at all levels,” Eater noted.

Shop floor: A union shop since 1944, Thorogood is highlighting that it used union labor to build its facility. Dean Miller, business manager from International Brotherhood of Electric Workers (IBEW) Local 388, and Zach Newton, VP of Newton Electric, whose electricians belong to the union and which served as contractor for the project, are featured in a video about the factory’s construction on the Thorogood website.

“We were firm in our belief that this work needed to be union-built,” a post accompanying the video states. “Because price isn’t everything—value is. And the value of union labor, of skilled tradespeople working together with pride and purpose, is immeasurable.”

Carhartt, a workwear company that launched in 1889, just three years before Thorogood parent Weinbrenner, has expanded into fashion and lifestyle with products for pets and kids. But like Brunt Workwear founder Eric Girouard, Burns is steadfast in the brand only making purpose-built shoes and clothing for trade workers.

“We’re not one of the brands that said, ‘OK, we’re going to forget who our core customer is,’” Burns said. “We know who our core customer is: It’s the electrician, it’s the carpenter, it’s the bricklayer, it’s the tradesmen and women who built this country.”

Nor does the Thorogood company-owned store—the first for the brand since it operated a few now-defunct stores in Wisconsin the 1970s—mark a move toward building a significant direct-to-consumer channel for the brand, which out of deference to its retail distributors does not even have a DTC e-commerce site.

“We are one of the last major brands that really don’t do direct-to-consumer; we only sell through distribution,” Burns said. “We firmly believe in the business model of supporting our distributors, so we don’t sell direct, and this is not an attempt to get into that business.”

(The company does operate a no-frills outlet store near its factory in Merrill, Wisconsin, but as with the new flagship, the store has no e-commerce component and won’t ship products from the store.)

Doubling Down: Burns, who has been president of the company since 2019, said revenuesdoubled in the last five years, “and we’re going to double it again in the next five years.”

One reason he’s so bullish is that unlike the factory that it’s replacing, which had multiple floors and what the company calls “segmented workflows,” the new facility is single-story and more streamlined and automated.

“We essentially reduced our wasted movement by almost 80% going from the old factory to the new factory,” Burns said.

He’s gratified that such efficiency, and the brand’s commitment to domestic production, is fishbowled for tradespeople who shop in the new flagship.

“A lot of companies are out there thinking about reshoring, or whatever we’re calling it now,” Burns said. “We never left. We’ve been here for 140 years. We believe in American manufacturing, and we believe in our people.”