DeLong was the nation's largest privately owned manufacturer of award jackets and team uniforms.
If you are involved in the sporting goods industry, you probably know that there are only a handful of companies that manufacture letterman jackets in the United States. Among the biggest was a company called DeLong Sportswear, headquartered in Grinnell, Iowa. A few months ago, rumors are that DeLong went into Chapter 7 bankruptcy and was scheduled for a liquidation of assets (although some sources say DeLong merely closed its doors and didn’t actually file). The town in which the firm operated for more than 150 years was given virtually no warning and employees were given a day to clean out their work stations at the factory, according to some things I’ve read.
We always maintain multiple vendors at our companies, and this is an example of how that policy has protected us. At Mount Olympus Awards, we sold thousands of DeLong jackets each year but we never allowed them to dominate our product offerings, instead spreading out our business among multiple vendors.
The truth is, my father, who has decades of experience in the sporting goods industry, called Aaron and I and warned us to virtually pull out of all DeLong products nearly six months before the company shut its doors. How did he know something was up with the firm? He and my mom founded and own a company called Chenille Appeal, which is one of the nation’s largest wholesale chenille manufacturers. They focus on selling only to a network of wholesale sporting goods stores (as opposed to my company, which sells to retail customers and team dealers). Anyway, during a call with customer service at the height of the busy winter selling season, the representative mentioned that they would be receiving a new shipment of a particular material in sometime during the week.
Knowing the letterman jacket and varsity jacket industry, my dad realized that a company the size of DeLong Sportswear should be drowning in cash during the winter and if they were unable to afford basic materials during the busy season, they couldn’t survive past another summer. After he told me this, I immediately, and quietly, shifted our sales to some other companies without missing a beat. The only exception were seven or eight orders that caused us a tremendous amount of grief (believe me – if I know about an specific order at the operating businesses, something went very, very wrong or very right.) (more…)
