Rowing Blazers’ Jack Carlson knows about competition. Carlson also knows about fashion. But someone forgot to tell Carlson the fashion game was supposed to be a cutthroat, no-holds-barred battle to the end when it comes to winning over consumers.
When Carlson started Rowing Blazers back in 2017, the mantra wasn’t just about making badass clothes that merge a cornucopia of styles (OK, it was a lot about that, but not all about that).
Rowing Blazers, from its inception, has been a collaborative effort between the company and sports franchises, other fashion brands, and the various community stakeholders that are important to Rowing Blazers. So how did he, new to the fashion game, come to find success by essentially being the good-guy team player in an industry not known for a hero’s résumé?
Competition Can Be Good … and Bad
Jack Carlson is a competitive person, which on its face would seem to go against the idea of intense collaboration. He was a coxswain on his high school, college (Georgetown), and graduate school (Oxford) rowing squads and was a member of the U.S. national team in world competitions in 2011 and 2014.
Competitive fire is a driver for him. But when one looks closer, sport isn’t just about winning. It creates bonds, teaches dignity in loss, and provides an appreciation for what one is competing against. Competitive fashion, on the other hand, is a bit of a different animal.
The $30 billion-a-year fashion industry can be savage and supply chain shortages created by the pandemic and its fallout have only made it more so as brands vie not just for consumer eyeballs but also for the very materials that go into their product. Scarce resources make for fierce behavior. When competition heats up, some of those hoping to “win” can start behaving in ways that are perhaps less than ethical to gain a competitive advantage. Sometimes that means turning a blind eye to a factory that has unsafe working conditions, such as in 2012, when a fire in a garment factory in the Ashulia district on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, killed over 100 people and injured more than 200.
Sometimes it means companies simply steal the designs of smaller, lesser-known designers and brands. Take, for example, designer Mariama Diallo. Diallo founded Sincerely Ria, a luxury women’s clothing line. She, like Carlson does with Rowing Blazers, has her items made in fair labor locales and with high-quality materials. This also makes the items slightly more expensive than goods one might find on a site like Amazon or Shein, which often highlight pricing above quality.
Diallo was surprised when a dress she designed and sold on her online platform seemed to make an appearance on Shein (Shein is a Chinese clothing manufacturer and online retailer that sells clothing at massive discounts; you get what you pay for).
Shein had produced an almost direct knockoff of Diallo’s dress and was selling it for pennies on the dollar. There are of course more examples. Too many, really. And these stories and this sort of behavior go against everything Jack Carlson wants Rowing Blazers to be.
“Fast fashion is just getting bigger and bigger, and it’s becoming a bigger and bigger problem. We are the opposite of fast fashion,” Carlson says. “There will always be a cheaper way or an easier way to make some of the products that we’re making. Every day we’re choosing not to take those shortcuts. I think it would be very easy to find cheaper ways of making these products, and we could have better margins, or we could lower our prices and do more volume, but that’s just not what we are interested in doing. It really is part of our value statement, that we put people and the planet over profits, and that truly is how we operate.”
Jack Carlson Says Planet Over Profits
While fast fashion may feel good to the pocketbook, there are of course consequences for that cheap dress or pair of slacks. On top of labor issues and workplace safety concerns, producing so much product in bulk is simply bad for the planet and our life on it. Rowing Blazers, from day one, set out to not be the type of fast fashion, lowest-possible-bidder type of company.
“Ethical sourcing has always been really central to everything that we’re doing,” Carlson says. “We produce the vast majority of our products in Portugal. We do a little bit in the U.K., a little bit in the U.S., mostly in New York. We are very rigorous in terms of sourcing all of our fabrics and materials. Most of the fabrics we’re using are from the U.K., Portugal, and Italy. I think that’s really important.”
That mindset and business strategy have a couple of benefits. First, it’s nice to have eclectic and irreverent options when one wants to purchase quality threads — options that aren’t actively making people’s lives worse and pushing the planet closer toward an inhabitable wasteland full of raging superstorms and Biblical-level plagues. The other benefit is other companies and brands want to work with you.There are of course degrees of malfeasance in the fashion industry, and no brand is perfect. But given the opportunity to work with a forward-thinking, sustainability-oriented brand that’s seeing rapid growth is a much more palatable partnership for major brands and up-and-coming outfits than getting into bed with a sweatshop-utilizing cloth dump.
How Jack Carlson and Rowing Blazers Choose Partnerships
Rowing Blazers enjoys partnerships and collaborations. But the company, and Jack Carlson, are very deliberate in the partners they work with and the collaborations they undertake.
“I think it’s important, and this is something that I’ve tried to stay very focused on,” he says. “We want to just keep coming back to our aesthetic, what we stand for, and making sure that everything we do is true to a couple of ideas. I think the two major ideas are authenticity and irreverence. We make sure everything we do has that authenticity to it. That’s one of the reasons why we do so many collaborations. I don’t want to just make our own boat shoes. If we’re going to do a boat shoe, I want to collaborate with Sperry. If we’re going to do a tennis shirt, I want to collaborate with Fila, and so on.”
And Rowing Blazers has done both of those things. The Sperry collaboration was something Rowing Blazers was particularly fond of. Like Rowing Blazers, Sperry was founded with innovation and craftsmanship at the forefront. Also, like the actual rowing club blazers that inspired the initial product offering at Rowing Blazers, Sperry was founded as a niche product for a particular set — in this case, the nautically inclined. And finally, like Sperry, Rowing Blazers developed a series of offerings that broke free of its founding niche to appeal to a much broader audience. But Sperry isn’t the only “American heritage” brand Rowing Blazers has partnered with.
“We also have been very fortunate to do collaborative collections with a number of brands that range from such as inspiring American heritage brands like Sperry, Lands’ End, and J.Crew,” Carlson says.
While those heritage partnerships are an important aspect of Rowing Blazers’ authenticity, the brand also goes out of its way to seek out smaller, up-and-coming enterprises, as well as partnerships that just seem to make sense to Carlson. “We’ve collaborated with organizations like the NBA,” Carlson says. “But also small institutions that I happen to love, like my favorite pizza place in New York, John’s of Bleecker Street. We’ve done a collection with them.”
And that’s part of the draw for Carlson. Why stop at a partnership with the NBA when you can let the freak flag fly with a collection centered around a 93-year-old pizza joint in Greenwich Village?
“One of the things I love with Rowing Blazers is getting the opportunity to go down those rabbit holes,” Carlson says. “To draw inspiration from something that some people might know about and might know is cool, but we can also show a whole new audience something that they might have forgotten or might not have realized existed. That’s a big part of the fun for me.”
While Carlson is open to collaborations and working with other brands, that doesn’t mean Rowing Blazers will take all comers. Carlson says it’s important to stay true to its founding ideals of irreverence and authenticity, regardless of the sacrifices necessary to achieve that consistency.
“We get more and more collaboration opportunities as we grow, too,” Carlson says. “We remain as selective as we have always been to make sure that any partnership, any collaboration we do, makes sense for the brand. We’ve turned down opportunities to get paid a lot of money to collaborate with certain brands because it didn’t feel right, or it didn’t line up with our values, for instance.”
There are plenty of brands out there, either due to their mission statements or their look, or both, that Rowing Blazers has worked with. As mentioned previously, the company has a collaboration with the NBA, generally regarded as the most progressive and inclusive of the four major U.S. sports leagues.
The collection crossover includes ball caps, rugby shirts, sweaters, sweatpants, belts, rugby shorts, and duffel bags, among other items. And, of course, blazers (the classic navy blazer with an understated Boston Celtics logo on the left pocket is both fan-friendly and dapper). While the NBA is a global sports juggernaut with millions, if not billions, of fans around the world, Rowing Blazers also likes to play small ball.
The “John’s Pizzeria of Bleecker Street” collection is exactly what it needs to be: a few select items attuned to what someone who is celebrating a local pizza joint might enjoy. These include hats, tees, hoodies, and sweatshirts with the classic John’s logo. For those not fully into New York-style pies, Rowing Blazers also offers a collection from another local New York haunt: Harry’s New York Bar, located in Lower Manhattan between The Battery and the Financial District.
While Rowing Blazers does have some partnerships with larger brands like Fila and Sperry, it’s clear Carlson enjoys championing the underdog and the irreverent. That also means that while Rowing Blazers needs to advertise like any company, taking the road less traveled is more Carlson’s speed. And that means staying (mostly) away from the traditional fashion end of things, like being a mainstay at Fashion Week in New York.
“Yeah. We’ve done a couple of other smaller activations, but for us, as a direct-to-consumer brand, we’ve always just marched to our own beat a little bit,” Carlson says. “That’s not to say that I don’t love Fashion Week. I certainly go to some of the shows and things myself. But, what we’re doing, it’s just a little bit of a different animal.”That different animal is a beast the fashion industry is seeing take off. So, whether they like the rules that Carlson and Rowing Blazers play by or not, they’re going to have to get used to them. “The brand is growing very quickly,” Carlson says. “I think we were one of the fastest growing apparel brands of last year, and it seems it’s going to continue growing and growing. I think the big thing is going to just be staying really focused on being true to who we are and what we stand for. I think we’ve done a really good job with that so far, even as we’ve grown and grown.”