Three years after the Bishop family purchased the Pendleton mill, they purchased another woolen mill in downtown Washougal, Wash. Both are still operational, with the Washougal mill employing 235 people and the Pendleton mill employing 60. Over the past century, the company has opened and closed other mills—operating one in Portland’s Sellwood neighborhood in the 19th century and other plants in New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and California at other times. Its product line has also shifted: The company expanded into apparel in the 1920s, making men’s shirts and, starting in the 1940s, women’s clothing. (The latter mostly focused on women’s formal wear—suits made of skirts and blazers — and was sunset in the 1970s.) The Washougal plant and the Pendleton plant have different types of looms and so focus on different products. Workers at the Washougal site operate dobby looms — a simpler style of loom that can only do simple, linear patterns, like stripes or plaids. The Pendleton plant has Jacquard looms, which can handle more complex patterns, including the angular and triangular designs associated with the company’s trade blankets, as well as more freeform Dale Chihuly patterns. At the turn of the 20th century, there were hundreds of textile mills in the United States; some estimates say there were at least 1,000 textile mills alone. Official estimates of the number of remaining woolen mills vary, but most say the number can be counted on one hand. A nonprofit called Fibershed found dozens of mills producing some amount of fabric in the U.S. but just three companies milling wool at a large scale domestically. While official estimates vary, the company has not been immune to changes that have upset manufacturing, particularly in the clothing industry, in recent decades. According to Bishop, until the 1990s, Pendleton shirts were not just woven but cut and sewn at domestic factories in Oregon and the Midwest, all of which have closed. While blankets are milled, hemmed and packaged at the domestic mills, fabric for shirts is milled in Washougal but exported to Mexico for cutting and sewing, Bishop says. And only about 50% of Pendleton’s product line is actually made from the fabrics the company makes in its mills. The rest — including pet beds (which are made of acrylic fleece but feature Pendleton designs) and knitwear—are made from other materials and are manufactured outside the United States. But about 30% of the wool the company uses is still sourced from Oregon ranches, says Daniel Gutzman, Pendleton Woolen Mills’ wool buyer, with another 15% or so coming from other western states, like Idaho, Utah and California. The company also sources wool from Australia and New Zealand, because wool is a seasonal product, with shearing happening in the spring — so sourcing from the southern hemisphere means a consistent supply. Another notable shift in Pendleton’s business model, Bishop says, has been its distribution strategy. In the middle of the 20th century, Pendleton had a few of its own retail stores but primarily sold to department stores and other retailers. In the ’80s and ’90s, department stores began to consolidate and became more powerful. It became, as Bishop puts it, more difficult to do business with them. So in the mid-1990s, Pendleton started a website and then a print catalog. And shifting to direct-to-consumer marketing has meant shifting to a more coherent brand identity, Bishop says. “Previously, our home business, our men’s business and our women’s business were really separate entities and we managed them differently,” Bishop says. “We had different sales forces, we had different advertising agencies, we were really expressing the brand quite differently across those three product categories. But when you’re selling it all in the same store, or on the same website, or in the same catalog, you really need to make a coherent message across the categories. So in the last 15 years, we’ve really made a concerted effort to express the brand in a way that’s uniform.” Still, once something is released into the world, there’s little predicting what it will mean to customers and other members of the public. Bishop says the first time he saw The Big Lebowski, he thought, “Oh, there’s our sweater. That’s cool.” But he had no Plaid shirt fabric is woven at the Washougal facility. 29
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