Complex garments are almost impossible to get manufactured locally, say the Ottawa-based marketers
It’s been weeks since Liam Mooney and Emma Cochrane dreamt up the hat with the message that Canada is not for sale. It has gone viral and resulted in a crash course in manufacturing for the couple.
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The Ottawa-based marketers behind the hat, made famous by Ontario Premier Doug Ford last week, say they’ve realized how difficult it is to produce a ball cap fully made in Canada.
“Imagine you’re a snake and you’re trying to consume a giant bowling ball. That’s what we’ve been experiencing here,” said Mooney, co-founder of business consultancy Jackpine Dynamic Branding.
The duo have approached several players in the apparel sector and generally heard the same refrain: they don’t manufacture hats fully in Canada because of cost and slim demand.
Mooney and Cochrane haven’t settled on a long-term solution, so they are mostly relying on ball caps imported from Vietnam, Bangladesh and China and toques from the U.S., which then get embroidered in Canada.
The difficulty in making apparel or accessories completely in Canada stems blows to the country’s textile industry, which lost much of the clothing manufacturing capacity developed in the 19th century as industrialists migrated to Canada.
“They started the apparel industry in Canada in large cities, so Toronto, Montreal, Winnipeg … but what happened by the 1980s was these industries started to go overseas,” said Henry Navarro Delgado, an associate professor of fashion at Toronto Metropolitan University.
They were drawn away from Canada largely because labour, materials and clothing components like zippers, thread and buttons were cheaper elsewhere.
“A T-shirt in China, depending on the complexity and if it has a print or not, could be produced for as low as $1,” said Navarro Delgado. “Can you imagine that? We just simply cannot afford that.”
Data from the World Trade Organization about clothing exporters shows Canada isn’t in the top 10, while China and the European Union reign supreme. Those countries are followed by Bangladesh, Vietnam, Turkey, India, Malaysia, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Pakistan.
On the flip side, Canada was sixth as an importer in 2021, after the EU, the U.S., Japan, the United Kingdom and China.
A lot of clothing manufacturing in Canada is tied to military or firefighter uniforms, along with apparel for extreme environments like the cold, said Navarro Delgado.
Otherwise, most of the components aren’t completely Canadian-made.
“Jeans, for example, have rivets, have metal buttons, have metal zippers and a specialty thread for the embroidery,” he said. “When you get to these very complex garments, it is almost impossible to produce them locally. You just can’t.”
Yet Jimil Ataman, an assistant professor at the University of Alberta’s department of human ecology, said many small companies persist, often by importing materials and pieces that Canadian seamstresses put together.
“But all of this drives the end price up in a way that I think most consumers are frankly very shocked by,” she said. “We’ve all been so socialized for years and years and years that something like a baseball cap should cost $15 but if you wanted to produce that ball cap under ethical circumstances, entirely under the labour laws and standards of Canadian policy, then the price for that is going to be much higher.”
Mooney and Cochrane’s “Canada is not for sale” ball caps sell for $45 to $55, while toques go for $40.
The idea for the hat came to them on Jan. 8, when they were watching Ford on Jesse Watters Primetime address U.S. President Donald Trump’s social media musings about how he’d like to see Canada annexed to the U.S.
“Emma (Cochrane) and I looked at each other from across the couch, sort of sprang up and said, ‘We’ve got to do something about this. Like this is absurd, this kind of disrespect,”‘ Mooney recalled.
By that evening, they developed a design and secured their first sales.
Orders for about 50,000 hats flooded in after Ford wore one at a Jan. 15 meeting with Canada’s premiers and prime minister. Meanwhile, Shopify Inc. president Harley Finkelstein talked about buying one on social media and knock-offs started to spring up.
While Mooney and Cochrane continue to search for a fully made-in-Canada solution, they’re embroidering hats in Toronto, where they’re able to produce 1,000 a day.
Though Mooney admits it’s been “a journey” to get to this point, he and Cochrane also find it humbling to see how so many people in Canada have rallied to try to get their product made.
“There’s a common solidarity,” Mooney said. “When the chips are down, we stand together.”
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