Faribault Mill Is An Inspiring Story Of Industrial Rebirth

To the people who say you can’t bring manufacturing jobs back to the U.S., that nobody here in the States wants to do textile work anymore, and that services are the country’s future, the folks at Faribault Mill say, “Hold our beer.”

The company, privately held since merging with the investment-minded clothing firm CircleRock in 2020, came back from being shut down, flooded, and ready to be dismantled to ramping up production once again, combining the area’s old-school know-how and an investment in modern equipment to forge a whole new business model.

A rich history

Part of the strength of Faribault Mill is its history.

The year was 1865, and the Civil War was just drawing to its close. In little Faribault, Minnesota, about 50 miles south of the Twin Cities, German immigrant Carl H. Klemer was starting up a business that would become the Faribault Woolen Mill Company, with the original horse-powered mill operating as a wool carding factory that made raw local wool into wool batting—layers of interlocked fibers used for quilting. In 1872, the company’s offerings would be expanded to include cloth, flannel, and wool blankets.

In 1892, the company would move into a new mill there in Faribault, trading their actual horsepower for hydropower that better accommodated the growing business.

Their wool blankets would provide the company with a huge sales opportunity when America entered World War I in 1917. Over the country’s year-and-a-half involvement in the fighting, Faribault would provide our soldiers with about 100,000 blankets.

Faribault had strong sales growth between the wars as department stores took the country by storm. That accelerated after the Second World War ended, as the US became increasingly prosperous in the post-war boom. The company began using imported wool from Australia and New Zealand and continued to innovate in new products, designs and colors, as well as advances that included washable wool and moth-proofed offerings. Business expansions into areas such as blankets for airplanes and hotels helped grow the bottom line too.

But the new millennium brought big trouble. Textile producers across America were either offshoring their production or shutting down completely. Faribault soldiered on longer than most, but the business was sold in 2001, ending 136 years of ownership by the family of founder Carl Klemer. In 2009, the industry trends appeared to finally catch up with the company. The factory was closed, employees were laid off, and the plant’s equipment was tagged to be sold overseas.

Rising from the dead

But then along came Chuck Mooty, former CEO of International Dairy Queen, and his cousin, attorney Paul Mooty. They reopened the business in 2011 as a family venture, which included bringing Chuck’s son John on as marketing director. They envisioned a big opportunity to leverage the high quality of the company’s products to move their marketing upscale. They relaunched with about 30 employees and new commercial customers such as high-end New York hotels that included the Hudson and the Waldorf-Astoria and helped along by a large but brief flurry of demand from JC Penney.

The group’s business recovery plans were progressing when the newly revitalized company merged with CircleRock, then an American-made men’s clothing company. “They were looking for a new group of investors, kind of a different direction for the company in February of 2020, and that’s when we got the deal done,” Ross Widmoyer, a co-founder of CircleRock who now serves as CEO of Faribault Mill, told me in an interview.

“We’ve been working hard over the past couple years to right the ship and point us in the right direction,” added Rick Dow, the company’s Chief Marketing and Business Development Officer. “Three straight years of record growth has us all pretty excited about where we’re headed.”

Rehiring expert workers

One of the first challenges in restarting the mill dated back to the original group that tackled the problems, and that was quickly regaining the expertise they needed to operate. Dow explained, “When the group out of the Twin Cities that bought the assets of the mill came down to Faribault, they went around town knocking on doors of people who used to work at the mill to say, ‘Can you come over and tell us what this machine is? Does this machine work? If it does work, do you know how to operate it? If the answer to all three of those questions is yes, yes, yes, you’re hired.’ And that’s the kind of heavy lifting of reviving this mill.”

They also tapped into the network of their newer team members. “What we did is found a core nucleus of younger workers who had joined us over the previous few years and sat them down and said, ‘Who do you know that’s smart, who’s curious, who’s creative, who would like to work in a fun environment, who may be doing something totally different?’ explained Widmoyer. “And let’s start talking, because good people hang out with good people, and we can train them and give them a career path. And that’s what we did. And so if you look at our workforce right now, we’ve really bucked the trend. Right now, our average age is somewhere in the 30s on our manufacturing floor.”

Another part of the workforce strategy was knowledge capture, involving both the company’s most knowledgeable employees and its broader business network. “Frankly, we know we’ve partnered with experts around the globe,” Dow said. “We’ve got loom experts, color experts and others internally that can pass along some of their knowledge to the next generation of workers, and for the areas where we don’t have experts, the production team has done a really good job bringing in outside experts to show us how to optimize things.”

Bold new investment

An especially bold move by the new owners has been their enormous investment in new production equipment. “We knew when we came in we were going to have to make a significant investment in new production equipment,” said Widmoyer. “A multi-million-dollar investment in new looms, a new state of the art industrial tenter dryer, nappers, fulling machines, and so you know that not only has allowed us to have our team spend more time actually making product as opposed to fixing machine, but it’s also allowed us to retain and recruit a much younger workforce.”

“I think one of the things that has hurt the American industry has been the lack of ability to really do that kind of investment,” Robert Antoshak, VP of global strategic sourcing and development at Gray Matter Concepts and a textile industry expert, told me in an interview. “They can’t keep up. So you walk into some of these plants and they’re pretty old and they’re just not running efficiently. They don’t keep up the maintenance, that kind of thing. It’s really a tough story. So to see something like this is just really exciting.”

A final big recent move was the expansion of the business into another natural fiber, cotton, through the 2022 purchase of Maine’s Brahms Mount, a much younger fellow blanket maker founded in 1983. The team saw that as a great merging of traditional regional cultures that share the made-in-America ethic.

In the end, though, it all comes down to the people. ‘We’ve been really fortunate to have second, third and fourth generation craftspeople at our place,” said Dow. “One of my favorite stories is there’s a woman up on our third floor cut and sew area who just had a baby, and her grandparents met while working on that very same floor where she works today. So, you know, it’s the fourth generation that we welcomed into the Faribault family, which is really, really neat.”

I think that’s a terrific model for a lot of manufacturing,” said Antoshak. “It has to be more than a niche. It’s understanding what your what market is, how to reach that market. It’s more important than ever, how to do it to different channels. Yeah, it’s also more than just a Made-in-USA story. I think it’s that local story, going to get the workers back. I think that will resonate and translate not only to more attention for the company, but to more sales.”