The American Flag: Made in USA and Creating Jobs in the Process
SARAH HOFFMAN/THE WORLD-HERALD
From left, Melissa Kleitsch, Diane Hynek and Laurie Bessler sew American flags at MSA Brand Products in the McBattas Packaging and Printing building in Fairbury, Nebraska. The former Swingster sewing factory — where Bessler worked for 17 years — has been transformed to produce and sell American flags made in the U.S.
The American flag flapping above the McBattas Packaging and Printing building on the north edge of town is unremarkable as flags go.
At 3-by-5-feet, it’s not especially large. Its colors, of course, are the standard red, white and blue, and it has 50 stars and 13 stripes.
But unlike $4 million worth of Old Glory replicas that were sold in the United States in 2013, this flag was made in America — right here in Fairbury, in fact.
Fred Arnold, owner of MSA Brand Products, which began making the flags in mid-2014, said that’s a big deal symbolically and economically.
The Making of our American Flag: Creating jobs in the process
“We started with one person sewing part time and now we’ve got about nine (employees),” Arnold said. “For a town this size, that’s a lot.”
Not quite 4,000 people live in Fairbury, and neither it nor Jefferson County has a formal economic development entity.
Both fall under the purview of the Southeast Nebraska Development District, and the district’s executive director, Dave Taladay, says towns like this are especially reliant on existing businesses to innovate because the prospects of, say, attracting a large manufacturer are slim.
“For some communities, just hanging on is economic development,” Taladay said. “If people like Fred Arnold can create and maintain new businesses, those are the ones that make it work in smaller towns. If it can work, they find a way.”
Arnold and Peggy Galloway, MSA Brand Products’ new business development manager, agree and have taken matters into their own hands.
Like Arnold, Galloway is a Fairbury native. She left a job with an architecture firm in Lincoln after living there for 20 years to come home and help stimulate the local economy.
“This isn’t just about making flags. It’s about bringing jobs back to this community,” Galloway said. “We’ve lost so much business here over the years.”
Vise-Grip pliers, manufactured for more than 80 years in nearby DeWitt, Nebraska, have been made in China since 2008. Fairbury Brand Meats’ famous red hot dogs have been made not here but in West Point, Nebraska, since Wimmer’s Meat Products bought the once-local company in 2004.
These products are still easy to find, but so are the holes they’ve left in the local economy.
As owner of Maxson’s Barber and Beauty Shop just down the road from Arnold’s sewing operation, Brent Maxson hears a lot from community members. He explains a trickle-down effect when businesses thrive or when new ones open.
“The local economies in southeast Nebraska are hit-and-miss. When you have businesses coming in and bringing more people to the community, there’s a better chance of more people coming through your door,” Maxson said. “The opposite goes for when someone goes out of business, though, and that can hurt your business pretty quick.”
That’s why Arnold and Galloway are so proud that the sound of whirring sewing machines in the McBattas building is not an unfamiliar one.
Twenty-five years ago, that building on the north edge of town housed the Swingster Co. factory.
The apparel manufacturing plant drew close to 350 employees each day at its peak, where workers like Diane Hynek, Laurie Bessler and Linda Hinzman sewed garments emblazoned with corporate logos and those of professional sports teams.
But in the late 1990s, the Kansas City, Missouri-based company shuttered the plant when the promise of cheaper labor sent jobs to overseas markets.
The plant sat empty for a few years before Arnold purchased the building for his growing packaging business in 2000. That operation now sprawls across a majority of the 30,000-square-foot former sewing factory.
There, Arnold prints and cuts cardboard packaging for more than 1,000 products ranging from Canadian whisky to auto parts. He also prints 10 newspapers from around the area, including two that he owns.
Next door is the trucking business he bought in 2007. All told, Arnold is responsible for about 85 total employees.
His goal for the sewing division? Twenty-five employees by the end of the year.
As Galloway works to drum up recognition of the company’s patriotic product, that goal is slowly being realized.
The company’s largest order yet was for 100 flags, and while normal orders are typically between five and 15 flags, demand for larger banners prompted the company’s sewing machine operators to begin cutting and producing two additional sizes of flag this week.
Galloway is still knocking on doors of retailers to get the product on more store shelves, but for now the flags can be purchased only at the Stagecoach Mall downtown or online at http://flagsmadeintheusa.com.
MSA Brand Products also recently submitted an application to the Flag Manufacturers Association of America, a 14-year-old, six-member organization that certifies the American flag made in the U.S. of domestic materials with all manufacturing in U.S. facilities with American labor.
The U.S. flag makers trade group is small but mighty, says Chairman Reggie VandenBosch, who is also vice president of sales for Pennsylvania-based Valley Forge Flag. By its own math, the FMAA represents “somewhere between 80 and 85 percent of the industry (production) volume” of U.S.-made American flag.
VandenBosch said American consumers increasingly are willing to spend more money on U.S.-made flags.
“I think there is a trend in general for people to put some value on that and pay a little more since it costs more to make products 100 percent in the U.S.,” VandenBosch said.
The Web-based United States Flag Store sells a 3-by-5-foot Chinese-made flag of printed polyester that costs $2.60. Hand-sewn Fairbury flags with embroidered star fields of that size, by comparison, cost $39.99.
Arnold describes the pains he’s taken to source raw materials from reputable, U.S.-based suppliers, as well as the pains taken by his impressively qualified workforce.
Today, Hynek, Bessler and Hinzman are back in the same building they collectively spent 52 years in, sewing on the very same machines that were there when they left. Arnold bought 10 of them from a former Swingster manager’s widow who had them in her garage.
Galloway said the company’s wages are competitive with those of nearby manufacturing plants, and she feels fortunate that Fairbury still has a deep bench of qualified sewing machine operators from years ago.
Bessler, who worked 17 years for Swingster, liked her job there so much she said she would have never left had the plant not shut down. She finished her business degree after the plant closed and spent time working for a co-op in Plymouth.
Returning to sewing, she said, was surreal: “My husband asked me how things went on my first day and I told him it was like coming home.”
Wonderful! Hometown mid America business! Way to go!
I am starting my own american made product and am growing and I would like to know how you grew and get advice on how you operate your sewing/manufacturing that you can share with me. thank you
gale