On a recent afternoon, Jacob Long gave a tour of the Connecticut wool mill that has become his biggest investment, his life’s mission and an unrelenting source of worry.
A factory building murkily lit even in daylight, the vast space contains 40 high-speed looms, as well as decommissioned spinning equipment that was thrown in when he bought the mill 11 years ago even though he had no experience in textile manufacturing.
Mr. Long, 54, talks quickly and bounds rather than walks. More than one colleague described him as the Energizer Bunny. He wears slim-fitting dress shirts, slim-cut trousers and chunky, stylish eyeglasses. Having worked as a banker in Europe for 25 years, he now comes off as a stranger in his own country: He speaks fluent Italian and sometimes struggles to come up with the American word or phrase to describe something.
He led the way past the old, idle equipment to a prized new machine, a German-made sample warper that cost $300,000. It was an essential part of his grand plan to revive America’s craft textile heritage — and finally make a profit.
“I convinced my wife to sell her last apartment in Italy to buy this machine,” Mr. Long said, adding with a nervous laugh: “Please don’t talk to my wife.”
For a decade, Mr. Long has been delivering a well-worn — and largely ignored — sales pitch for his improbable venture, comparing it to the craft breweries that uplifted local economies with an emphasis on quality over quantity.
Now the man seems to have finally met the moment, as the tariffs imposed by the Trump administration have renewed conversations about the reshoring of many U.S. industries, including apparel. But so far, the country’s textile manufacturers say they haven’t seen much benefit to their bottom lines or a change in public perception.
It feels like a long shot. The U.S. textile industry has been in secular decline for half a century, as apparel production moved to lower-cost countries like China and Vietnam. The domestic supply chain for wool is nearly extinct: Perhaps fewer than five woolen mills capable of spinning yarn, weaving fabrics and finishing fabrics are still operating. Mr. Long’s firm, American Woolen Company, is one of them.
For Mr. Long, the stakes are personal. His investors include his father, his in-laws and his Italian wife, whom he persuaded to sell everything they owned and relocate to the United States.
He bought the plant from Loro Piana, the Italian luxury firm renowned for making some of the world’s most beautiful fabrics. After 25 years, the company had closed it and laid off all the workers because many of its customers had gone out of business. If the fashion industry’s most celebrated weaver couldn’t make the economics work, how would one man with no experience?
“I put my family in a very uncomfortable situation,” Mr. Long said. “I put myself in an uncomfortable situation.”
‘Soup and sauces, or textiles?’
On Good Friday, Mr. Long took the train three hours to Kennedy Airport in New York and boarded a plane for Venice. He was traveling to spend the Easter holiday with his wife and two children, before flying back to his spartan rental apartment in Hartford, Conn.
To understand why Mr. Long is currently living apart from his family — and why he commutes 4,000 miles to see them every other month — it is helpful to rewind a decade or so, to 2013.
That fall, at a cafe in Milan, Mr. Long was having a drink with an Italian colleague from the world of investment banking. The colleague, he remembers, said something like: “Our client has a textile mill in Connecticut that they’re looking to sell. You’re American. Would you happen to know anybody who would want to buy it?”
Mr. Long was restless in his finance career and during his years in Europe had become enamored with Italian craft manufacturing. His investment portfolio included a Tuscan winery, and he was trying to wrangle the funds to buy a distressed firm in the region of Veneto that made fish soups and sauces.
Riding home on his bicycle after the drink, Mr. Long wondered: “‘Do I want to do fish soup and sauces, or do I want to do textiles?’”
He spent the next six months reading everything he could about textile manufacturing and made five trips to see the mill, which is 30 minutes northeast of Hartford in the small town of Stafford Springs. A woolen mill had operated there since 1842. Loro Piana, which bought the facility in 1988, poured more than $30 million into the operation to modernize the machinery, and brought over from Italy a textile engineer, Giuseppe Monteleone, to train the local workers and run the plant.
Had Mr. Long been evaluating the deal with the cold eye of a banker, he might have run away. But a dream had taken hold in him, and despite everything going against U.S. textile manufacturers, he couldn’t shake it. In his envisioning, he would turn a commodity product — fabric for clothing — into a specialty good, as he’d seen European brands do with success. He would “tell the world that made in America in textiles and apparel can work.”
Most of all, Mr. Long bet that big apparel brands like J. Crew, Brooks Brothers and Ralph Lauren would see the value of American production, sign on as customers and make his 19th-century woolen mill — and the broader U.S. textile industry — prosperous again.
So in the fall of 2014, Mr. Long and his wife, Federica Zagolin, settled with their children in a suburb of Boston, and he began commuting three hours each day to and from Stafford Springs. (Ms. Zagolin did not return an interview request for this article.)
Mr. Long found himself the custodian of roughly 475,000 square feet of manufacturing space. Next to the local bank and one block from the town hall are several brick buildings that run up a gentle hill like a living history museum: a wool mill dating from 1842; a trolley depot built in 1899 that is now used as an equipment warehouse; and another production building from 1853, which houses a yarn-spinning plant.
There is also the more modern weaving plant built by Loro Piana in another part of town. Mr. Long even owns two reservoirs, with rights to divert water from a brook for use in his factory.
Immediately, Mr. Long felt the weight of responsibility owed to the town, the mill and the work force of about 50 men and women, many of whom had been laid off by Loro Piana and called back to work by American Woolen.
The first reality check came when none of Loro Piana’s existing clients agreed to work with American Woolen. “Everybody told us they were buying from us,” Mr. Long said. “Nobody did.”
He poured all his energy and boyish charm into winning new contracts, imagining that many would jump at the chance to work with a local mill and attach a “Made in the U.S.A.” label to their designs. Instead, he found himself sitting in the lobbies of New York fashion brands with his sample book of fabrics waiting for meetings that sometimes never came.
“I’d be told by the secretary, ‘It’s been three hours. I don’t think they’re going to see you,’” Mr. Long said, laughing.
The apparel industry is fickle, competitive and, above all, cost conscious. Every few months, Mr. Long said, American Woolen would get interest from brands like J. Crew, Brooks Brothers and Timberland, all of which eventually became clients. But these labels and their competitors were also getting cheaper fabric abroad, or buying Italian fabric because “Made in Italy” tends to be more of a selling point for U.S. consumers — a problem Loro Piana probably faced when it tried to sell American-made fabrics from the Connecticut mill.
With payroll to meet, drafty factory buildings to heat and very little revenue, American Woolen was bleeding money every month. This went on for years.
The issue was never quality: Many American Woolen workers were trained by Loro Piana on expensive Italian machines and are experts at producing luxurious fabric. And Mr. Long had succeeded in luring Mr. Monteleone, 62, the gifted engineer, back from Italy to run the mill as vice president of production operations.
Inside those old buildings, Mr. Long had what amounted to a Ferrari, certainly as compared with the fallen state of many U.S. textile mills, but he couldn’t seem to make the fashion industry care.
“The low point — and this was a low point — came in 2017 at a trade show in Chicago,” he said. “A suit manufacturer looked at me and said: ‘Jacob, you know what we need from you? We need an Italian-designed cloth offered at a Chinese price point, but made in America.”
In the red
Mr. Long is nothing if not persistent. His father, John H. Long, a retired lawyer and the former chairman and chief executive of Fluid Power, which made hydraulic components for companies like Caterpillar, tells a story about his son.
As a boy, Mr. Long participated in a bike race at a local park. “Jacob had this run-down bicycle,” his father said. “The tires were almost flat. And he beat everybody. He was that way about everything. He would work and work and work.”
The elder Mr. Long says he has watched how the mill has stressed and aged his son.
“He’s had the unenviable task of nobody wanting to listen to his story,” the father said. “I’ve watched his hair gray.”
By 2020, six years into his quixotic decision to uproot his life and buy an old mill, Mr. Long’s hard work had yielded little gains.
That same year, the coronavirus pandemic forced American Woolen to shut down, while two important clients, Brooks Brothers and J. Crew, filed for bankruptcy. It was a period of soul-searching for Mr. Long, who would come into his silent factory every day to guard against vandals and think.
He sought to understand what he’d done wrong. With his fabric offerings, he realized, he had tried to knock off the Italians to appeal to U.S. labels.
Going forward, Mr. Long decided, American Woolen would be true to itself — a New England mill with a focus on the heavyweight fabrics that reflected the region’s culture and fashion heritage.
“Everything was coming into focus,” Mr. Long said. “I don’t need to have an Italian color palette. I need a New England color palette. New England is luxury but durable. Be in New England.”
A year before the pandemic, American Woolen had won a U.S. military contract to produce the fabric for Army service dress uniforms.
The government work, which would grow to include blanket fabric orders for West Point cadets and broadcloth for the Air Force bridge coat, created something American Woolen had never had: a stable foundation of business onto which Mr. Long could layer commercial clients.
Smaller, independent fashion brands had also begun to discover there was a former Loro Piana mill in rural Connecticut that was still operating.
“It was so epic. That mill, that space,” Jacob Hurwitz, the co-founder of the Pennsylvania-based men’s wear label American Trench, said of his first visit to Stafford Springs, in 2015. “The Italian and Swiss machinery combined with this very old building — I knew it was special.”
The orders these independent labels placed were modest, under 1,000 yards in some cases. Mr. Hurwitz purchased American Woolen fabric for baseball caps and later a wool trench coat.
But Mr. Long gladly took the work, and found that these younger entrepreneurs spoke the same language about craft, heritage and American-made goods.
“We produce everything domestically and always try to find domestic components when we can,” said Challen Brill, director of design and development for Nashville-based Imogene + Willie.
Initially, Imogene + Willie hired American Woolen to develop fabric for a wool chore coat. Then came wool blankets woven at the mill, which sold out two consecutive seasons, followed by a hided jacket for women and fabric for a quilted down jacket.
Evan Helle, whose family operates a sheep ranch in Montana and founded the label Duckworth to turn their wool into rugged clothing, said he was grateful that American Woolen made it possible for his flannels and jackets to be made entirely in the United States, from sheep to shirt.
“American manufacturing is so tired, so beat down, so old,” said Mr. Helle, before adding of Mr. Long: “We’re trying to give him as many orders for yarn as we can. Nobody in the wool industry has more passion than Jacob.”
Brands such as Weather Wool, Warren, The Iron Snail, Chatham blankets and New England Shirt Company, which work with American Woolen and are all based in the northeast, have created the regional supply chain of which Mr. Long had long dreamed.
Some of these clients have highlighted American Woolen in their marketing, helping to raise the mill’s profile.
“Those smaller brands, if you get enough of their business, it’s good,” said Mr. Long, who rattled off other clients, including Stormy Kromer, a Michigan-based label that makes heritage outerwear, and Big Woods Buck, which makes clothing to outfit participants on hunting tours. “We are working to achieve their aesthetic.”
More than a decade into his adventure of becoming a U.S. textile manufacturer, Mr. Long has risked it all, personally and financially. Last summer, his wife and two children moved back to Italy, putting an ocean between him and his family. With the mill at least, he seems to have turned a corner.
“We are in the red, but we see a solid path to profitability now,” he said. “I don’t want to say it’s the Trump tariffs, I don’t know, but the last 18 to 24 months, we’re busy.”
Though he’s grateful for the military work and the independent brands that have kept the looms running, Mr. Long hasn’t given up on landing one of the big names in American fashion. Such a high-volume client could not only transform his bottom line, but make a statement about the resurgence of American craft.
The new sample warper that Mr. Long bought from the sale of his wife’s apartment allows American Woolen to make small runs of fabric quickly, to ensure quality and design specs before a substantial order is placed.
That afternoon, the fabric being woven on the machine was for Ralph Lauren.
Steven Kurutz covers cultural trends, social media and the world of design for The Times.
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