The goal at Fieldsmith has always been to produce an affordable yet premium product. A big part of that goal is to deliver on maximizing product life cycle, offering high value to customers and keeping more clothes out of landfills. Also, it’s important to have products made domestically, otherwise Fieldsmith wouldn’t have been a brand at all. The idea is to embody the values of the people creating our clothing & the people wearing them.
Honest hard work is how most people make their ends meet. Here in Canada, there’s plenty of hard working people that put up with crazy conditions and have done so for generations and that's a tradition worth talking about. This is the spirit that guided a lot of the decision making in creating every Fieldsmith product and resonated during product development. It’s how we arrived at the pants that we’re calling the ‘Work Pants’.
The Work Pants are a simple design with a mission: to last as long as possible and be comfortable and be functional enough that you’re going to want to wear them again and again. Through our planning stages, we wanted to cut anything that could break or compromise the durability of the overall product and add anything that would extend the life cycle. And we simplified at the manufacturing level to bring down the end cost to the customer.
What you’re left with is a straightforward pair of pants, but every level of design was geared towards elimination, substitution or engineering controls at the design level to make these pants last 3x longer than the average pair of cotton pants. One of the ways Fieldsmith was able to achieve this was through leveraging 100% Cordura over standard cotton, which is 3 times tougher using the Martindale Method.
A big challenge is that the Work Pants are made for people doing heavy work in industries like construction, mining, oil & gas, transportation, forestry & agriculture, not to mention climbing, camping, hiking, whatever. Added to this was the fact that we are dead set on manufacturing these goods domestically and we quickly realized why this is the road less traveled for most of the apparel industry.
There is almost a generational gap now in the skills and machinery required to produce this type of heavy duty clothing in large quantities and they’ve been offshored for so long not many factories are equipped or interested in sewing them. It took plenty of research & outreach to connect the dots, but Fieldsmith was lucky to have eventually found a domestic partner that would take this on.
The outcome is that we’re the only brand in North America pairing industrial grade, ethically-made manufacturing techniques with military grade materials, and offering them at an affordable price to the average consumer.
Obviously this has an adverse effect on production costs, but we firmly believe the pros outweigh the cons. There are inherent benefits to choosing to have these goods made here at home in Canada. The most obvious benefit is that you’re choosing to buy from a small Canadian business who manufactures in a country with strong labor laws and environmental protection so you don’t need to worry about whether your products are being made in sweatshops with sub-par compensation for workers. So there’s real merit and peace of mind to be able to stand by the ethics of a product you purchase.
At the end of the day Fieldsmith is about a solid product at a solid price with ethical pedigree. Fieldsmith’s end goal is honestly made clothing for an honest day’s work.