7 September 2025 --- Ralph 

People ask frequently why our products are expensive compared to other brands of outerwear.  And our price is really the only thing for which we get flamed.

First of all ... check pricing of some other outdoors-oriented brands, and we are not very expensive. But also, check out pricing on city-oriented brands, which often make us look like a bargain. Mainly, tho, we feel we should be judged as Hardcore Luxury (a trademark of ours). Is any outdoor-oriented brand more luxurious? Does any city-oriented brand offer better hardcore performance? If you think so, please let me know the name!

For any product or service, there is a range of prices, a lot of different ways to do things. Until WeatherWool, I felt nobody was fulfilling the potential of All-Purpose Woolen Outerwear. So we decided to fill that void ... We are making the best pure-American, pure-woolen outerwear we can figure out how to make. All of our components, processing, and craftsmanship are the best we can find, and again, American-only. Every decision we have ever made was intended to improve our products and service. The costs really add up. Here are some factors:

• We make our own Fabric, which is quite unusual for a small clothing manufacturer. We could save about 85% on the cost of our Fabric if we simply purchased fabric from the standard sources. But if we used run-of-the-mill fabric, we'd be just another company that had to rely on design and marketing to sell garments that could have been made by anyone. If we weren't making our own Fabrics, we wouldn't be doing this at all
• We are extremely particular about the fiber we work with.  The labels on our garments reference 100% WeatherWool Certified Fine Wool.  Our raw wool is the best for our purposes and sourced from ranchers we get to know.  We buy the best wool for our purposes, and we normally top off the price a little because we want and need our ranchers to stay in business ... and wool-ranching is experiencing very tough times
• Every step in our production, all of our components, starting with the sheep themselves and their raw wool, then cleaning, spinning, dyeing, weaving, finishing, cutting, sewing, tailoring and delivery --  is the highest quality and purely USA. And almost all of it custom
• All this custom processing results in a very protracted production timeline.  From start to finish, we are routinely running 18 months.  That is, we are spending time and money for 18 months before we have a product to deliver to a customer.  Our Batch 9 fiber was purchased in April of 2022, and as of October of 2024, we were still weaving it.  From the cash flow, financing and tax standpoints, that is a nightmare.  Plus, I'm not getting any younger!
• We use absolutely no cotton or fillers. Only pure, prime, small-batch American wool, sourced from America's leading ranches. Woolen garments typically have cotton, polyester or other fillers, plus inferior types of wool mixed in. We don't use cotton thread either (cotton is bad news in wet conditions). Our mil-spec thread is very expensive and sometimes hard-to-get, but it is the best thread we can find
• Our FullWeight and MidWeight Fabrics are woven on a Jacquard Loom.  (Until we developed 100% Wool Denim in 2023 as part of Batch 9, all of our Fabrics were Jacquard.)  Normally, only complex patterns are woven on a Jacquard loom because it is the only loom that can create complex patterns, including even recognizable portraits). However, the Jacquard also creates a more three-dimensional structure in the Fabric that significantly enhances performance. We may be the only people who weave Solid Colors on a Jacquard loom. 
• We use Slot Buttons (aka Canadian Rail Buttons) almost exclusively.  There are a couple of garments where they don't seem right. Slot Buttons are much more expensive than typical 4-hole buttons, and they are significantly more expensive to sew. All told, they are probably about 75 times the cost of typical buttons. BUT, Slot Buttons are much better at standing up to long, tough use. And nobody is ever going to think “Gee, I wish my Jacket was made with standard buttons instead of these mil-spec Melamine Slot Buttons.”  Read about Slot Buttons and other examples on our Details page.
• No-Risk Field Testing: Take WeatherWool out in the field and test it hard under the worst conditions ... for a while. Get a refund if you want. Basically, nobody wants the refund.
• Our garment design, development and production is done in the Garment District of New York City, the home of the most-talented but also (of course!) highest-paid sewing professionals in the USA.
• Finished inside stitching. Mostly, we don't use liners on the inside of our garments, which means our inside stitching is fully visible and therefore needs to be finished instead of rough, which significantly increases labor costs. A lot of tailors can't even produce finished inside stitching because they have never made garments that don't have liners to hide the inner stitching.   On some garments we do use liners (made from our own Fabric and our usual fiber!) in order to construct inside pockets that are not visible from the outside of the garment
• Free returns or exchanges or refunds. Even after heavy-duty field testing. Or for financial hardship.  We can't have anyone unhappy
• No additional cost for credit card processing or PayPal. These payment processors take anywhere up to 4% of the entire transaction ... usually almost 3%.  The fact that processing costs apply to the entire transaction is significant.  If our gross profit per garment is 50% (we are not there, although that is industry standard), then a 3% credit card fee eats up 6% of gross profit
• Free shipping in the USA (even Alaska, Hawaii) and Canada. Shipping a garment costs us typically $20 or more
• Filling an order costs us $50, and that's if there are no exchanges.  But we don't like adding additional charges during checkout, so all costs are built into the price of our products. No extra charges

The costs for processing our raw fleece into Fabric are exceptional. We require special treatment at every step of the way. Our original millers put this in writing: “... you are a special customer ... you have your own Mill within the Mill.  We do not do this for any other customers.”  (This was the old, original Woolrich, before they shut down all US operations in 2018.  Woolrich is now a European company.)

Repeating for emphasis:  Our FullWeight and MidWeight Fabrics, even the solid colors, are woven on a Jacquard loom, which is capable not only of producing complex patterns, but also creates in our Fabrics a three-dimensional structure that enables performance significantly superior to the typical standard/flat (Dobby) loom.  The Jacquard loom is so important to what we do that we purchased two of our own Jacquard looms in March of 2025.  As of September of 2025 we are still working to get those looms online.

Sometimes we have to go to crazy lengths to remain pure-American, but we are unwilling to make any exceptions. We were unable to find any American makers of the type of pure (soft!) merino woolen cuffs and ribs we need for our Hooded Jackets and some other items. So, we had to start from scratch, by sourcing appropriate fiber, then having it spun and dyed to our specs, and then knitted into cuffs (and ribs). This process was very time-consuming and insanely (embarrassingly) expensive.  This was back in about 2015, and we still don't know of anyone making the cuffs/ribs we need as a commercially available product.  But at this point, because we got involved in knitting, we are offering Watch Caps and Neck Gaiters, and so we'll continue to make our own cuffs and ribs, regardless of what might be available commercially.

We are a very small company, making small quantities of garments. We worked three years to develop our first true production Fabric. Each garment we offer has been designed and fitted and tested repeatedly before we put our label on it. It is routine for us to spend thousands of dollars and more than a year developing a garment.