We're excited to team up with Gustin on this piece, because like Primer, they believe that great style doesn't have to break the bank.
You can only choose two: Affordable, Quality, or Easy. This is the framework I recently discussed for men’s style. If you’re dissatisfied with the quality of your clothing—whether it's the materials, manufacturing and ethics, or design—you’ll either need to pay a premium or accept a more complex and time-consuming buying process.
Attempting to make affordable and quality a little less annoying is one of the big reasons we highlight sale and deal finds, giving you the opportunity to buy a higher quality item on a discount that’s ready to order as soon as you add to cart.
But of course, that is really just a different version of thrift hunting, limiting what you can buy based on what you stumble across at the time. And like thrifting, it requires a certain commitment to paying attention and not waiting to buy things right when you need them for your big presentation or family vacation.
Gustin is one brand we’ve long referenced for affordability and quality through their pre-sale, made-to-order model—American-made clothing at a fraction of the retail price, with a trade-off of having to place an order in advance and waiting for production and fulfillment.
But now, getting your hands on their well-crafted pieces just got a little easier. Using data from over a decade of campaigns, they’ve started stocking a selection of their perennial bestsellers, so you can enjoy the same quality without the usual wait.
If you’ve been poking around these parts for any length of time then you’re not new to the brand, which we’ve featured many times over the years, since their launch as a Kickstarter campaign in 2013 then later that year as a direct platform. Gustin pioneered the idea of crowdsourcing men’s made-to-last US-manufactured clothing. By partnering directly with US factories and taking advance orders through a campaign on their website, they’ve dramatically reduced the waste and overproduction that plague fast fashion retail brands—issues that have only worsened in the industry over the past 15 years.
Once the campaign is funded (98% of them are), the partner factory starts on the order, and Gustin fulfills shipping everything out to customers. The result is Gustin customers get premium, decades-enduring menswear at a near wholesale price.
The clothing you get from Gustin isn’t “just the same quality you get from a mall brand like J.Crew, but happens to be made in America.” The jeans, for example, are made out of some of the world’s best denim from the best manufacturers. Take their 1968 model that I’m wearing: Made of deadstock USA-made selvedge denim from the legendary Cone Mills White Oak plant in North Carolina, a standard-bearer of the premium denim world for decades, that abruptly shut down in 2017.
Or the BlackXBlack Stretch, which is cut and sewn in America from premium Japanese selvedge.
While Gustin initially got their start with jeans, over the past ten years they’ve expanded to everything from USA-made Horween leather jackets to Italian-made leather sneakers to joggers to briefcases and everything in between, with 95% of their campaigns made in American partner factories and 98% of campaigns getting successfully funded.
The “Quality” in the Affordable-Quality-Easy matrix isn’t just about how and what a piece of clothing is made out of, but also the quality and uniqueness of the design. What really sets things over the edge for me is, on top of the unrivaled pricing to quality ratio, they also feature some really interesting and stand-out designs like the Canadian-made natural rainbow nep fabric on the Vintage Heavyweight Sweatshirt I’m wearing.
It's clearly unique in detail, when noticed, but far from flashy — a hallmark of refined style. Doing this for as long as I have, I’ve never seen something like this at the price ranges we cover and made at this quality level.
To make the process as painless as possible here are a few of my tips:
- Gustin doesn’t use vanity sizing. Using their size and fit charts as a reference, measure one of your current favorites in whatever type of item you’re looking at.
- Pay close attention to the measurements you took when choosing your size on their site. Expect to order a larger size than you’re used to. If it’s close or in between, err on the larger size.
- Waist sizes 29-33 have a 34” inseam, and waists 34 on up have a 36” inseam, meaning whether you're narrow and long or wide and short, the perfect-fitting jeans are a quick hem away.
Check out Gustin’s full Stock section to see what’s available to ship now, and take a look at the campaigns currently being backed.
