Gretchen Valade can trace her family’s history in the apparel industry back more than a century. It was 1889 when her great-great grandfather, Hamilton Carhartt, started making durable overalls for railroad workers in the Midwest.
Fast forward to today, and the workwear company that bears his name is still owned by his descendants and continues to be headquartered in Detroit.
Valade grew up immersed in the family business, interning for the company when she was just 14 and joining full-time a decade ago after working for a couple of other brands including Li & Fung in Hong Kong.
“I came home to visit my family in Detroit,” she recalled. “My mom was showing me all the changes that had been happening within the city. And it got me really excited about Detroit. So I wasn’t necessarily planning to move home to work for the family business, it was more to get involved with everything happening in Detroit. But working for Carhartt sort of set my path.”
Gretchen Valade
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She started out in design and merchandising, transitioned into the direct-to-consumer space followed by community impact initiatives. Then around eight years ago, she began to embrace the sustainability space, launching Carhartt Reworked, a program that collects, cleans and repairs previously worn garments for resale. She also created the Carhartt Workshop, a community initiative that offers locals the opportunity to rent tools for free for their own projects.
It’s this background that led Valade to her latest project. On Tuesday, she will launch Wylie Welling, a separate business under the Carhartt umbrella that will give new life to original garments.
“Wylie Welling stems from my long-standing interest in circularity, craftsmanship and longevity,” she said. “Through Wylie Welling’s reinterpretation and restoration of original Carhartt garments, I hope to further celebrate the beauty of craft, leaning into the history and legacy of each product and design.”
The brand is named after Hamilton Carhartt’s son, Wylie Welling Carhartt. “We really liked that he was second generation,” she said. “Wylie Welling products are second generation and we love that connection between the brand and what we’re selling.”
But the decision to drop the Carhartt name from the new business was intentional. “We wanted to distinguish it a bit from the [core] brand. And it’s like a little Easter egg for customers.”
Although sustainability seemed to have reached its peak of popularity several years ago, Valade shrugs off the fact that the buzz may be gone.
“Anything related to sustainability at Carhartt was never really about the buzz,” she said. “It always had to do with our values and responsibility, and specifically with Carhartt creating very durable and functional products. Circularity just went along with our business model — we had always been repairing and standing by our products, even if we weren’t advertising it.”
She said that Carhartt’s sustainability efforts fall into two buckets: a repair program that launched in 2021 where consumers can send in their pieces to be repaired for free, and Carhartt Reworked. Wylie Welling falls somewhere in between.
Wylie Welling will rework Carhartt products.
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“We asked ourselves: what about product that isn’t high-quality enough for Carhartt Reworked but is not end-of-life either,” she said. “My team and I were trying to understand how we could continue to divert product from landfills and give them a second life. So we tested a couple of things internally, and, at the end of the day, realized it was a program that wasn’t suitable for Carhartt but we felt had legs.”
Calling it her “personal passion,” she said Carhartt is “allowing me to build this brand and product.”
The pieces in the debut collection are being sourced from the open market and are primarily menswear, although Valade views Wylie Welling as “more of a unisex brand.” It will consist of vintage and upcycled Carhartt pieces that are being reworked in Los Angeles and Detroit.
It will be broken down into two categories for the launch: Well Worn, which she described as product that has been sanitized, mended and restored, and Archive, which is centered around vintage product.
Well Worn pieces will retail between $95 and $225 for T-shirts or sweats to just under $900 for a jacket. Examples include a duck canvas vest from the 1990s for $150 and a denim Detroit jacket for $895. Pants will be $195 to $350 and shirts will retail for $250 to $295. Archive pieces will be higher-priced and more exclusive. The launch collection will consist of fewer than 10 pieces that will retail for $595 to nearly $3,500. Examples here include early 1970s duck canvas double knee pants for $595 and an early 1970s lined denim chore coat for $3,495.
The collection will be sold direct-to-consumer only and the plan is to introduce the line through digital and outdoor advertising, focusing on cities such as New York and L.A., she said. “We’re really focusing on metropolitan areas where we know our consumer is living and spending their time.”
And Valade will open a physical store in Detroit’s Little Village neighborhood this summer near where Wylie Welling himself lived. In addition to the reworked Carhartt product, it will also include responsibly made jewelry and accessories.
“It’s going to be the best expression of our brand,” she said. But it’s also going to be more than just a place to buy the one-off pieces. “We really want to lean into the community impact and focus on repairing, restoring, upcycling along with education workshops. It’ll be a place for the community to gather.”
The store is also expected to appeal to the large number of students in the neighborhood. “We have quite a few colleges and universities that focus on design, and I’ve had the opportunity to speak to a lot of students over the years,” she said. “One of their major passions and focus areas is upcycling and sustainability, and there’s nowhere for them to network or meet.”
The Wylie Welling store will also be around the corner from the Eugenie boutique that Valade and her husband, Kevin Steen, have owned since 2020. That store too is centered around responsible, sustainable product, many from independent, women-owned designers.
With all of her businesses, Valade is laser focused on making a difference. “Wylie Welling was built and developed when we discovered that a very broken-in and well-worn condition of a Carhartt garment still had a lot of life in it,” she said. “At the heart of Wylie Welling lies a reverence for the worn, the repaired, and the beautifully imperfect.”
