Fleece At 40: How Polartec Made Polyester Sexy

You likely own at least one item of clothing made with a fabric that the original maker intended for toilet seat covers. This fabric—soft, snuggly, and, yet, in the mountain environment for which it was repurposed, technical—is “fleece.”


Fleece—sheared from synthetic yarns—was introduced to the outdoors market in the late 1970s by the mountain equipment brand Patagonia. Company founder and ethical icon Yvon Chouinard believed that if he could find a lightweight fabric that would repel water yet retain its thermal properties climbers would jettison their heavy-when-wet woolen garments. 

Chouinard heard that North Atlantic trawler crews kept warm and dry in challenging conditions by wearing thick synthetic pile beneath their waterproof outers (“pile” refers to fabric with loops, strands, or peaked tufts of yarn; tiny balls of this fabric scuff up during use in a process known as “pilling,” not an imperfection that ever bothered trawler crews but of importance later in the fleece story.)


Southern California at the time wasn’t awash with fuzzy fabrics favored by European fisherfolk but, in 1976, three years after the founding of Patagonia, Chouinard’s wife Malinda chanced upon a U.S.-made pile while browsing the trade showrooms at a permanent textile market in the Fashion District of Los Angeles.


A salesman in one of these cramped showrooms handed Malinda a roll of stiff, napped fabric that the company sold in small batches to makers of bathroom accessories. Color choice: powder blue or tan.


The salesman worked for Malden Mills, one of New England’s few remaining textile makers. The family-run business had only recently emerged from bankruptcy after the collapse of the fake fur market and stayed afloat with the manufacture of a soft fabric for infant clothing called bunting.


Malden Mills started in 1906 in Malden, Massachusetts, founded by Jewish Hungarian immigrant Henry Feuerstein, who had earlier peddled rags from a pushcart in New York City. By 1956 the business was run by his grandson, Aaron, and he moved it to a century-old redbrick mill in Lawrence, 30 miles north of Boston, where the firm became the biggest and best employer in town.


The textile trade was already in decline—mills in Mexico and Asia had lower operating costs and, over 30 years, slowly squeezed most of New England’s textile manufacturers out of business. However, Malden Mills limped on. 


Fuzzy logic

That chance find by Malinda Chouinard changed everything. But not at first. Patagonia was still young, too undercapitalized to commission Malden Mills to produce fabric rolls in brighter, more saleable colors. 


Despite the choice of just two bathroom-related tints, the fuzzy fabric became a firm favorite with hikers, climbers, and kayakers who craved lightweight performance fabrics that stayed warm when wet but, unlike wool, didn’t swell with heavy moisture. By 1977, Patagonia’s sales had grown by 50%, almost all powered by the repurposed pile fabric made in New England.


This pre-fleece version of the fabric “pilled” terribly, and Patagonia tasked Malden Mills to use its skills with bunting fabrics to create a double-faced non-pilling fabric. Introduced in 1981 and initially marketed as Synchilla, this new cozy-to-the-touch fabric was an instant success. It propelled Patagonia to the front of the growing outdoor business, with mountain apparel now selling to everybody, not just enthusiasts. Out went tan and powder-blue, in came cobalt, teal, French red, aloe, seafoam, and iced mocha. Fleece was now fashionable.

As with all fashions, the popularity of fleece rises and falls, with the ubiqitious fleece gilet—worn, for example, by Stephen Colbert in a recent episode of A Late Show—considered decidedly unfashionable in many quarters.


Fire

The making of fleece was the making of Feuerstein—his business, now with a proprietary product, had never been as successful. 


Patagonia had an exclusive on the name Synchilla (so called because it simulated the soft fur of the chinchilla, a South American ground squirrel) but not on the fabric technology co-developed with Feuerstein’s in-house technicians. 


Malden Mills marketed its version of the new fabric as PolarFleece, PolarPlus, and others with “Polar” as a prefix. Simplified in 1991 with the adoption of the catch-all name Polartec, the front end of the consumer business was renamed the same.


In 1993, Polartec introduced recycled fleece made from plastic bottles (to date, Polartec has recycled over 1.8 billion of them). Two years later, the business almost wholly went up in smoke. On December 11, 1995, a boiler exploded at the Lawrence factory; the resulting fire destroyed three of the plant’s buildings, rendering useless 600,000 square feet of manufacturing space, jeopardizing 3,100 jobs.


The proprietary part of the factory survived. Fleece is a knitted fabric that is napped and sheared in a specialized process, and the finishing plant, known as Fin2, wasn’t destroyed, enabling the business to continue manufacturing, outsourcing yarn production and knitting, but, critically, keeping the fleece-specific technical processes in-house. 


Feuerstein claimed on a $302 million insurance policy but, famously and perhaps unwisely, he didn’t take the money and run (to Mexico) or jettison any jobs. Instead, he furloughed most of the workers, promising them and the town that he would rebuild the factory. At the time, NBC called Feuerstein the “best boss in America”; Reader’s Digest called him “one boss in a million.”


The rebuilt factory opened 21 months after the fire had nearly consumed it.


While making branded fleece was profitable, other parts of the Polartec business weren’t. High-end wovens and flock (cheap synthetics mostly used in automobile upholstery) had been dragging the business down even before the fire, and not all of the company executives agreed with Feuerstein’s ideas to keep these divisions going; and not all agreed with his paternalistic worker policies, either.


Sales of the (golden) fleece rebounded, but other parts of the business continued to flounder; key lieutenants jumped ship or were sacked. In 2001, Malden Mills declared bankruptcy again, and the company’s creditors paid little heed to Feuerstein’s corporate sainthood (his benevolence was thought by many to be one of the reasons for the bankruptcy) and he was removed. 


After restructuring in 2003 and the absorption of a government subsidy, the company emerged from Chapter 11.


Manufacturing continued at Lawrence, and sales improved. However, not enough to prevent the firm again filing for bankruptcy protection in January 2007.


The following month, Philadelphia-headquartered private equity group Chrysalis Capital Partners (now known as Versa Capital Management) purchased Malden Mills’ assets for $44 million. 


Technically always for sale in the years it was owned by Versa, Polartec carried on for another twelve years under new management before, in 2019, being sold to Milliken & Company of Spartanburg, South Carolina.


Milliken—founded in 1865—has been three times ranked as one of America’s Best Midsize Employers by Forbes. Of more relevance, though, it knew the fabric business—it had been one of the companies which Polartec turned to for production outsourcing after the Lawrence factory fire.


Lofty goals

While fleece has long been commoditized—available from multiple global suppliers, usually very cheaply but often of poor quality—Polartec remains at the rarefied, performance end of the market. A Polartec tag on a garment is a sales filip.


Polartec now makes numerous performance fabrics, not just fleece. Polartec Alpha—a technical baselayer launched in 2012—resulted from a collaboration with U.S. Special Forces and is now part of what Polartec calls the Active Insulation category. 


Another of the company’s innovations is Polartec Power Air made from fibers folded in on themselves—this creates a fabric that sheds far fewer microfibres through washing compared to other synthetics.  


Polartec has also made fabrics for leading cycling brands Sportful, Rapha, and Giro. For two years, Polartec co-sponsored a development professional cycling team founded by two-times Tour de France winner Alberto Contador.


Polartec fabrics are now made in factories in Hudson, New Hampshire, and Cleveland, Tennessee, as well as in China and Italy. The factory in Lawrence—Feuerstein’s folly say some, although not local union leaders—was shuttered in 2016 and now houses IndusPAD, a business incupator space. 


Fleece has come a long way since 1981 and is now challenged by down feathers and lofted synthetic insulation, but its many performance-oriented iterations mean this family of fabrics likely won’t be bettered for action sports any time soon. Instead, the family grows, with sustainability being a key future goal.


Polartec the company may be in new hands—again—but it remains dedicated to not just the production of high-end fabrics but the creation of new and highly technical ones.