Camber is one of many trade-oriented clothing companies — think Carhartt, Gildan, Dickies and Cat — now coveted by the fashionable crowd. The tiny company, which is based in Norristown, Pennsylvania, takes larger orders via catalog or sells privately through wholesalers. There are two lo-fi uniform suppliers you can order from though: All USA Clothing and All Seasons Uniforms. Overseas, the brand’s sweatshirts — specifically the soft, sturdy 12-ounce #232 Hoodie — are sold by a select few London-based menswear shops savvy enough to acquire stock.
What makes their wares so covetable, exactly? Word of mouth. The brand, started by a father-son duo in 1982, has never once advertised its products. They built their reputation by wholesaling other labels’ things (since as far back as 1948), but eventually decided they’d be better off manufacturing better stuff under their own name — and here in the US.
Today, Camber’s catalog includes 8 largely unchanged items — including the 12 oz heavyweight hoodie, which has been heralded as the best $64 dollar sweatshirt ever made by legacy newspapers, menswear bloggers, Japanese YouTubers and English shop owners alike. Camber’s made-to-order (and made in USA) products are now feverishly hunted by the style conscious and often upsold by as much as $150 dollars.
Camber’s heavy hoodies feature a sturdy drawstring hood with brass eyelets and a front pouch pocket.
I’ll admit I have searched far and wide for my own, too. Since I live in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and have friends and family across the state in Philadelphia, I’ve long wondered whether I could just show up at their door and demand five or six of them in several different colors. (I’d rather pay the Turnpike tolls than shipping from a small store in London or Paris.) But A quick Google Maps search shows a photo of the company’s factory building in late November 2021; it looks impenetrable, albeit barely even marked. You wouldn’t know what it was if you weren’t from around there. The brick building’s painted white and boarded up at street level. It has a side entrance it shares with a used car lot.
A post shared by Matthew Spade (@mat_buckets)
Even though the brand is unabashedly American, it’s Americans that are hardest pressed to find Camber products. If you go on Camber Korea’s Facebook page — Camber Korea is a set of social media accounts run by Amuseman, the sole Korean stockist — the first post features a comment from a hungry American shopper wondering whether Camber Korea could airmail an item back to the US. The answer? No. As for the European stockists, by the time news of a restock reaches the American media, everything’s long gone. (Matthew Spade, the UK-based manager of design publication Best of Packaging, pictured above, for example, makes it a point to call out Camber restocks to his more than 72,000 Instagram followers. For reference, he’s also wearing one in those photos.)
Even though Camber makes over 200,000 hoodies a year, they’ve remained impressively hard to find — until now. Stockholm-born sneaker retailer Sneakersnstuff has collaborated with Camber a second time on a four color collection of sweatshirts, hoodies and sweatpants in sizes S-3XL. Standard Camber stuff runs all the way up to 7XL, but these custom colors come with limitations. And even though these are marked up to $119 dollars, getting one from SNS and getting it shipped (for only $10 more) will cost you less than the ones available in one of the aforementioned, London, Paris or Seoul stores. Plus, you’ll save yourself the hassle of hunting down the shops that do sell them and then anxiously waiting a restock.
Editor’s Note: The Natural and Green SNS x Camber hoodies drop on March 12th, and the Royal Blue and Red iterations release on March 19th.