The average temperature in Utah Valley in June is 86 degrees. On June 13, 2024, Salt Lake City broke a record, reaching 100 degrees for the first time that year. Despite the heat, Jess Reese, founder and CEO of James Street Co, a sustainable knitwear brand, finds herself breaking out a stack of sweaters.
“Many think sweaters can only be part of a fall or winter brand, but our buyers and customer base want our clothes in June,” she says. “[Knitwear] is our bread and butter. It’s what we’re known for. Having those styles available year-round is where we’re headed.”
While today Reese has a clear vision for her company, she started out her career in fashion by piecing together statement outfits for high school in Logan, Utah.
“Because I’m from Logan, [fashion] didn’t seem like a real job. I didn’t know anybody who made money at it. I knew nobody who went to school for fashion or chose it as their career,” Reese says.
Bridgerland Technology College, located in Logan, offers classes in fashion merchandising and development. Reese enrolled and got her toes wet before attending Utah State University and earning a bachelor’s in interior design. She then made the leap to attend FIDM (Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising) in Los Angeles, where she became captivated by knitwear fashion design, developing her skills and earning an associate degree in that area.
“As a very tactile person, I gravitate to knits,” Reese says. “I like how sweaters are designed far more than how traditional cut clothing is created. With knitwear, you’re designing based on a shape. There’s a little more manipulation and forgiveness involved. You can graph it on paper and consider how the stretchy material will fall and drape. You design it, cut it into whatever shape you wish, sew it and put it on a mannequin. It was ultimately better for me with how I tend to learn.”
Creating her style
After graduating from FIDM, Reese interned for Uniqlo and Brochu Walker in LA. When she and her husband moved back to Utah for his job, Reese knew it was time to start something on her own.
“In many ways, I knew at a young age what I wanted to do,” Reese says. “It became a matter of, OK, ‘How do I get there? How can I support myself this way?’”
After securing a few ’80s-style refurbished sewing machines and installing them in her home, Reese began knitting made-to-order sweaters, the start of the career she’d only dreamed of up to that point. The more sweaters she sewed, the more word traveled and orders came in. Over time, she specialized her products to create an “androgynous, elevated tomboy brand,” focusing on oversized knitwear and denim.
“James Street Co reflects me, my evolution,” Reese says. “I dress very androgynously and am not the most feminine girl. What we create has resulted from all I have sought out and what I believe the next thing will be.”
She knew she was on the right track when she never had to seek out orders. As a one-woman operation, however, she could only do so much.
Reese was knitting, washing and assembling every day of the week. After about a year of struggling to keep up, she was finally able to expand into a full-functioning factory in LA, one of three she still uses to create clothing for James Street Co today.
“We don’t produce many styles, but if one isn’t selling and we have leftover quantities, we will always donate them to a local women’s shelter. We send our clothes to where they can get used. I have no interest in keeping a warehouse full of clothing.”
— Jess Reese
Sustainability from the start
Reese made a choice early on to run an actively sustainable company.
After working in Los Angeles, Reese decided to promote sustainability in all she created. There, she saw how much excess a large brand could make and how quickly waste could accumulate due to a business shift or choice. It took her aback.
Styles of a single brand would get created and canceled, often leading to a lot of discarded excess. One saving grace of being a small, niche company is that Reese didn’t have the financial backing to make those kinds of costly mistakes. Still, she wanted to proceed differently, shifting toward better practices that were kinder to the environment, like choosing traceable yarn vendors.
While many industries can fail in these practices, the fashion and apparel industries are especially troubling. The trend toward fast fashion, for example, has regularly merited disastrous results, including unchecked worker exploitation in factories located in lower-income countries. Workers are often young women working under hazardous conditions.
To promote change in her field, Reese has chosen to create her clothing in small batches, using traceable fabrics and vetted factories that promote ethical practices.
“Because I made that choice in the beginning when the company was small and it was easy to do, I didn’t give myself any other option,” Reese says. “These are issues I care about and serve as moral choices for the brand.”
For Matt Disney, president of Wuru Wool, the longer his company existed, the more it made sense to be sustainability-driven. For example, building a factory in the United States allowed Disney to “control the controllables.” Now, the American-made Merino wool clothing company can produce pieces faster than if it outsourced manufacturing overseas. Recently, the company’s stateside manufacturing enabled it to take a product from concept to completion in under two weeks.
“That’s just not possible to do globally. For us, [sustainability] was a byproduct of what we do and doing business as we felt it should be done,” Disney says.
While James Street Co pursues sustainable manufacturing, the company has also created an archive site where customers can resell used pieces, an inexpensive way for buyers to upgrade and upcycle. If a customer wants to discard an item they’ve worn for a few years or find new pieces at a lower price point, they can go through the James Street Co site. Often, resellers use original photoshoot images on their listings.
As she actively pursues sustainability in all areas, one thing is for certain: Reese doesn’t produce more than is needed. Whatever gets created will get used.
“We don’t produce many styles, but if one isn’t selling and we have leftover quantities, we will always donate them to a local women’s shelter,” Reese says. “We send our clothes to where they can get used. I have no interest in keeping a warehouse full of clothing.”
It takes a village
While much of her sales and success can be traced back to her own experience, Reese has found many mentors along the way who have helped to grow her company. After being accepted into the Master of Business Creation (MBC) program at the University of Utah’s David Eccles School of Business, where business owners share ideas designed to catapult revenue, Reese learned how to budget and market more effectively.
The mentors she gained via the program were rarely involved in the fashion industry, but that was often more of a pro than a con. The industry didn’t matter as much as learning how others actively grew their companies.
“I got the best feedback from people who couldn’t have been more different from me. One was a scientist, for example, and another was a guy who owned a knife shop,” Reese says. “Being in what was essentially an incubator helped me understand what I wasn’t skilled at yet so I could organize my company better to grow.”
By seeing what other businesses were doing, Reese was able to fine-tune her strengths. It was important to determine what made her company unique — what made her customers gravitate toward James Street Co over another brand. Building on that without piggybacking and following the lead of others is hard to do sometimes, Reese says, but it helped her strengthen the uniqueness of her company and its customers.
“James Street Co has established who it is and has a clear voice. The MBC helped me to be OK with who we are and to shut out the rest as noise,” Reese says. “It’s what allows us to survive. We must ride that and keep that focus without caring what others are doing or how.”