👷 A Tale of Two Carhartts

What Paul Newman and Easy-E Have In Common — Plus, What to Expect During the First Government Shut Down Since 2018

Author

Katie Perry
October 02, 2025

Welcome to Tuesday Thursday Saturday! Here, I share a snapshot of trending stories across business, tech, and culture, plus some updates from the daily financial news show I host. - KP

The Big Story: Selling the Same Beanie Twice

Take a stroll down a few blocks on Broadway in New York and you’ll encounter something interesting: Two Carhartt stores within walking distance of each other.

One is Carhartt Work In Progress (WIP), the line that caters to skaters, DJs, and lifestyle influencers. The other is a newly-opened, traditional Carhartt store, built for the original audience — that is, people who actually work in their clothes. Both manifestations of the brand exist within three subway stops of one another. But why?

A traditional Carhartt store is opening on 21st and Broadway, just a couple of subway stops up from the SoHo WIP location.

From a Detroit Loft to the Railroad

Carhartt began in 1889, when Hamilton Carhartt opened a small shop in Detroit with two sewing machines. His first products didn’t sell well. Instead of calling it quits, he talked to some railroad workers. What did they need in their clothes? What wasn’t working? Out of those conversations came a new overall design that could withstand the roughest of conditions.

That kind of pragmatism would come to define the company. Carhartt built mills in the South, opened factories around the country, and eventually expanded overseas. The clothes weren’t glamorous, but they endured. By the time of the World Wars, Carhartt was supplying uniforms and coveralls for soldiers and laborers alike. In the 1970s, demand surged again when the Alaska Pipeline needed gear tough enough for freezing temperatures.

The brand promise was beautifully simple: Carhartt built clothing that solved problems.

The late, great Paul Newman wears Carhartt in the 1994 film, “Nobody’s Fool.”

A New Kind of Customer

Sometime in the 80s, Carhartt’s rugged style began to seep into an entirely different audience. Hip-hop artists, graffiti writers, and skaters started wearing it. For them, Carhartt wasn’t about working on the railroad. It was about projecting toughness and authenticity. The jackets and pants became cultural armor, a signal that you were part of something real.

NWA’s Easy-E in Carthartt (Source: snobhob.substack.com)

This unexpected adoption, particularly in Europe, pushed Carhartt into a new experiment. In 1994, under the direction of German distributor Edwin Faeh, Carhartt launched Work In Progress (WIP). WIP kept the same iconic silhouettes like the Detroit jacket, the chore coat, and the double-knee pant — but they slimmed them down, refined the fabrics, and sold them in boutiques instead of hardware stores. The first WIP store opened in London in 1997. Since then, the line has spread across the world with more than 80 WIP stores and a steady stream of collaborations with fashion and skate brands.

Carhartt capsule catered to skaters.

The Money Side of the Story

Because Carhartt is privately held, the exact revenue figures are fuzzy. But e-commerce estimates tell part of the story. According to ecommercedb, in 2024, Carhartt.com (core line) netted about $356 million in online sales. Carhartt-wip.com (the fashion line) made about $98.8 million.

Put another way, sales for Carhartt’s trendy WIP offshoot could amount to more than 20% of the brand’s total sales. But that’s not the entire story. The workwear market is a scale game. WIP, by comparison, is smaller but more influential. It thrives in subcultures where credibility matters more than scale. And it commands higher margins.

Check this out: A Carhartt core knit beanie costs $19.99. On the WIP website, that very same beanie — or at least something very close to it — costs $28 or more depending on the pattern. They sell some of these for $68 there.

Same beanies, different buyers.

Two Stores, Two Strategies

Which brings us back to New York. WIP has been in SoHo for years, selling to affluent New York City transplants who encourage their TikTok followers to “get ready with me” and “shop the link in bio.”

The new Carhartt store, a more traditional extension, will be based in Flatiron. It’s not exactly “rugged” there either — there’s an Eataly a few blocks up — but it’s also not the fashion slash tourist capital of New York. And to its credit, it’s a stone’s throw away from one of Manhattan’s rare Home Depot locations.

Carhartt clearly isn’t trying to merge these audiences, but they are letting them coexist. The playbook is working, and apparently, it’s working quite well. Do you know how many brands would love to sell the same product to two audiences and squeeze the more affluent buyers to juice margins? Answer: Literally all of them.

Beauty brands do this all the time. Maybelline Great Lash Mascara costs you $8 at CVS, while Lancôme Hypnôse Mascara will set you back $30 at Sephora. Both of these products are manufactured by L’Oréal Group.

The key difference is that Carhartt’s brand is the same yet equally strong across its audiences. Carhartt’s core brand has 1.6M followers on Instagram. WIP has 1.7M.

So, how do they get away with it?

Plenty of brands have tried to chase fashion trends and lost their credibility in the process. Carhartt avoided that trap by building a structural firewall. WIP is its own line, with its own stores, collabs, and design team. That separation allowed Carhartt to maintain authenticity with workers while also cultivating cachet in the fashion world.

The dual-brand playbook is stupidly simple. Keep the original audience loyal. Let a parallel line speak to an entirely different crowd. Sell the same DNA twice. What looks like redundancy is actually a form of brand alchemy.

That’s why two Carhartts coexisting is such a statement. The worker and the fashion kid may never shop side by side, but they’re both part of the same story — especially in a city like New York. One sees Carhartt as armor for the job site. The other sees it as a marker of cultural taste. The brilliance is that both are right.

Daily Rip Live: Day 1 of the Shutdown, Direct Indexing, and ‘Degen’ Bankers

Every weekday, Shay Boloor and I co-host a morning markets show for Stocktwits called The Daily Rip Live. Wednesday’s episode was full of jokes, guest appearances, and a few obligatory digs at our elected officials, who can’t seem to figure out how to do their jobs (again). Here’s what we covered:

⇢ 2:24 | Our old pal Jerremy Newsome joins us, a ray of light IN A WORLD SO DARK.

⇢ 3:04 | 750K federal workers furloughed, no BLS data — are our pets' heads falling off?

⇢ 7:37 | On the positive, at least Nancy Pelosi has a lot more time to day trade 😆 

⇢ 8:11 | The U.S. takes 5% stake in Lithium Americas, as expected. $LAC ( ▲ 31.78% )  

⇢ 11:50 | People hating Congress = good news for crypto? $BTC.X ( ▲ 1.41% )  $ETH.X ( ▲ 0.24% )  

⇢ 15:08 | Self-described “TradFi Guy” Shay Boloor admits that he got Tom Lee'd

⇢ 17:25 | Would you look at the P/E ratio on Robinhood?! $HOOD ( ▲ 2.04% )  

⇢ 22:00 | The gang divulges their latest trades: $NFLX ( ▼ 0.79% )  $DUOL ( ▲ 3.08% )  $SOFI ( ▼ 2.81% )  

⇢ 33:00 | Public’s head of product talks direct indexing democratization

⇢ 42:12 | Nike earnings and comeback update: SKIMS up, Chucks down $NKE ( ▼ 3.54% )  

⇢ 48:00 | Crypto-as-a-service CEO talks about tradfi x defi mixing it up & regulatory next steps

Now, Here’s a Chart

Just kidding. No chart today. Just a reminder to stream the new Taylor Swift album at midnight.

😉

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Tuesday Thursday Saturday is written by Katie Perry, owner of Ursa Major Media, which provides fractional marketing services and strategy in software, tech, consumer products, professional services, and other industries. She is also the co-host of Stocktwits’ Daily Rip Live show.

Disclaimer: The contents here reflect recaps and summaries of pre-reported or published data, news, and trends. I have cited sources and context for the information provided to the best of my ability. The purpose of the newsletter is to inform and educate on larger trends shaping business and culture — this is NOT investment advice. As an investor, you should always do your own research before making any decisions about your money or your portfolio.