Last week the Board went looking for the one trouser in a catalogue of 92 whose cloth was woven in America. This week the search is shorter, because the company that sews the shirt also owns the machine that knitted it.

Columbiaknit’s own About page says the company was founded in Portland in 1921 and has been family owned and operated since 1958, out of a factory at 5200 S.E. Harney Drive. The homepage makes the claim this issue is about: “The entire process from knitting of the fabric, through cutting, sewing and shipping is done in our Portland, Oregon USA factory.” That sentence is doing a lot, and it is homepage copy, which is exactly the kind of line this newsletter got wrong on Hamilton Shirts and corrected in print on August 18. So the only useful question is whether the product pages back it up, one listing at a time.

They mostly do, and the shape of the exceptions is the interesting part. I read all 707 listings in the store this morning. Counting a listing as naming an origin for its cloth when the description puts a cloth word (fabric, jersey, terry, twill, knit) and a “made in” or “knitted in” place inside the same sentence, the split is: 211 name Oregon for the cloth, usually in the form “the fabric is a traditional 10 to 10 1/2 ounce cotton jersey knitted in Oregon.” Another 72 name the USA for the cloth but not the state, as in “Fabric is 8 to 8.5oz 100% COTTON Jersey made in USA.” 227 name a place for the garment only, most often a flat “Made in USA” or “Made in Portland, Oregon USA,” with nothing said about the cloth. And 197 name no place at all. That is 707 listings, and 283 of them put a place on the cloth itself rather than only on the garment.

The 197 silent listings are not a random scatter either. Sixty six are boat neck tops, 22 are henleys, 13 are the fine gauge dresses and six are headbands, and 46 of the 197 have a description under 40 characters long, usually a bare fibre percentage such as “100% COTTON.” Then there is the hat shelf, where two products sit next to each other and disagree. The 15 Acrylic Watch Cap listings, $8.90, open with “Acrylic Watch Cap Made In Portland, Oregon USA.” The six Acrylic with Natural Wool hats, $18.45, describe the 85% acrylic and 15% natural wool blend in detail and never say where the hat was made. Same store, same category page, one sentence apart in effort.

So does the homepage claim survive the catalogue? It is not contradicted anywhere in it. Across all 707 listings, not one names a foreign country, and not one uses the word imported. That is the honest verdict: 283 pages back the homepage sentence explicitly, 424 simply say less than it does, and none of them says anything that would make it false. Silence is not a foreign claim, and it is not a US claim either, which is the whole reason this newsletter counts instead of quoting.

One more thing a reader will hit immediately: columbiaknit.com is not itself a store. It redirects to usa-wear.com/ostore/, an OpenCart storefront with an IE6 stylesheet still linked in the head. It is a genuinely dated shop and it is also unusually specific about stock: sold out sizes are greyed out and labelled “Out Of Stock” in the size menu rather than being silently addable to a cart. Of the 572 listings that carry size options, 470 show every size available this morning and 27 show none.

Buy first: the Men’s Solid Rugby in white, product code WM029 WHITE, $108. Its page says the fabric is a traditional 10 to 10 1/2 ounce cotton jersey knitted in Oregon, pre shrunk, with a continuously sewn placket, rubber buttons, under arm gussets, rib cuffs and a cotton twill collar. All six sizes, XSmall through XXLarge, were showing as available this morning. If you are in Portland you can collect it at the factory for no shipping charge, though their pickup page says plainly that they do not do in store shopping.

1. 🇺🇸 Truman Black Oiled Rough Out Plain Toe, $480. Fully US-made, and a useful contrast with the shirt above it. Truman’s site-wide banner reads “RUGGED LEATHER BOOTS PROUDLY MADE IN EUGENE, OREGON,” but the product page does not repeat it: it lists Goodyear welt construction, the Formal last, a Truman Commando sole and a structured toe box, then ends with a flat “Made in USA” and no qualifier. A country, not a town. Eighteen of the 20 size and width combinations were live this morning, nine of them EE wides. Worth knowing that Truman runs two different claim strings across the catalogue: plenty of their boots read “Made in USA with global components” or “with globally-sourced components” instead. This one does not, and the difference is printed rather than hidden.

2. 🇺🇸 Faribault Mill Minnesota Flag Wool Throw, $245. Fully US-made, and the closest thing this week to a Columbiaknit in blanket form. Their page says the throw is “woven right here in the USA at our historic mill in Faribault, Minnesota,” which names the building the loom is in. 42 by 65 inches. There is also a factory second of the same throw at $169, in stock this morning, and their seconds are sold as seconds rather than dressed up as a sale.

3. 🇺🇸 Leather Works Minnesota Whiskey Tote in Mahogany, $350. Fully US-made, and it does the same trick one layer down: “Made by hand in St. Paul, Minnesota using All American Steer from Tennessee Tanning.” Naming the tannery on the product page is the leather equivalent of naming the knitting state. Brass hardware, a ribboned interior that holds four glasses and a bottle, 15.5 by 7.5 by 5 inches. Glasses included, whiskey not.

4. Gitman Gold Neat Paisley Tie, $81. Disclosed nuance, and the cleanest disclosure in this issue. One page carries both halves: “Woven in Italy from 100% silk” and “cut and sewn entirely by hand at our North Carolina factory.” Nothing is hidden and nothing is implied. Compare it with their Orange Cotton/Linen Madras shirt at $186, down to a small and an XXL this morning, which names the Canclini mill in Italy for the cloth and then says nothing at all about where the shirt was sewn, on a brand whose other shirt pages say Pennsylvania. Same catalogue, two different levels of care.

5. 🇺🇸 Sea Bags U.S. Yacht Ensign Wharf Tote, $230. Fully US-made, from the other Portland. “Handcrafted in Maine from recycled sail cloth,” which is a country of origin question that answers itself: the cloth was a sail before it was a bag. If $230 is more tote than you need, the same Yacht Ensign wristlet is $30.

The most recent Sale Wire is The Shop: same shoe, same price, one made somewhere else, from Friday August 21. A new Shop lands this Friday, August 28.

Two corrections from Friday’s Shop, and the first one is the kind I like least. On August 21 this newsletter called American Trench’s August Special Chukka “the largest dollar discount on any footwear I found this week, $321 off.” That is wrong, and the same issue disproves it three bullets further down. Frank’s mismatched Type 1 Packer, left 13B and right 12.5D, sat in that issue’s own Sale Wire at $300 from $825. That is $525 off, and two more pairs on the same rack beat $321 as well, a Monkey Boot at $355 off and a Type 2 Highlander at $330 off. What I meant was the largest discount on first quality footwear, where $321 genuinely does lead, because a factory second’s original price is not a like-for-like comparison. But the qualifier is the whole claim, and I did not print it. Anyone checking my work against my own Sale Wire would have it in a minute, and some of you would.

The second is smaller and bothers me more. That issue reopened the promise this newsletter made on July 14, to put the labeling question to Quoddy directly and print their answer, and told you “I have no answer to print.” True as far as it goes. It also reads as though I asked and was ignored, and that is not what happened. I never sent the email. I decided against it and reported what Quoddy’s own product pages say instead, which turned out to be the better story and is the reason that section exists at all. But “no answer to print” and “I never asked” are different sentences, and I printed the one that made me look better. Quoddy did not stonewall anybody.

All four of those discount figures were re-checked against Frank’s and American Trench’s live product data this morning, August 25, and all four still hold. The Packer is still on the rack at $300.

Nobody prints the yarn. Not one of Columbiaknit’s 707 listings uses the words yarn, spun or grown. They will tell you the jersey was knitted in Oregon, which is one layer deeper than the 227 of their own listings that stop at the garment, but where the cotton was farmed and where it was spun into yarn before it reached a Portland knitting machine is not on any page in the store. The August 18 Board made the same observation about a Connecticut mill. Two makers is not a pattern, but it is twice now that the deepest disclosed layer stopped exactly where the company’s own machines stop. This is a reading habit worth having rather than a complaint about one company.

A dated website is not evidence either way. The Columbiaknit store still carries an IE6 conditional stylesheet and jQuery 1.7.1, and it routes its own brand domain to a third party storefront. It also names the knitting state on 211 product pages. Gitman’s madras page, on a far newer site, names an Italian mill for the cloth and no place at all for the sewing. Design budget and disclosure budget are not the same budget, which is worth saying out loud because the temptation to read an old stylesheet as a warning sign is real.

Every price, claim string, count and link above was read on the makers’ own live pages on the morning of Tuesday August 25, 2026. The whole board is public and searchable at registry.quarterboard.co, every maker labeled and dated. No brand paid to appear. Some links may become affiliate links; that never changes what gets picked.

P.S. The counting rule for Columbiaknit is printed above on purpose, so you can run it yourself and get 211 rather than taking my word for it. If you run it and get a different number, tell me which listing broke it. The two corrections above came out of checking my own arithmetic against my own Sale Wire, which is a thing any of you can do to me at any time, and should.

Until next time,

quarterboard.co · @quarterboardco