We are Lightning Wear Apparel, a sports apparel company founded in 2006 by athletes who wanted to innovate the sports apparel industry. At first, we heavily relied on overseas manufacturing, but we soon realized that this was not sustainable if we wanted to compete with bigger brands. We learned the hard way that dealing with unsupervised overseas manufacturers was costly and stressful, so we decided to step up our plan of attack.

We located a cut and sew manufacturer in Fairfax, Virginia, and started making our orders in the States. In the beginning of 2009, we found a manufacturer in Maryland located closer to our home office, where we learned the ins and outs of running a high production manufacturing facility. However, we did not realize that the manufacturer had other customers too, and big orders from other brands had our smaller orders being pushed to the side.

Finally, we decided it was time to make the “big boy” move and set up manufacturing “in house.” With a book of orders that needed to be filled, we bought our first set of sewing machines, cutting tables, and fabric cutter. We assembled over 30,000 units of our sports pinnies, custom shorts, custom shirts, and custom sweats per month in our Kensington, Maryland, USA factory.

We launched www.lacrossepinnies.com in July of 2010, a unique custom reversible jersey site that allowed customers to design an inner and outer color mesh jersey with whatever they wanted on it. Since then, we have expanded our customer base across the globe, including customers in Australia, Japan, Switzerland, England, Iraq, South America, and Canada.

At all times in the production process, customers can create and prepare their orders and track them from start to finish. We are proud to say that in some cases, we have cut, sewn, and personalized orders in one working day. We have expanded our product line to include sublimated reversibles, sublimated shorts, sublimated long and short sleeve shooter shirts, sublimated hooded sweatshirts, and custom sweatpants. We invest in state-of-the-art digital equipment and highly talented artists and operators to create and produce our garments from start to finish.