Missoula clothing company launches campaign to fund manufacturing facility

MISSOULA — Youer has launched a crowdfunding campaign to

fund an apparel manufacturing facility in Missoula.

The Youer “community supported apparel” will enable the activewear brand to secure its ideal location and begin building a production space that will be called the Youniverse.

“We’ve run into an absurd number of production challenges over the last five years of making clothing in the U.S., and over time we’ve realized vertical integration is our best and only option,” Mallory Ottariano, founder of Youer, said in a press release. “Only 2 percent of the clothes we buy in the U.S. are made here, and pretty much none of those are made in Montana. We want to change that.”

The campaign will run through Oct. 28 on www.shopyouer.com. With funding from the campaign, Ottariano aims to secure a building by the end of 2021. Once the building is purchased, Youer plans to have machines and people up and running within eight weeks.

Youer is a community-centric business and wants its customers to be involved in the decisions.

“We are creating our own whimsical clothing factory outside Missoula, in order to have more control over how, when, and where our products are made,” Ottariano said.

Typically a CSA stands for “community supported agriculture” — a tool used by farms to guarantee sales and collect operating expenses in advance of the growing season. In Youer’s case, it stands for Community Supported Apparel. Over the course of the 30-day campaign, Youer will be selling and pre-selling a selection of goods all in an effort to fund the building of a

factory together as a community.

The campaign includes a limited edition Treasure Dress, Youer’s best selling item, which historically sells out within a week each year — in an exclusive color only available for backers.

Each limited edition dress will come labeled with a sew-in patch that says ‘This Dress Built the Youniverse’, and each will be hand signed and numbered by founder Mallory Ottariano.

For more information head to https://www.shopyouer.com/collections/youers-csa and be sure to watch the launch video.