LEADVILLE — They bounce out the Melanzana door giddy. Clad in their freshly stitched fleece, a foursome of giggling teen girls pose for a selfie. Others swiftly unwrap their new purchases and drape themselves in their new microgrid hoodies.
Jan Mueller and Cindy Jaye walk onto Harrison Avenue in downtown Leadville and toast their bundled treasures like glasses of champagne.
“Nice Melly,” they say to each other.
They were able to sidestep the reservations needed to buy Melanzana fleeces by showing staff in the Leadville manufacturing facility a photo of themselves at the start of the Colorado Trail.
“I think the owner must be partial to people doing the trail,” says Jaye, of Golden, whose trail name is Waterbug.
“They are soft. They are so cool. It’s a club, you know,” says Mueller, a Denver hiker who goes by Tortoise and says she’s quick to toss a “Nice Melly” to fellow members of the fleeced flock. “We are in our 60s so it’s kind of cool when the young kids say ‘Nice Melly.’”
The Melly mystique is a real thing evidenced by the golden-ticketed buyers in Leadville, the only place to buy Melanzana hoodies. Some buyers wait several months for an appointment to go to the Leadville shop and permission to buy no more than two items. The company, founded in 1994 by an adventurer who pined for a warmer sweater, does not advertise. It does not deploy Instagrammers or athletes. You can’t buy Melanzana’s coveted hoodies online or by calling the shop.
At a quick glance, it appears that company founder Fritz Howard has broken just about every rule taught in business school. Yet, he’s wildly successful. About 80 people work in the Melanzana store, where a phalanx of locally trained sewers work Juki and Yamato industrial sewing machines in 10-hour shifts, four days a week. He has methodically grown his business in a way that kept his employees working without overwhelming them while keeping customers donned in his instantly recognizable fleece.
Howard, who turns 57 in early August, bristles a bit at the notion that he created scarcity to help his bottom line. He didn’t impose reservations and appointments and purchase limits as a way to build buzz or foster a sense of exclusivity. The limits on access are not a marketing strategy.
“It was purely to handle the traffic so we didn’t sell out,” he says. “We needed to maintain some level of inventory in the store. We have always tried to make as much product as we can, but within our value system. We have very specific values. First is that we make everything ourselves.”
A second sewing shop in Alamosa
Howard recently opened a second manufacturing facility with about 35 workers in Alamosa. He’s spent nearly 18 months training sewers and cutters in Alamosa, just like he did in Leadville.
Were there lessons from 30 years of operation in Leadville that smoothed the opening of a new manufacturing shop in Alamosa?
“I don’t know what lessons we are figuring out. We’ve never opened another store,” Howard said. “So we are just learning as we go.”
It’s not like Howard wanted to open a new store. He had to, he says.
“We needed it. The brand needed it,” he says.
As wait times for appointments grew — alongside the number of bewildered folks who strolled into the shop in Leadville only to be told they could not buy off most of the store’s racks — “we knew we had to push to a new level as far as production godsend to try to meet that demand, we looked to Alamosa.”
Now there’s a plan afoot to maybe expand Alamosa’s Melanzana’s production shop to fulfill online orders. There’s no plan to sell hoodies in Alamosa. That’s staying in Leadville.
A few months ago Melanzana started selling the company’s new merino wool base layer hoodies online. If online sales start to include the micro-grid hoodies that everyone wants, there will still be a limit of two per customer.
“Look, we have always wanted to sell as many of these things as we can. We want to make as many people happy as we can,” Howard says. “Two items per purchase seems to help us do that.”
It’s not that demand is ebbing.
“You have to think that with any business, there will be plateaus,” Howard says. But not with Melanzana. In 30 years, he’s only seen demand climb.
“Sneaky, simple functionality,” he says of the appeal of his hoodies, with the gaiter that fits just so, a hood that can cover a helmet or ball cap and a seemingly indestructible construction. “Truthfully, I don’t know that I totally understand the demand, even now. It’s not like you can control what a brand does. I’ve never really thought about it, really. I’m not a brand guy. I just wanted to make stuff.”
About 450 reservations booked each week
It’s not a complicated business strategy: sell enough to keep people working, shelves stocked and customers clad. But it can be a challenge to explain to those ambling downtown shoppers. There’s a person at the shop — usually a smiling, bubbly young woman — who greets everyone who walks in the door. “Do you have a reservation?” she asks.
Those who do — some 450 a week — are shuffled toward racks laden with hoodies. Those who don’t are shown some beanies, T-shirts and a small rack of discounted apparel.
“That’s the hardest job in here,” Howard says, standing at the door as the woman repeats her spiel over and over on a busy summer weekday. “A lot of people just don’t get it.”
The giddiness of the appointment shoppers clashes with the dismay of the others. It’s an odd juxtaposition, with half the room gathering hoodies while others ponder a business that seems not to want to take their money. Sometimes, when the Alamosa facility is churning out hoodies, the Melanzana crew is able to slip more appointments into the books, enabling access for the occasional lucky drop-in shopper.
Howard said the disgruntled shopper vibe really thrives on social media, where his company endures some blows.
Howard is an outdoorsman who rides his bike to work every day, even in the depths of Leadville’s exceptionally frigid winters. He wears sandals to work and is a big fan of the new merino wool hoodies. He tucks his thick, shoulder-length hair into a Melanzana beanie. He lopes around his shop and greets his employees.
During a recent tour, Howard mostly lingers in the background. He scratches the ears of an employee’s dog in the cutting room and idly chats with his crew.
The shop is like a dance floor. Everyone is moving as slabs of fleece are cut and sewn, slowly taking the shape of hoodies headed toward the retail racks out front. The sewers work in pods of four, shuffling the fabric through stages of assembly.
He’s pretty hands off on the day-to-day operations. Like a lot of innovators, he’s creative. Howard handles research and development for Melanzana, working mostly with an array of fabrics, colors and designs from a lab a few blocks from the downtown shop. Amid racks of potential new designs, a big TV next to his stand-up desk plays a recent Sturgill Simpson concert.
Howard does not spend a lot of time online. So he doesn’t have callouses to the meanness fostered by internet anonymity. He winces a bit when he talks about “a lot of negativity around the appointment system.” (The company has 765 reviews on Google and a vast majority of them are five-star. There are a handful of one-stars, all of them lamenting the appointment gig.)
That system was born in the pandemic. There were lines out the shop all day long in the early days of COVID. The appointment plan worked so no one would drive up from Denver only to find empty shelves, he says. The reservations allow folks to find colors and sizes they want, Howard says. Click over right now, and the next available appointments are in February.
A less extractive relationship with Leadville
Adam Ducharme heads up Lake County’s tourism and economic development programs, working to balance economic vitality with visitor demands in a county that is 75% public lands. In 2021, Leadville saw visitor spending climb nearly 50% over the previous year as the region drew more and more visitors fleeing the Front Range during the pandemic. Melanzana’s move to appointments defied a long history in Leadville of business owners wringing everything they can from the region.
“If we only think of things as extraction-based, we will only exacerbate the problems we all feel around growth,” Ducharme says.
Melanzana’s pivot to reservations is yet another example of Howard and Melanzana working to protect local values around resiliency, respect and culture, Ducharme says.
“Fritz doesn’t think about what he can extract. In Leadville we really love and appreciate the fact that they have held on to the concept of sustainability, not only for their employees but their customers,” Ducharme says.
Parallels between Leadville, Alamosa
Melanzana buys giant rolls of fleece from a century-old textile company — formerly Malden Mills and now Polartec — in Tennessee. Melanzana is the Tennessee facility’s largest buyer outside the U.S. military. In a backroom of the Leadville factory, cutters layer rolls of fleece 40 deep and crawl atop tables as they carve out panels and sections for hoodies.
The Leadville company sends all its textile waste to a shop in Arizona that breaks down the scrap fabric for reuse. And the company’s “Smelly Melly” program refurbishes and resells used pieces it buys from customers, who get to skip the appointment process when they surrender items for a second life.
“Our growth has been slow but it’s been sustainable, which is really important to us,” says Erin Farrow, who handles communications for Melanzana, a task that involves posting thank-you notes to people who praise Melanzana online as well as soothing the occasional overheated critic. “We are selling things online. We’ve opened a second facility. We’re working on it. It hasn’t been overnight, but it’s happening.”
There is a moment in the life-cycle of every growing outdoor company where there is a call to relocate away from the small mountain town that seeded the company — closer to trains and airports and urban centers filled with potential workers. It takes commitment to stay in a small town, even as costs soar to pay workers, move product and hold space in pricey mountain communities. It’s always cheaper in the cities. Even cheaper if you relocate production to Asia.
Howard says he’s never been tempted to relocate to a big city or offshore. His biggest move was opening the production factory in the San Luis Valley. Howard sees similarities between his hometown and Alamosa.
“There are probably a thousand different ways to run a manufacturing business and each is totally personal, you know. I don’t want to live my life running to Asia to check on a factory or even running to Denver,” he says. “So I do it here. And now I’m running to Alamosa, which is parallel to Leadville in a lot of ways.”
Filling a gap left by the collapse of an insurance company
The arrival of Melanzana’s new manufacturing facility in Alamosa coincided with the closure of Friday Health Plans in 2023. That health insurance company opened in 2015 and had more than 300 employees at its national headquarters in Alamosa when it collapsed in 2023 after burning through more than $300 million in investor financing.
Not surprisingly, Howard’s arrival in Alamosa and his commitment to training local workers has been celebrated.
“There is a sense of pride in that building,” says Sarah Stoeber, the head of the San Luis Valley Development Resources Group. “His workers are really happy to be there. They are creating these beautiful garments and they are paid well. Isn’t that what we all aspire to? Give people the skills they need to sustain their lifestyle and grow the community’s economy? Fritz really walks that walk. He’s so thoughtful with his growth model. He really is more concerned about people than profits.”
Howard called his growth plan “careful and cautious.” He’s pretty risk-averse, he says. But he’s taken leaps, he says. Like spending “a couple million” to get Alamosa workers onboard and buying his Leadville building 20 years ago.
That shop, on a busy corner on Harrison Avenue, is one of Leadville’s biggest draws. Melanzana shoppers support other businesses in town, which is particularly helpful in the offseason months. That’s important to Howard. When he faced a decision to expand sales online, which could slow traffic into Leadville, he chose his community.
“Fritz is Melanzana and Melanzana is Fritz,” says Farrow with a laugh as her boss flinches through a very rare photo shoot. “There’s an authenticity there.”
There are no outside owners of Melanzana and no debt. Howard is the majority owner of the business. But he’s developed an ownership program for employees. It’s not a formal Employee Stock Ownership Plan. More than 20 of the company’s veteran workers own stock in Melanzana and the long-term plan, Howard says, is that eventually the company will be fully owned by employees.
“As I try to step back, if I can, ever, you know part of that mechanism would be more employee ownership,” he says.