Profits Quadrupled: How Minus33 Rebuilt a 110-Year-Old Mill Into a Merino Powerhouse

By Amara Osei

Profits at Minus33 have roughly quadrupled since Lawson Glidden joined the New Hampshire merino-wool maker in 2018, with revenue up about 2.5 to three times, the company's 39-year-old president told Fortune. This year, the company's own PR pitch billed as one of its highest-profit years. Minus33 is privately held, so the figures rest on Glidden's word.

Glidden runs the fifth generation of a textile business his family has operated in Ashland, N.H., since 1916. The company makes base layers, underwear and socks — and he wears nearly all of it. "We don't make the pants or the shoes. That's all we don't make right now," he said on a video call.

He's blunt about the product: "They are the best socks on the planet," Glidden said. "I say that because not only am I incentivized to say it and I believe it, but also because it's true."

How far did the family business fall?

Very far. At its 1990s peak, the family mill was a $50 million operation with about 300 employees, Glidden said. By around 2002, it was "a zero-dollar, three-person company."

The collapse mirrored the industry. U.S. textile mills employed about 500,000 people in January 1990, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. By January 2002, that fell to about 298,000, and by early 2026 it was under 80,000. Apparel manufacturing employment dropped more than 80% over two decades, from about 900,000 jobs to 150,000, the BLS reported in 2012.

As apparel production moved overseas, the New York garment makers who bought the mill's wool broadcloth disappeared. "Everyone that bought wool from us … sewed it into beautiful suits and pea coats and stuff, they stopped doing that, and therefore they stopped buying from us," Glidden said.

What did the turnaround involve?

Glidden's father launched joint ventures overseas, a steam laundry and snowmobile jackets — he "shotgun five or six companies out there," in his son's telling. One supplier's washable merino wool became Minus33, which grew by word of mouth for about 15 years.

When Glidden left a senior technical consulting job — 80-hour weeks, and one year the equivalent of a full month on airplanes — he bought sock machines and learned to program them himself. U.S. manufacturing started in 2019. His socks fit "like a second skin that eliminates all the friction," he said, letting him use less nylon and more wool. He claims one pair survived the entire Appalachian Trail, worn every fourth day, without a hole.

The design philosophy is personal: "I've got sweaty feet, and I just kept making socks until I no longer got blisters and I was comfortable all day," he said.

How did marketing change the business?

When Glidden arrived, Minus33 ran almost entirely as a B2B network with almost no public profile. "Our website could have just been, 'Congratulations, you found us,'" he said.

He built the ladder in rungs: pay-per-click advertising in 2019, a rebuilt website in 2020, then third-party marketplaces. On Amazon, he moved Minus33 out of the program where the platform buys inventory and resells it, and into the one where Minus33 owns the stock. That raised profitability "by a lot," he said. "We took control of everything."

Minus33 now sells through about 700 independent retailers, but none can sell the brand on its own website. Social media remains the unfinished rung — "it's hard to just keep saying, 'Hey, we still sell underwear,'" he admitted.

What rules govern growth now?

Glidden runs the company like someone who remembers 2002. "We don't do business where we have to borrow money ever," he said. He sizes bets so a miss never forces layoffs — one $20,000 magazine ad campaign failed, and he shrugs it off. "I'm willing to be wrong, like 70% of the time, as long as on aggregate, we're moving in the right direction," he said.

His best-timed call came in 2019, when he set a rule: "You can't double the size of the company if you don't have … two years' worth of inventory." When COVID emptied competitors' shelves, Minus33 doubled in size.

Seventy-two individual shareholders, most of them family, collect dividends; Glidden owns about 5%. Twenty years ago, he said, many figured the company was dying. Now, he said, "it's coming back like a rocket ship, and they're all just ecstatic that they get to hand off these shares to their kids again."

His formula for the next century is short: "Make the product as good as you can, offer it for a fair price and a good value. And then you'll just have customers for the rest of your life."