Letter from the Owner - Marcus Harvey

To our Valued Customers,

We at Portland Gear hope you and your family have stayed safe and healthy through these challenging times and wish you the best as we head into the Holiday season. If there’s one word I can use to explain the last twenty-four months it’s change. The world and our business have changed right before our eyes in so many ways and I’d love to pull back the curtain a bit and explain why I’ve decided to make a few changes moving forward. 

Thanks to you we were able to keep the entire team employed, avoid layoffs and help us push through to 2021 when we began experiencing a bit more of normalcy. In 2020, we saw a nearly 70% increase in online sales due to you, the customer, supporting and repping the P all over the world! In this same time our retail sales dropped by almost 50% as we closed shop for an extended period of time to keep our employees safe and learned more about the pandemic. We created in store pickup from our downtown store which is still in use and has seen tremendous success to make the shopping experience easier. 

I’m sure you’ve seen the news lately about “supply chain” issues which have put the retail landscape in a bit of a tailspin. There are over 70 shipping containers sitting off the coast of California waiting to get unloaded, but due to a lack of employees, truck drivers, dock space, they just sit. Thousands of companies and brands have products on those ships which have created a global shortage of goods including t-shirts, sweatshirts, screen printing ink, etc. This mixed with the shortage of labor in Portland and our local screen printing partners having a hard time scaling back to pre-pandemic numbers, have all resulted in sky rocketing costs across the board.

Producing and printing our gear has become more expensive, our retail bags, shipping boxes, stickers, and cost of labor to keep our amazing employees, has all gone up over the last two years but really felt over the last four months. 

Starting November 10th we'll begin raising the price of our products to match these increasing costs we’re experiencing. Expect the prices to go up by a few dollars depending on the item but know we’re working our hardest to keep pricing reasonable and approachable for all. It was important to give you all, our loyal customers not only a heads up of this coming change but also a chance to purchase from us at our same pricing for the next week! 

We’re so so thankful for this community of customers at Portland Gear and are thrilled with the quality of product we have coming out soon for the Holiday season and Black Friday (which is our 7th birthday!!) We hope you can understand this and we look forward to hopefully seeing you in one of our three retail stores in the coming months!

Marcus Harvey / Founder Portland Gear