Minus33 Merino Wool celebrates expansion

Minus33 Merino Wool, a manufacturer of outdoor clothing, recently celebrated a major expansion as well as a combined 110 years of doing business in Ashland, a town at the heart of the Lakes Region.

Named after the temperatures that snowmobilers like John Glidden have encountered on trails throughout New Hampshire, Minus33 is the direct and familial successor of L.W. Packard, which was founded in 1916 by Luther Woodbury Packard, Glidden’s uncle, on Mill Street.

Lawson Glidden, president of Minus33 and the L.W. Packard company, both of Ashland, speaks during an Oct. 27 ribbon-cutting ceremony at the latter’s new facility on Main Street. (Photo by John Koziol)

At its height, L.W. Packard was one of Ashland’s largest employers and it made wool broadcloth and sold it to such prominent clients as Burberry, Hickey Freeman, Hart Schaffner & Marx, Calvin Klein, Perry Ellis, Liz Claiborne, Neiman Marcus, Lands’ End, Nordstrom, L.L. Bean, Eddie Bauer, Bergdorf Goodman and Evan Picone.

When garment manufacturing went overseas more than two decades ago, however, L.W. Packard pivoted to making winter and recreational clothing, beginning in 2002, under the Minus33 name.

The company’s then president, John Glidden, hired his son Lawson to run Minus33, which has steadily grown and eventually outgrew the Mill Street space which had been started by L.W. Packard.

Minus33 eventually purchased the former NOK Sealing Technologies property on Main Street for expanded manufacturing and as a warehouse.

On Oct. 27, Gov. Kelly Ayotte joined the Gliddens in a ribbon-cutting ceremony there, which also featured an open house of the 15,000 facility that also boasts a display of Minus33’s more than 150 products.

Lawson Glidden said Minue33 intends to move into the new space — which cumulatively measures 21,000 square feet in two buildings — or roughly double the size of its existing space on Mill Street – in January 2027.

The company is too busy until then, he explained, with filling orders for clients until about the final week before Christmas.

Ayotte thanked the workforce at Minus33 for creating products that are well received in both the outdoor enthusiast and rescue communities, Minus33 makes bags containing clothing and blankets that it donates to search-and-rescue teams around the country.

“Congratulations,” Ayotte told the Gliddens. “We look forward to another 110 years, if not more.”

Lawson Glidden admitted that when Minus33 began, it was after L.W. Packard had gone through “a rough couple of years.”

The idea for Minua33, he continued, was born “on a snowmobile trip (by his father) in the cold winter of New Hampshire.”

He said Minus33 had to expand “because we got too big” and there was literally no room to grow at the Mill Street site.

John Glidden said the expansion marks “a new adventure for us” in that Minus33 now has two manufacturing locations.

The interior of the new Minus33 warehouse and manufacturing facility on Main Street in Ashland. (Photo by John Koziol)

Still a tiny part of the outdoor clothing industry, Minus33 has about two dozen employees and, as it has done since its founding, will add a handful of more employees each year going forward, he said.

Asked what has made Minus33 and L.W. Packard still viable after more than a combined century, John Glidden replied that the company doesn’t have an especially long-term approach to business, but instead focuses decisions “on what is the best now.”

There’s some good old fashioned, pragmatic Yankee sensibility mixed in, too, he said.

“We’re a one-percenter in our industry” and Minus33 competitors are not only well heeled, but are “very keen, very clever,” John Glidden said.

“We don’t invent anything new,” he summed up, adding that the secret of Minus33’s success – “I would not mind being to $40 million (in annual revenue) in five years,” Glidden acknowledged –is a timeless one: “We just have to serve our customers.”