Black Bear Brand and the Ghost Signs of Seattle
Walk down 1st Avenue in Seattle and look up. Faded into the brick, more than a hundred years old, a bear is still watching the city go by. That "ghost sign" is a fragment of our founding — and the beginning of a story that runs from a tiny Seattle overall shop all the way to the looms of Okayama.
A carnival of signs
Around the end of the 19th century, America became a carnival of signs. Advertising took hold like never before, and there were no rules about where a sign could go or how big it could be. Commercial buildings, barns, depots, grain silos — any place people gathered or passed by was fair game. These enormous ads were hand-painted directly onto brick by traveling sign painters, in durable lead-based oil paints. That paint is exactly why, a century later, so many of these advertisements still linger, faded but legible — the "ghost signs" that haunt old American downtowns.
The bear on the wall
One of those survivors is ours. The Black Bear Brand ghost sign, painted in the early 1900s, still lives on 1st Avenue in Seattle, with a weathered sibling up in Sultan, Washington, along the old railroad line. It's an advertisement for a company that once helped clothe the working Northwest — and it's the reason our story didn't stay buried.
1902: five machines and a fight
George G. Black arrived in Seattle in 1900. As the story goes, he overheard an out-of-state overall salesman boast that Seattle "would take" whatever the factory chose to ship — and decided the booming Northwest ought to make its own work clothes instead. In October 1902, he opened in a small upper-floor room at First Avenue and Jackson Street, in the Smith Building: a cutting room, a handful of sewing machines, a shipping desk, five machine operators, and Black himself running the whole thing. They made blue denim overalls, turning out about 125 dozen a month. Three months in, a fire destroyed the Smith Building and everything in it — and Black simply rebuilt and kept going.
"Black Bear Means Long Wear"
The company grew fast, moving through Pioneer Square and Belltown as it outgrew each home. In 1914, determined to escape the sweatshop conditions common to the garment trade of the era, Black commissioned architect Andrew Willatzen — who had apprenticed under Frank Lloyd Wright — to design a light-filled "daylight factory" at 1130 Rainier Avenue South, with more than 15,000 square feet of windows, a cafeteria that sold food at cost, and a rooftop garden for the workers. By 1916, hundreds of employees and some 275 machines were producing around 2,460 garments a day. The slogan said it all: Black Bear Means Long Wear. The company made overalls, mackinaws, overcoats, and heavy wool shirts — and, notably for us today, even a line made for the ladies. The Black family ran the business for nearly 80 years, into the early 1980s, and the factory earned Seattle Landmark status in 1987.
The resurrection
Then the bear went quiet. For years it was a soot-black diamond gathering dust — a lapsed name and a half-forgotten legacy. Josh Sirlin, a lover of history and lost causes, tracked it down, secured it, and set out to make it shine again. One of the first calls he received came from a longtime Seattleite whose own family had worked the old factory floor — the past reaching out to shake hands with the present. Today Black Bear Brand honors those frontier roots while building ruggedly refined goods for a life well lived: denim from Okayama, terry and wax canvas made right here in Seattle.
Wear the history
The Original Logo Tee carries that same historic bear graphic used across the brand's first decades — a piece of Seattle you can wear. And that century-old "line for the ladies" lives on today in Black Bear Brand WOMAN.
Read the fuller story on our History page, find the Original Logo Tee and other tees, and explore the full Black Bear Brand store.