Harvest-Season Haute
The primary market for Farm Boy and Farm Girl brand clothes and accessories—namely, farm kids—is small and getting smaller. Still, sales are growing at Farm Boy Co-op and Feed Company, LLC. The St. Paul business that Dan Adamson and Brian Goldenman launched in 2002—by selling T-shirts to the 4H-ers in the state fair livestock barns—now brings in $2 million annually through sales at 2,000 retail stores in the U.S. and Canada.
Many are farm supply stores. Goldenman says the company remains focused on being “the trend brand for the farm kid,” a consumer that only the “tractor brands” were targeting with clothing sales before. But he and Adamson have tapped into a larger rural and rural-wannabe audience, too, by creating a brand that evokes values such as honesty and hard work.
“The [farm kid] market is shrinking,” Goldenman says, “but it’s become romanticized because of that.”
