As an avowed history fan and the fourth-generation scion to run his family’s shirt-making business, David Hamilton is aware that Hamilton Shirts has made it through worse than the Covid-19 pandemic. There was the last pandemic, for one, the Spanish Flu of 1918 that killed 675,000 Americans and caused double-digit losses to businesses across the country. But Hamilton Shirts, the oldest custom shirt brand in the country, kept its doors open. World War I and II, the Great Depression, the Great Recession, the OPEC oil embargoes, Black Monday—the family-run company somehow soldiered through all of those disasters, too.
