Key Takeaways
- Resto Athletic manufactures roughly 350,000 custom garments each month and employs more than 600 workers across the Dominican Republic and Egypt.
- The Kansas City company built its own AI designer that turns written prompts into custom uniform concepts, freeing artists for production work.
- Resto is an official supplier for youth programs connected to the NFL, MLS, and NHL, plus leagues across the country.
- Unlike outsourced apparel models, Resto owns its manufacturing facilities, treating higher wages as central to the business rather than a cost to cut.
- Every order pairs with a dedicated sales representative, and most customer communication is handled through text messaging with the team.
A Manufacturing Model Built Around Wages
Resto Athletic did not start as a jersey company. MJ Mitchell, who co-founded the Kansas City business with his father and serves as CEO and CTO, says the original goal was job creation.
“We actually started for job creation, creating dignified work internationally primarily,” Mitchell said. “Digital customization allows us to have enough room to pay workers what they deserve.”
That framing shapes how the company is built. Rather than outsourcing production, Resto owns and operates its own facilities, employing more than 600 people across operations in the Dominican Republic and Egypt, with a growing creative team in the Philippines.
The scale is real. Resto manufactures roughly 350,000 custom garments each month, supplying youth sports organizations and leagues nationwide. It has also become an official supplier for youth programs connected to the NFL, MLS, and NHL.
Where AI Enters the Design Process
As orders grew, so did design requests. Every job starts from a different place. Some customers arrive with finished artwork. Others bring little more than an idea and a deadline.
“You have to be able to take someone’s scratch on a napkin, and convert that into custom jerseys on their doorstep in less than two weeks,” Mitchell said.
That creative workload became one of the company’s tightest constraints. More customers meant more concepts, more revisions, and more designer hours. Instead of expanding its art team indefinitely, Resto built its own AI designer that generates custom concepts from a written prompt.
Mitchell is direct that the tool was not built to cut staff. “The AI has allowed us not to get rid of our artists, but to free them to do the things that they should be doing,” he said.
Why Human Artists Still Finish the Job
The AI handles first drafts. It does not handle manufacturing. Turning a concept into a garment that can actually be produced still depends on experienced production artists, according to CMO Jonas Bedford-Strohm, who joined Resto after a career modernizing Germany’s public broadcasting system.
“We’re excited about the concept art for AI, but the minute you need perfect precision and reliability on the panel layouts, those are all things that are beyond AI,” Bedford-Strohm said.
The company recently rolled out an updated online experience that lets customers either work directly with an artist or start with AI before placing an order. Even then, Resto keeps a person in the loop, pairing every order with a dedicated sales representative. Most of that contact happens over text message.
“The customers who reach out to us, they’re ordering from their person,” Mitchell said.
The Sewing Industry Test Resto Is Trying to Pass
For Resto, AI is a means, not the mission. Bedford-Strohm frames the technology as a way to protect the company’s founding purpose rather than replace it.
“AI is not meant to just grow the bottom line,” he said. “The purpose of the financial viability is a deeper purpose, which is to make a difference and show that you can do something incredible in the sewing industry that does not destroy people.”
The open question is whether that balance holds as Resto scales. Automating concept work removes a bottleneck without touching the wage structure the company was built on, which is the part that is hardest to protect as volume climbs. If Resto can keep adding output while keeping its factories in-house and its pay commitments intact, it becomes a working example of a claim the apparel industry rarely gets to make: that customization technology can grow a business and improve the jobs inside it at the same time.
Source: Startland News, “AI uniform designer generates custom jerseys in minutes; its real mission: create clothing that doesn’t destroy people,” Taylor Wilmore, July 7, 2026, https://startlandnews.com/2026/07/resto-athletic/
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