American Tent: Commercial Event Tents Made in Green Bay, Wisconsin

Buy a commercial party tent from most sellers and you are buying a shipping container. Somebody overseas cut the vinyl, somebody else stacked it on a boat, and twelve weeks later a 40x80 pole tent shows up at your dock with a bill of lading and nobody to call when a seam is wrong.

American Tent sells the opposite of that. They cut and sew their tents in Green Bay, Wisconsin, and they put the pitch about as plainly as a Wisconsin company can:

"You don't need to wait for the slow boat from China; we've got the speedy truck from Wisconsin."

It started with a Craigslist ad

Tony Ehrbar spent more than a decade as a strategy consultant and, by his own telling, did not figure out he wanted to run something until he was 32. The nudge came from an episode of Shark Tank. The opportunity came from Craigslist.

In 2013 he bought a tent rental company off a classified listing. In 2014 he bought the manufacturer that had been supplying it, moved home, and started running both. That second purchase is the one that became American Tent.

At the time it was three people in a 5,000 square foot warehouse. Today it is roughly 40 employees working inside a 110,000 square foot building that used to be a shopping mall. Revenue has grown somewhere north of 30 times over. There is a former movie theater inside the facility that is being turned into a community auditorium, which is not a sentence you get to write about many tent factories.

Ehrbar has a definition of innovation he keeps coming back to: "leaving things better than you found them or refusing to accept the answer, 'we've always done things this way.'"

That shows up in small, unglamorous places. He found a stackable plastic water ballast system for anchoring tents on asphalt, where you cannot drive a stake, and backed it. It replaced the wobbly barrels and sandbags the industry had tolerated forever, and he says the investment came back more than 200 times over.

What they actually build

The catalog is deeper than most people expect from a domestic shop. Frame tents, which skip the center poles so the whole interior is usable floor. Pole tents, which go up fast and stretch past 200 feet. Keder tents, clear top tents, high peak tents, heavy duty pop-ups, pagodas and gazebos. Then sidewalls, ballast systems, tent parts and custom printing.

Sizes run from a 10x10 you could put behind a restaurant to 40x100 and beyond, with custom work available if nothing on the list fits your parking lot.

The spec sheet is where the American made part stops being a slogan and starts being a reason:

• 16 ounce blockout vinyl at 1000 denier, which is the top of the commercial grade
• Anodized aluminum frames and poles that will not fray, chip or rust
• Flame retardant to NFPA 701-2, which is the code every state wants, plus California Fire Marshal certification
• UV protection in both the material and the stitching
• Reinforced seams, weldable webbing, alligator clips every 24 inches
• A life expectancy of seven years and up

Pricing is public, which is refreshing in an industry that loves a quote form. A 15x20 frame tent starts around $3,078. A 20x40, their best seller, starts at $5,884. A 40x60 pole tent runs about $11,164. Financing is on the table if you are a rental company buying inventory rather than a church buying one tent.

And because they are the factory, you are buying direct. Their site says it in four words: "We are the manufacturer."

Who ends up under one

The customer list is a decent cross section of American outdoor life. Rental companies are the backbone, but the tents also end up at breweries and restaurants adding patio seating, churches running revivals and vacation Bible school, schools, golf courses, farmers markets, trade shows, dealerships, government agencies and disaster relief operations.

That last one matters more than it sounds. When a storm takes out a town, FEMA tents and medical tents need to arrive in days. A container on the Pacific cannot do that. A truck leaving Green Bay can.

Ehrbar came up through the rental side, which colors how the company talks to buyers. The about page says it directly: "we were rental company owners once, too." They will give free business advice to people starting a rental outfit, and the owner's phone number is published on the site, which is either confidence or recklessness and probably both.

The four rules on the wall

Most company values lists are wallpaper. American Tent runs on four that are at least worth reading twice: "Find your joy." "Be the buffalo," meaning you walk into the storm instead of running from it, the way bison actually do. "Do more, better." And "Family first."

They back it up with a four day work week and mental health services for employees. For a cut and sew operation in northeast Wisconsin competing against overseas labor costs, that is a genuinely aggressive bet on treating people well and winning on everything else.

Ehrbar also had to learn to say no. After reading "The Six Types of Working Genius" he added an activation stage between having ideas and building them. His summary: "The activation step helped filter out about 80% of ideas and allowed us to concentrate on implementing solutions that made a significant impact."

The company has taken home three Inner City 100 awards and an Inc. 5000 spot. Ehrbar is on his second term on the Advanced Textiles Association board, and he has since launched a separate venture, Renegade Plastics, chasing a recyclable polypropylene alternative to the coated vinyl the whole industry runs on. The man who sells vinyl tents is funding the thing that might replace vinyl.

Days, not weeks

If there is one line that sums up the whole operation, it is the one on their homepage: "Days - Not Weeks - Away. Ships from Green Bay Wisconsin."

That is the dividend of domestic manufacturing in a business most people never think about. Your tent is late and your wedding is Saturday, or your rental season starts in three weeks and you are short two 20x40s. Overseas, you are out of luck. Green Bay, you are probably fine.

They will also mail you a free sample kit of the actual materials so you can put your hands on the vinyl before you spend five figures. Try getting that from a listing with a twelve week lead time.

We have covered plenty of Wisconsin manufacturers, from Sunset Hill Stoneware to BenShot and Speed Queen over in Ripon. Add American Tent to the list, a company that bought a small factory off Craigslist and turned a dead shopping mall into a place where American workers sew the roof over your best day of the year.

Just another great reason to buy American!