When Tony Ambroza joined Carhartt in 2010, he arrived from a very different kind of brand environment. At Nike and Under Armour, the pace was relentless: move fast, execute, learn, repeat. Carhartt required something else.

“Go slow to go fast,” a colleague told him early on.

That philosophy would become central to how Ambroza helped guide the 130-year-old workwear brand into a new era of cultural relevance.

The challenge wasn’t to reinvent Carhartt. It was to understand what people already loved about it and find ways to make that meaning relevant to more people.

The answer, Ambroza says, came from listening. Deep consumer research revealed that Carhartt products weren’t simply clothing, they were memories. Workers remembered the projects they completed, the families they raised, and the milestones they reached while wearing a particular jacket or pair of pants. That emotional connection became the foundation for expansion.

Rather than abandoning its workwear roots, Carhartt went deeper into the lives of its core consumers. They wore jeans, T-shirts, hoodies and sweatshirts. So the company expanded into those categories while maintaining the durability and utility customers expected.

At the same time, Carhartt began celebrating the people behind the work. Where Nike made athletes the heroes, Carhartt made workers the heroes: the people who build bridges, construct skyscrapers, and keep communities running.

By 2016 and 2017, that strategy was helping Carhartt reach audiences who had never considered the brand relevant to them. The brand wasn’t becoming something new, but revealing how much it had always represented.

For Ambroza, that’s the lesson: cultural relevance doesn’t necessarily come from predicting what’s next. Sometimes, it comes from understanding what has mattered all along.