08/04/2025
Ever wondered about a Nokona glove?
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There’s a lot that goes into making Nokona baseball gloves stand out in the crowded sporting goods marketplace, but the thing that makes them most unique is the little tag on each one that says “Made in America.”
Being the last U.S.-made baseball glove company left standing is a nice claim to fame, though it does come with challenges at a time when every other glove maker is manufacturing overseas for a fraction of the cost. Still, after some tough times in decades past, Nokona’s business is strong as the company prepares to celebrate its 100th year of making leather goods in Nocona, a town of about 4,000 people 90 minutes north of Fort Worth.
The Nokona factory is smaller than you’d imagine, and that’s part of the charm. Half the building is filled with state-of-the-art machines to map and cut leather, and the other half is filled with about a dozen or so craftspeople who stitch and form each glove by hand, pretty much the way it’s been done for a century.
Sheets of leather come in through the back door, and their first stop is a big examination table. Steer hides are like any other hides, including yours, and they’re sometimes covered with the scratches and scars of a life lived. A Nokona employee looks each one over, marking imperfections with a laser wand.
The usable portion of the hide — usually 70% to 80% of it — is mapped using a computer program that overlays a template of all the glove parts that can be cut from that piece of leather. From there, each part — glove fingers, webbing pieces, etc. — is cut using a machine. And that, for the most part, concludes the mechanized portion of the process.
Each glove follows the same steps. First, the linings are stitched together. Since this is the part of the glove no one sees, this is where the newbies start at Nokona.
One of Nokona’s owners, Rob Storey, the great-grandson of the company’s founder, said it takes about four months to master sewing the linings. From there, employees graduate to sewing exterior portions of the gloves. Only the best craftspeople end up doing the final stitching and lacing.
Of the 340 million people in the U.S., Storey said, less than 10 are skilled enough to do that, and they all work at Nokona.
Read the full story from reporter Matthew Adams → https://www.star-telegram.com/news/state/texas/article311504705.html
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