In 2000, a company called Pegasus Apparel Group was founded with private equity money and a big idea: Buy a group of fashion brands based in the United States and create a homegrown version of the major European luxury conglomerates.

Can't wait to ditch that old phone, computer, car or sweater? You're a victim of planned obsolescence.

"It's America first, you better believe it," President Trump said, standing over a tool cabinet at the Snap-On Tools headquarters in Kenosha, Wis., where he signed his "Buy American, Hire American" executive order this month to favor American companies for federal contracts.

In 2012, Matt Scanlan, the founder and chief executive officer of Naadam Cashmere, was just a young New York University alumnus with an unsatisfying job at a venture capital firm. "After a couple years of working as an analyst - which is a pretty thankless job - I left," he says. "A week after I quit, I booked a flight" to Ulaanbaatar, the capital city of Mongolia, to visit a college friend who lived in the region. The two of them met a newspaper reporter who hailed from Scanlan's hometown of Westport, Conn., and soon happened to hit it off with a couple of the reporter's sources, nomadic goat herders."