How an Air Force Veteran Is Using AI to Scale her Made-in-America Manufacturing Business
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Alabama
How an Air Force Veteran Is Using AI to Scale her Made-in-America Manufacturing Business
An interview with Teresa Downing, president and owner of GO-KOT, a made-in-America camping cot company based in Ashville, Alabama.
My husband, Michael, and I were on active duty in the Air Force for a combined 29 years. Ten years after I retired from active duty, I was looking for something to do as a family that would connect us back to the military and something made in the USA. For years, when we first met, he would always lament the decline of US manufacturing and wanted to make a difference.
I found this small cot company, GO-KOT, that's been around since 1978, and the quality is amazing. We met with the owner, who offered us the opportunity to buy the brand if we continued manufacturing in the US.
We worked with him for a few months as he taught us the ins and outs that he’d learned through the years, including his unique method of preventing cots from squeaking by running bar soap down the sides. My family is not very mechanically inclined, but we learned all of the metal shop work. I had never sewn anything other than a button on a shirt, so I had to learn how to sew.
GO-KOT relied solely on word-of-mouth for years. To grow, we needed to advertise. I started with learning digital marketing by familiarizing myself with Google’s Merchant Center, a handy tool that helps our products show up in search results, and exploring AI-powered advertising tools like Performance Max.
While experimenting with our first ad campaigns and getting to know the Merchant Center, I learned how to work with AI to improve our search visibility and found that simple changes, like including humans in our product photos, significantly boosted our sales.
Teresa Downing, president and owner of GO-KOT
Today, I rely on Google AI for marketing and customer-facing communication. It helps me craft compelling product descriptions, write effective ad copy, and even draft personalized responses to customer inquiries. All told, it easily saves me ten hours per week—allowing me to focus on other areas of the business.
Since 2018, we’ve experienced significant growth, with e-commerce sales increasing tenfold. Beyond profitability, we prioritize giving back. We’ve partnered with a young man in Birmingham supporting the homeless, donated to Christian organizations taking mission trips, and just recently, it felt really good to be able to donate cots to North Carolina after the hurricane.
Looking ahead, I’d like to see GO-KOT grow to the point where we can manage it and hire more people. As hard as it gets, we're proud to manufacture here in the US and support other American jobs.
Learn more about GO-KOT
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