Freedom & Glory is a family-owned American flag company based in Hillsborough, North Carolina. The company was founded by Dwight Morris in 1980 and has spent 45 years supplying American-made flags and patriotic products to schools, government agencies, veterans' organizations and communities nationwide.
Today, Dwight's daughter, Liz Morris, leads Freedom & Glory as CEO.
“We believe in the American dream,” said Liz Morris. “We are based on the analogy of a drop of dye in a bucket of water—the idea that even a small action can produce a lasting change.”
Dwight started the company in the attic of his home just outside Chicago. One day, he went shopping, simply looking for a flag to fly outside his home. At the time, Chicago was the second largest city in the United States, and Dwight found it odd that he couldn't find an American-made flag.
He founded Carrot Top Industries to fix that problem. While the name may sound odd, its origin was simple—Dwight was a redhead.
In the 1980s, the flag business was booming amid a new focus on patriotism and national pride. Still, the industry relied on a regional sales model. Dwight wanted to create a catalog business with nationwide distribution.
“There was a small article in the Wall Street Journal talking about the bicentennial,” Dwight Morris said. “It was talking about the boom in flags in the US, and yet I had trouble finding a flag for myself. So I contacted a bunch of suppliers, all of whom started to say, ‘Forget it,’ to me. But what I wanted to do was something different than anybody else had done … The first few years were stressful and a little slow-going.”
Dwight processed just 34 orders in his first 52 weeks in business. It took about five years for the company to break through, and he knows that he couldn't have done it without the support of his wife.
“My father-in-law said, ‘Dwight, it's really admirable that you're selling the American flag, but can you sell more than $50 worth a year?" he recalled. “The interesting thing is that I really failed in the first four years, but my wife just kept supporting me. I never totally understood how she had that much confidence in me, because I really wasn't doing well.”
Carrot Top Becomes Freedom & Glory
Carrot Top grew to become one of the largest suppliers of American flags in history, spending 10 years as the top shop in the nation.
After the company started to find success, Dwight moved his family and company from Chicago to Hillsborough, North Carolina.
Over the years, he always found a sense of pride as he drove past homes flying Old Glory, knowing he helped put that flag atop the pole. However, his crowning achievement was when he started selling flags to the U.S. government.
“When we started selling to the U.S. government, that was awesome,” Dwight said. “Totally cool.”
Dwight ran the business for nearly 40 years until, in 2019, his daughter, Liz Morris, took over the company.
Growing up, Liz never thought she wanted to run Carrot Top, but she wouldn't truly know until she tried.
“I honestly never thought that I wanted to run the company,” Liz said. “I saw it as my dad's business, and I wanted to kinda do my own thing. And I did. After college, I went and worked at another company, and he just kept up with me.”
Liz said she never felt pressured by either parent to join the business. It was important for them that Liz and her sister had the independence to go their own way. But one day in 2016, Liz decided to join the fold.
“When I came back in 2016, I started working for the business, and I had the mindset of, ‘I think that I might wanna do this, but I won't know until I try.”
The transition started in 2016, and the company has since evolved from Carrot Top, a company run by a sole entrepreneur, to Freedom & Glory, which is more of a team effort.
In early 2026, Liz's three-year effort to rebrand the company kicked off what could be a record-setting year.
“We've been working on that project for almost three years, and at the beginning 2026, we made the name change,” Liz said. “I was obviously very anxious about it. I was worried our customers wouldn't be able to find us or be confused, like, did we go out of business?”
The company performed a lot of work leading up to the name change, checking in with customers, and most of them really understood the switch.
“They loved the name Carrot Top. It's unique. But they also knew that we were competing with a comedian, and they understood that new customers might be confused with what we sell,” Liz said.
Peak season for flag sales is the spring. Things really start to ramp up in early March before Memorial Day and continue through the Fourth of July.
This year, with the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, America's semi-quincentennial presented Freedom & Glory with a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.
“In business, you don't have these [types of] opportunities every year where there's just such an excitement around an event. You have to take advantage where you can,” Liz said. “I've been so excited for the team. They work hard every year, and we do have our ups and downs, but this year, to have such a big win and to have people really thinking about buying a flag that maybe it's not always on their mind, that's just really amazing for the team.”
State-of-the-Art Technology & Craftsmanship Create All-American Flags
In Ontario, California, Freedom & Glory's manufacturing partner uses a mix of state-of-the-art machines and legacy craftsmanship. When it comes to the American flag, quality is crucial, and the company relies on five partner facilities in its network to fulfill demand for some 500 flags per day.
“All of the pieces of the flag, all of the assembling of the flag, are made in America,” Liz said.
Flag making is a small industry. For example, raw goods like the fabric come from one of two American fabric manufacturers.
“I know all of the people that sell the fabric, that dye the fabric, that sell thread,” said Liz.
The flagship machinery in Ontario is a pair of massive automated sewing machines that make each flag's star field. To keep the 126-head machine running, a robot feeds new spools from beneath each star field. The robot looks and acts kind of like a revolver, but instead of loading bullets, it loads full spools of thread. Combined, these machines make 48 star fields at one time.
Despite the automation, much of the manufacturing in Ontario is centered around standard industrial sewing machines. The company uses an automated sewing line to sew the stripes together, seven for next to the star field and the six that run below.
The grommets are added with a semi-automated process. Still, some of the process is rather manual, like attaching the star fields to the seven stripes and adding the heading—the heavy fabric used to secure the flag to the halyard line or rope.
Each flag is then folded and packaged by hand as well. The manual processes require a lot of skill, as these machines are moving fast. Like much of the manufacturing industry, skill or good labor in general remains a challenge for Freedom & Glory.
Sewing is a dying art, but the company's manufacturing partners work with local universities to try and get more people involved.
Freedom & Glory Evolves Beyond the Catalog
Liz Morris' first job at the company was as a kid working in the warehouse. While her father was running the company, she thought he was more of a stay-at-home dad who she helped by packaging up orders and sending out catalogs.
“I really liked doing things with my hands, so I loved working in the back, helping to package up orders,” Liz remembered. “We still send out catalogs, but we used to send out a lot of catalogs. My sister and I would put labels on the catalogs.”
After spending some time building a career outside of the family business, Liz returned in 2016 with a role in the merchandising and marketing departments.
“When I came back, they had an opening in the merchandising department, and I didn't know anything about merchandising,” Liz said. “I had just spent seven years doing project management at a bank. I wanted to start learning about the business, and I knew I had to start somewhere. So, I helped my dad, and then the marketing director went out on maternity leave. I was like, ‘Well, why don't I kind of take that as an opportunity to learn a little bit more about marketing?"
As she learned about the business, Liz started to envision how she could reshape the company in her own image, like combining its robust catalog business with emerging e-commerce.
“My dad created an amazing business, and it was obviously important to me to carry on his legacy, and it took me a while to figure out how to make the business mine.”
When Freedom & Glory transitioned from a catalog business to more of an e-commerce effort, the company was still using a legacy software system to handle order processing, purchasing, inventory management and accounting. As a result, employees spent a lot of time on manual tasks and lacked centralized data.
The team wanted to move to a platform they could configure as the company grew and needs changed. The company partnered with American cloud-based enterprise software company NetSuite. The company picked NetSuite because its e-commerce solution, SuiteCommerce, connected directly with its ERP solution, including inventory, orders, customer information and financials. The move helped the Freedom & Glory team see relevant business information on a dashboard in real time, such as total sales, number of orders and status and inventory levels.
The company also implemented NetSuite’s Payment Automation and Bill Capture products to automate invoice processing and payment. The move cut accounts payable labor hours by some 50%. Finally, the company added a Warehouse Management (WMS) solution to improve operations through defined pick, pack and ship strategies as well as automated replenishment.
Running a Business Is Patriotic
Liz strategically timed the company’s name change to coincide with America's 250th anniversary. For a company that sells everything from the small stick flags you see kids waving at parades to the massive flags you see stretched across the field at NFL games, Freedom & Glory is tracking 2026 to be a banner year. While Liz acknowledges the inherent patriotism of selling American-made flags, she stresses that there is little more patriotic than running a business.
“We sell American flags, and I think it's important, to me at least, that they're made in the country that they represent,” Liz said. “I [also] feel like it’s patriotic to grow a business and to do things for other people that help them to kind of celebrate what they have pride in.”
Now, Liz isn't just trying to reshape her family's company, but reshape the industry her father helped build. For example, she spends time in Washington lobbying for domestic flag manufacturing as well as truth in labeling.
In particular, the nation has issues with imported, unlabeled flags masquerading as Made in America.
“I personally do a lot of lobbying in Washington, DC, around a number of things in support of domestic manufacturing, especially for the flag industry, and then also truth in labeling,” Liz said. “What's important to me is that if it is something that they care about, that they be able to look at their flag and see where it's made. If they want to base their decision on that, they should be able to trust in what they see on the label.”
The issue is with imported flags.
“We have really tried to crack down on flags that come in [to the U.S.] unlabeled. Customs and Border Patrol, in terms of checking products that come into the country, is underfunded,” Liz said.
For Liz, the efforts in the nation's capital are not a business decision. She says that if you're selling the American flag, customers deserve to know where it was made. Arguably, no product in this country carries the weight of the American flag.
A Father’s Faith
For 45 years, Dwight and his family built a business around making sure the flags Americans fly are actually made in America. And truly, there are fewer things in this country more patriotic than creating American jobs and opportunity.
Dwight started his company in 1980 with that conviction, and now his daughter, Liz, carries that commitment going forward.
“I should have failed in three years, but I was too stubborn,” Dwight said. “I've seen so many people have good ideas and get off starting quickly, but then they give up. There are too many people who want somebody to tell them what to do, who want to work for somebody.”
Dwight said that it can be lonely starting a business, which can be difficult for some entrepreneurs.
“They have an idea, they go out, they're all by themselves, and they can't handle it in the beginning, 'cause you gotta start with one person,” Dwight added. “The support I got from my wife during those years when I was not doing well, the fact that she supported me so much, I mean, that blows me away.”
Dwight admitted that older business owners sometimes have a problem letting go of the company they founded, but he has faith in Liz’s vision for Freedom & Glory.
“I think a lot of people hang on; they don't think the next generation can handle it. I don't have that at all,” Dwight said. “I think my daughter is going to take over the world.”
This is Made in America.
