How U.S. manufacturers can make reshoring painless

Companies are on the hunt for domestic manufacturers. They are failing. President Donald Trump’s tariffs create incentives to reshore, but the U.S. manufacturing ecosystem isn’t prepared to meet the demand. When measured against overseas competition, the U.S. is often embarrassingly far behind. It’s not just about price, although that’s a big factor: domestic suppliers are often busy, disinterested, or otherwise hard to work with.

In a viral social media post, one frustrated buyer summed up his experience by proclaiming that “U.S. manufacturers are babies.” His company had been sourcing custom metal kiosk enclosures from China for years. (Since I don’t know his name, I’m going to call him “Kiosk Guy.”) Chinese suppliers were accommodating. They took rough models, figured out how to fabricate them, designed custom-fit packaging, and were willing to ship them in any quantity at a great price. It was a painless, high-quality, turnkey custom manufacturing experience.

U.S. suppliers were rather the opposite. The general mood was that the job was too low volume, too much of a pain, and not designed for manufacturability (DFM). Shops dragged their feet to bid, and after weeks of back and forth, prices landed five to 10 times higher than overseas. Not only was the experience worse, it was way more expensive. Kiosk Guy concluded, “Of course we are going overseas. We’d do that even if the U.S. was cost-competitive, and it isn’t.”

That’s hard to hear, but manufacturers have their reasons. For example, I own an on-demand metal fabrication shop, and I wouldn’t have been able to help this guy. My shop is all about exposing DFM issues to the customer and then turning manufacturable components around as fast as same day. But we don’t do pro bono design or assembly, and we certainly don’t design and manufacture custom molded foam for shipping. We’d have invited him to make his own design manufacturable and upload his parts on our website.

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Read the full article at The Fabricator

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