Posted June 7, 2017

When everyone is moving in the same direction, the results are powerful. In the U.S. textile/apparel industry, we’ve all experienced this synchronicity in recent years, and good things are happening. A trend that started as a slight tremor is becoming something of a rumble that is positively impacting many of our businesses.

I’m referring, of course, to the made-in-America movement.

Today in Atlanta, I heard a presentation from Harry Moser, founder of the Reshoring Initiative, with which I’m very familiar. A few years ago, he presented at a Southern Textile Association annual meeting when things were just starting to again move in the right direction for U.S. manufacturing. Today, his message was much more resonant and real, as reshoring/onshoring/backshoring/inshoring – whatever you want to call it – has taken on a dynamic persona as U.S. – and foreign – companies continue to figure out that manufacturing works here (again).

Fast turn, a shorter supply chain and local-for-local are all finding their way into our lexicon as companies, suppliers, associations, academia and others are working collaboratively to create a successful Western Hemispheric model. You know it’s a genuine and not theoretical when retailers and brands such as Walmart, Under Armour and adidas are getting into the action with made-in-America initiatives.

Speaking at today’s Home Furnishings Manufacturing Expo at the Georgia World Congress Center, Moser said we have turned the tide as it relates to reshoring.

“We’re seeing great progress. There are still 3 million to 4 million manufacturing jobs offshore and there’s a huge opportunity to bring them back,” said Moser, whose non-profit group’s mission is to bring good, well-paying manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. by assisting companies to more accurately assess their total cost of offshoring, and shift collective thinking from offshoring is cheaper to local reduces the total cost of ownership. “There are very positive signs out there that this will continue to occur.”

Based on what I’ve seen and heard in recent weeks and months, that is indeed true. It seems like everyone these days has made-in-America top of mind, and that’s the common thread in just about every meeting, conference and trade show I cover these days. Recently, for instance, the Shima Seiki Global 3D (G3D) Knitting Seminar & Workshop in Brooklyn had speaker after speaker talk about their efforts to disrupt traditional manufacturing and cater to the new consumer mindset of “IWWIWWIWI” – that is “I Want What I Want When I Want It.” That demand has led retailers and brands and their supply chains to seek ways to improve speed to market with more direct-to-consumer products, to expand channels and catalogs for “seasonless” storytelling and to focus more on mass personalization.

As you can read in this week’s lead story, among those companies at Shima Seiki’s G3D event taking on this new and exciting challenge of consumer-driven retail are Vanguard Pai Lung, with its Wildfire initiative; The Textile Foundry; Ministry of Supply; Thursday Finest; KnitIt; and Supreme Corp.

And Shima Seiki is enabling many of these companies to do just that with its WHOLEGARMENT knitting machine technology, coupled with its APEX3 software solution. Shima Seiki USA, the U.S. arm of the Japanese parent, is well positioned to facilitate the concept of “back-door production,” according to Matt Llewellyn, its vice president.

“This concept means localized production with on-the-fly changes in style or color to capitalize on fast-changing trends, which drastically reduces inventory, shipping and travel expenses, yet improves factory communication and shorter supply chain,” he said. “These benefits can easily outweigh the benefits of lower-cost Asian imports and fits mass customization, e-commerce and smaller fashion companies. This concept also fits into many sectors of our industry such as medical and industrial applications.”

Hear that? That’s a rumble that’s resulting from a distinct fault line. Let’s continue to shake things up, y’all.