Love may be too mushy a word for a gritty manufacturing mindset to embrace. But I cannot help it: I love Maker’s Row and what this business is doing for American manufacturers and our economy. This site, with its new Made in America E-commerce store, and a mission to assist designers, makers, inventors, and other product-centric businesses, connects you with factories across the USA and offers a lot to, well, love.
Making a product, at least the getting-it-out-there, has gotten easier with the crowdfunding momentum we see in Kickstarter, IndieGogo, and other platforms. The actual making, the manufacturing of a product, at scale, that is not as easy. That’s where Maker’s Row comes in. The company is a matchmaker, of sorts, where you can find or “source factories” to manufacture a product within the United States. You may think that all manufacturing is done "offshore," but that is far from true.
Offshoring, as you may have read, is a declining trend and “reshoring” is gaining ground, improving prospects for domestic manufacturing. Of course, like all trends, it depends on where you get your data. I have written about reshoring and the research is based on work from the
“By a three-to-one margin, respondents also predicted that reshoring would create U.S. manufacturing jobs within five years. Fifty percent of the respondents said that they expect to boost their U.S.-manufacturing workforces by 5 percent or more. Only 17 percent predicted that their companies would be employing at least 5 percent fewer manufacturing workers in the U.S. five years from now. The survey findings reinforce a previous BCG estimate that reshored production, along with rising exports, could create between 600,000 and 1 million direct manufacturing jobs by 2020.”
Back in 2012, as crowdfunding was really spreading its wings, Maker’s Row started and has been riding, in my view, the reshoring trend. The company has provided over 80,000 businesses with opportunities to discover and communicate with domestic manufacturers. In essence, they have been striving to make the manufacturing process simple to understand and accessible within the United States for companies of all sizes.
Since I talk to many would-be manufacturers, that is, inventors or designers with an idea, a service like this is nearly indispensable. As a little company, a startup, you often cannot afford to go make a product in another country, let alone just figure out how to navigate the starting details. It is too much. Maker’s Row gives you an edge, a jumpstart, to educating yourself and starting the early conversations needed to help you figure out how to get a product made, then to market.
With the new online storefront, The General Store, where you can explore “Made in America” products, you can get an idea of what’s possible because of the great examples shown there. Those are all for sale, of course, but existing makers and designers, so that part is not new. Ebay and Etsy let you do that, too, but this one clearly celebrates the increasing number of designers who are becoming maker-type businesses.
As Maker’s Row co-founder and CMO, Tanya Menendez, said in an earlier Forbes post: “Domestic factories have also shot themselves in the foot in that they are usually terrible at marketing themselves to find clients. A simple internet search can tell you next to nothing about a factory, let alone if it produces quality work. There is a lack of transparency that makes it difficult to compare options and clients can be tight-lipped about their factories and manufacturers think little of collaborating with other factories to produce product. ‘Part of it is that people treat it as a trade secret.’”
Note: If you want to get a handle on factory sourcing, read the above-linked Forbes post by Karsten Strauss.
I won’t use the L-word again, but it sure is a great business model to help Made in America come back to life. If you have a product idea and want to learn how to get it made, Maker’s Row offers a range of education, factory sourcing (finding a manufacturer), and now an online storefront of American made goods.
