Is it Possible to Move Nike's Manufacturing to the United States?
As place increasing pressure on brands to bring manufacturing to the States, the questions lingering on everyone’s minds is 1) is it possible, and 2) have they tried before? The answer to the latter is yes. As technology ramped up in 2015, brands began experimenting with what this could mean for their manufacturing. , and all made big moves to bring their factories to the United States, and spoiler alert, they all failed.
From 2015–2019, Nike invested millions of dollars to automate the highly labour-intensive task of shoe manufacturing. They opened a high-tech factory in Guadalajara, Mexico with the partnership of Flex, who had previously helped Apple successfully set up a factory to make Mac Pros in Texas. The goal for the Swoosh was to not only bring back manufacturing to the US, but also to reduce the number of workers needed to produce sneakers. If it worked, it would have been revolutionary for the industry; however, they came across a multitude of problems that inevitably led to the project’s closure just four years after it started. The main issue being that robots struggled to handle the soft and malleable material used to make shoes, but they also weren’t able to adapt to how the materials changed with the temperature and the slight differences between each and every shoe (a sole for instance is not as uniform as a computer chip). Ultimately, it was decided that the human touch was necessary, and since the labour costs in America were far too high, the manufacturing remained in Vietnam, China and Indonesia.
At the same time, adidas set up ‘speedfactories’ in Atlanta and Ansbach, Germany with high-tech machinery that promised to spit out shoes at an unprecedented rate, and Under Armour launched ‘Project Glory’, which aimed to use automation to make sneakers in Baltimore. Both of these also folded in 2019.
Now with the ongoing tariffs and ‘trade-wars’ looming, brands will need to reconsider their approaches. Nike are yet to comment on the situation.
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