Manufacturing’s comeback is a hot national topic. It’s also a contrast to the post-recession narrative, when manufacturing had lost hundreds of thousands of jobs and was declared dead and buried.

Today the numbers tell a different story:

• Four years ago, pundits cited sub-50 PMI levels (Purchasing Managers’ Index, a measure of manufacturing health) as evidence that manufacturing was dead. Today the PMI hovers around 60, and the overall economy grew for the 107th consecutive month. The economy goes as manufacturing goes.

• New data measures the power of manufacturing’s multiplier effect and the widening impact of the manufacturing supply chain. Brian Lewandowski and Michael Hansen’s CompanyWeek column outlined that Colorado manufacturing activity “supports a total of 441,000 jobs in the state, and contributes approximately $47 billion to state GDP.” It’s powerful stuff. The state’s top employment sector — trade, transportation, and utilities — supports about 470,000 jobs. Almost as many are touched by manufacturing.

• Harry Moser’s Reshoring Initiative, an early mover in forecasting a return of American manufacturing, just released its 2017 data report, and the numbers are again eye opening. The press release reads, “Including upward revisions of 67,000 jobs in prior years, the total number of manufacturing jobs brought to the U.S. from offshore is over 576,000 since the .. manufacturing employment low of 2010. The 171,000 reshoring and FDI jobs announced equal 90 percent of the 189,000 total manufacturing jobs added in 2017.” The release adds, “Combined reshoring and FDI jobs were up 122 percent compared to unrevised 2016 totals and 52 percent compared to revised 2016 totals.” If Moser’s right, U.S. firms are repatriating jobs. It means the economics of manufacturing in America is compelling brands to make things here for the first time in decades.

• OEDIT’s Luis Benitez uses the term “connected economies” to describe cross-sector collaboration, and it’s an apt description of what’s happening today, companies discovering shared interests and opportunities across the industry silos that have defined them. For example, brands in natural products and outdoor industries are realizing they have a lot in common — including customers. And they’re collaborating to advance their shared interests. It’s a big opportunity: consumers spend $887 billion annually on outdoor recreation, and another $190 billion or so on natural products. As technology, processes, people, and best practices bleed across industries, the outcomes will be seismic, as in a $1T opportuntity in this example alone. It’s the tip of the iceberg.

• The renewed influence of the sector was on full display at two regional events this April — the Colorado Manufacturing Awards and the Northern Colorado Manufacturing Partnership trade show and expo — NOCOM. Both were harbingers of things to come, showcasing the state as a manufacturing laboratory and an engine of innovation and growth.

Does all of this translate into a more resilient sector? The answer is less clear.

Manufacturers cite workforce challenges as a barrier to growth. Can it stop sector development cold?

Maybe. It’s a multi-faceted challenge. Re-training a new manufacturing workforce to meet the needs of a modern sector is challenge one.

Affordable housing is a close second. I’ve written how Naturally Bay Area, formed to model Naturally Boulder’s success, might incubate and accelerate companies only to see them move for lack of manufacturing infrastructure and employees.

Even as business finds a way, economic developers still lack a playbook, a blueprint, to guide the development of the manufacturing supply chain. What are the ingredients for success, and for which industries? Build it and they will come, but how to determine what’s lacking? Today the regional manufacturing supply chain is more spotty than complete.

Cohesive, pro-manufacturing public policy is as elusive. Do tariffs serve the collective interests of manufacturers? How will immigrant-reliant industries like food and ag manage growth with fewer employees? Tax cuts are great. Trillion-dollar deficits increase uncertainty.

Benitez’s “connected economies” are still unconnected, largely.

But the next exponential leap in industry development — and resiliency — will occur when brands are clustered with their means of production and with others outside their current sphere of influence, companies that share common opportunities and challenges.

Exhibit A: How powerful would Colorado’s outdoor industry be if it were better aligned with regional manufacturers building its toys and with the state’s tourism juggernaut? We’ll dig deeper into the concept in the coming months.

In the end the American West has the upper hand. Net in-migration and positive outcomes of well-funded workforce initiatives will rebuild the talent pipeline. Industries will get connected.

Until then, the revolution is being televised. Don’t miss it.

Bart Taylor is publisher of CompanyWeek. Reach him at btaylor@companyweek.com.

Is there an industry more challenged by its success than the Outdoor Industry?

Take Nike, a colossus of OI. Phil Knight’s now famous sojourns to Asia to establish a shoe manufacturing beachhead opened the floodgates for American brands to offshore en masse, and boy, have they. Still today, brands of all sizes follow Knight’s Orient Express to ensconse production in thriving, world-class shoe and apparel factories, primarily in China.

The results have been stunning. Chinese factories are so capable that today “the likes of Balenciaga have started manufacturing in the country,” according to GQ. (Did you know that a $700 cross-trainer was even available? Neither did I.) The investments in infrastructure and people have transformed China into an OI manufacturing superpower.

But as business media reports, Nike, Adidas, and others are leaving China in search of cheaper labor in other markets — like Vietnam. It’s part of a modern shell game brands now manage, one precipitated by their own success in creating centers of manufacturing excellence offshore that are, by definition, increasingly expensive to operate. Qualified labor, benefits, advanced technology, and materials — the price of world-class manufacturing — are becoming as pricey in China as they are in Detroit.

After helping transform China into a economic behemoth, sights are now set on other Asian countries where major investments in infrastructure can be offset by lower labor costs. It’s the offshore playbook, out of print and updated for an iPad.

Here’s the rub: Today OI brands are motivated by more than profit. It’s an industry packed full of change agents who are moved to steward public lands, develop “authentic” brands, preserve finite resources, and generally make the business world a more sustainable, friendly place.

How to rationalize, then, the inherent unsustainability of an Asian supply chain? Or rural unemployment and dogged underemployment in states home to the same brands that are investing in jobs and production infrastructure in overseas communities? Or how to justify a lack of credible environmental oversight in countries home to the apparel factories of U.S. OI brands, as the industry wields its considerable power here to punish states for public lands policy?

As uncomfortable OI brands are with this paradox, they’re not showing it. Domestic manufacturing is making a comeback, but in OI circles, the question of where its products are made is largely a back-burner issue. The Industry still operates under a halo of tacit approval that brands must offshore production to stay in business, or, that it’s okay to relegate manufacturing to remote destinations. We’ve embraced the methodology of U.S. brands pouring profits into the development of world-class manufacturing facilities offshore, not here.

Until now.

For one, there’s a vanguard of companies challenging conventional wisdom, companies that have simply said that offshore production will not be part of corporate or product DNA. CompanyWeek Editor Eric Peterson reminds us of several Colorado-based companies that fit the bill, this week.

Alchemy Bicycle Co. is first on the list and in the alphabet, but Ryan Cannizzaro’s mission and accomplishment is not trivial. Alchemy, like Utah-based ENVE, maker of the wheels mounted on most all of its frames, decided composite frame manufacturing could be established in the U.S. despite Taiwan’s hammer lock on the sector. Today Alchemy is battling for market share against U.S. brands made in Taiwan at the same time it challenges the notion that OI products have to be made offshore.

But it’s consumers who may force OI brands to follow the lead of Alchemy and others. Buyers unerringly force companies to keep their brand promise, and if OI is to live up to the lofty ideas and rhetoric of its spokespeople, the contradictions of its manufacturing strategy may move from back burner to center stage.

We’ll be there to celebrate the shift.

Bart Taylor is publisher of CompanyWeek. Email him at btaylor@companyweek.com.

With the Olympic Games and Academy Awards providing a worthy backdrop, we’re set to announce finalists in the most important competition of the spring, the Colorado Manufacturing Awards. Gold medals and Oscars have nothing on us.

The 2018 CMAs again recognize outstanding maker and manufacturing businesses across multiple industries, but this year with a meaningful twist. We invited 10 of Colorado’s creative trade and business organizations to help us select worthy finalists within their industry communities. It’s a tip of the cap to their great work, but also a reminder of how manufacturing’s influence spans so many of the region’s key industries.

So here’s a first look at finalists from half the field. We’ll report on the rest next week, as we near the April 5 Colorado Manufacturing Awards gala event, where we’ll announce category winners at The Cable Center at University of Denver.

At some point in the past year, we had no choice but to distinguish Colorado’s brilliant cadre of contract manufacturers with their own category. We reached out to the Rocky Mountain Tooling and Machining Association (RMTMA) to help us identify three finalists, and it’s a predictably strong group. Boulder’s Tecomet, Ft. Collins’ Manes Machine, and standout Arvada aerospace shop Faustson Tool are this year’s deserving finalists for Outstanding Contract Manufacturer.

The Colorado Distillers Guild helped us select three candidates for Outstanding Craft Distiller. Finalists reflect a deep statewide movement that’s positioned Colorado’s sector as a national leader. Carbondale’s Marble Distilling Company, Crested Butte’s Montanya Distillers, and Denver’s standout early-mover Leopold Bros. comprise this powerhouse group.

The region’s craft brewers are a force of nature, today with over 350 companies shaping a regional beer tsunami. With so much innovation, entrepreneurship, and community-building, it’s at once easy yet incredibly difficult to select three — and only three — finalists for Outstanding Craft Brewery. With an assist from the Colorado Brewers Guild, this year’s finalist group includes Longmont’s iconic Left Hand Brewing Company, Divide’s barrel-aged masters Paradox Beer Company, and the upstart artisans at Broomfield’s 4 Noses Brewing.

The State of Colorado has pegged bioscience as a “key industry” and the Colorado Bioscience Association is one of the region’s accomplished trade and business associations. The industry sector is informed by entrepreneurship and great science but also by manufacturing acumen, and finalists this year for Outstanding Bioscience Manufacturer flash all three. As additive manufacturing transforms how surgeons operate, Littleton’s 3D Systems is on its leading edge, and Allison Medical’s story is as compelling as TOLMAR Inc.‘s cancer-treating innovation. The three companies represent Colorado’s bioscience industry with distinction.

Outdoor industry has crashed the national business scene with the force of an avalanche and Colorado’s OI sector is poised to become an epicenter of product innovation and manufacturing. CO Active Colorado, one of the state’s newest trade associations, selected three finalists overcoming the challenges of domestic manufacturing to make and assemble a generation of high-performance gear using local talent, expertise, and grit. Denver’s Meier Skis, Phunkshun Wear, and Alchemy Bicycle Co. fit the Outstanding Outdoor Industry brand.

Next week, we’ll showcase the remaining five industry associations and category finalists: Outstanding Industrial & Equipment, Consumer & Lifestyle, Energy & Environment, Aerospace, and Small Food brands of the year.

REGISTER for the 2018 Colorado Manufacturing Awards event, but don’t wait: The event will sell out.