Of the 850 or so companies we’ve profiled the past four years, is there a single business we can point to that embodies all that’s compelling about the new manufacturing economy?

It’s a tall order. But among the criteria, we might agree that said company would be:

• Offering employment opportunities that appeal to a Millennial workforce.
• Utilizing advanced manufacturing techniques and materials, with at the same time flashing a profound connection to the craft — to engineering and design, fabrication, construction and assembly — calling cards of U.S. industrial acumen.
• Building products at the forefront of a resurgent Made in America movement, products that also open new export markets for the company and for counterparts in the sector; or, filling America’s massive OEM pipeline for parts and products from contract manufacturers that are often sourced overseas today.
• Renewing an American commitment to reclaim industries offshored or otherwise abandoned in pursuit of low-cost labor or services or materials.
• Providing primary jobs in communities in need of new employers and diversified economies, while at the same time investing in the local supply chain to build a foundation for other manufacturers and makers.
• Inspired to embrace the mantle of U.S. manufacturing exceptionalism.

Moreover, if we can identify more than a handful of companies, across manufacturing industries, that meet these criteria, would this then formally equate to a new era — a new golden industrial age — of American manufacturing?

I’m inspired to ask these questions because this week we feature a company that meets our criteria of a bellwether modern manufacturer.

We first profiled Steamboat Springs-based Moots in CompanyWeek‘s inaugural month of September 2013. This week we revisit the company and new president Drew Medlock, seemingly a great addition to a company leading a vanguard of maker businesses reshaping the sector.

Consider:

Moots’ talented designers and fabricators, sellers, brand managers, and other employees may not fully grasp what they’re accomplishing — no more than those working at Colorado’s other cycle manufacturers like Guerilla Gravity or Alchemy — but the combination of entrepreneurialism and a renewed interest in the physical product add up to a powerful magnet for aspiring young professionals.

Moots is pioneering with advanced materials and processes — titanium and 3D printing, for starters. The Moots’ weld is also a thing of beauty.

As Medlock notes in the profile, “I think European customers have even more of an appreciation for metal bikes over carbon fiber.” Can Moots open international markets for other exporters, even if it can’t today handcraft enough bikes to become a significant player? It’s a good bet. Moots’ brand embodies quality and craftsmanship, ingenuity and industry.

Much as Utah’s ENVE Composites has done for wheels and components, Moots is leading a movement to bring cycling manufacturing back to the U.S., mainly from China and Taiwan. As Medlock points out, it’s no walk in the park. Domestic manufacturing “is always a major challenge for us in terms of cost. We always try to source . . . domestically. So that’s a challenge. It’s not easy.”

Yet for communities from Steamboat to Park City to Telluride, the primary jobs that Moots and its peers keep in the local economy can be a foothold to establish more non-service sector jobs, employment alternatives that help places escape the single-industry business cycles that bedevil local economies.

Finally, Medlock and the Moots team may not realize they’re game changers, given the day-to-day challenges of staying in business while bucking the move to offshore production, where cheap labor and materials add up to black on a spreadsheet. If they could, they might fully embrace the transformative effect many small- to medium-sized manufacturers are having on America’s manufacturing brand.

This week, we’ll do it for them, and remind the business community that if we don’t align resources to ensure that Moots and other companies like it succeed, we’ll have a missed an opportunity to change our industrial fortunes. It’s a sure bet that, in sounding a cautionary tale about supply-chain challenges, there are days when businesses like Moots and leaders like Medlock contemplate resource-rich ecosystems, wherever they may be.

Let’s not miss the opportunity to rally around change agents like Moots. Manufacturing will prosper as a result.

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

Amazon’s disruptive model has always evoked strong feelings, good and bad. So who wins and loses as Amazon bursts into the grocery business with the acquisition of Whole Foods? Beginning this week, WF shoppers will enjoy lower prices on “high-volume staples.” It’s a short-term win for consumers.

But if Amazon’s discounting strategy extends into most WF SKUs, the small, innovative brands that have led a food manufacturing revival in California, Colorado, Oregon, and other progressive states may see margins erode, a potentially devastating development for companies that have benefitted from WF’s model.

Specialized retailers have been a catalyst of the artisanal, craft manufacturing boom. By providing early-stage brands encouragement and key shelf space, grocers like Whole Foods have fostered growth and innovation. The higher margins that shoppers pay have also worked to protect small producers: locally made, organically-sourced products are often more expensive to make, especially early on, when companies aren’t big enough to co-pack or able to invest in larger more efficient product facilities. Notes Steven Hoffman, managing director of Compass Natural Marketing, “An authentic brand will never win on price, but it can win customers who share its mission and values.”

And here’s the rub. Is Whole Foods’ values connection with customers and brands consistent with Amazon’s algorithms “that scrape competitors’ prices before automatically matching or narrowly undercutting them on its website?” What happens if Whole Foods evolves, if not to a discount brand, but a store that squeezes margins across the board? Margins that sustain early-stage companies and fuel the steady stream of new ideas pouring from food ecosystems in California, Colorado, and elsewhere.

Bill Capsalis, former president of Naturally Boulder, the go-to trade association for Colorado’s natural and organic product sector, isn’t concerned — yet.

“Let’s be clear, we’re talking about one retailer here,” Capsalis says. “Yes, they are important, but my own experiences show me that due to Whole Foods’ own policies and processes they have been getting a 10 percent to 30 percent premium on the same products you can buy at other retailers.”

Capsalis was bullish on Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods initially. “It’s good because brands can now preserve margin by selling direct. If you combined the expertise of Whole Foods and the way they curate brands and products — with the tech savvy and direct to consumer model of Amazon – the consumer really wins big time in this equation.”

Hoffman also takes a long view. “This is a continuum of what’s already been happening with brick and mortar retailers having to compete with e-commerce sellers,” he says. “Distributors that had been serving Whole Foods, too, are having to deal with this quantum shift, as Amazon comes with its own myriad warehouses, and margins are sure to be squeezed along all channels of distribution.”

Today, he adds, the impetus is on brands to evolve, and the game’s on. “Before, I would recommend companies explore online strategies in addition to trying to get into Whole Foods and other retail markets. Now, online strategies will become an essential part of every brand’s business model. My guess is that, if you do well on Amazon.com, you may very well end up on the shelves at Whole Foods Market.”

That said, Capsalis and others are wary. “The fears of what’s to come with this merger are real and palpable,” he says. The fears, no doubt, are related to Amazon’s track record of transforming America’s retail landscape — and the resulting unintended consequences.

Here’s what we know: Small food brands that are transforming the industry need sufficiently long runways to innovate and operate. Eroding margins can be a slippery slope in the wrong direction. In the outdoor industry, Patagonia founder Hap Klopp calls this eventuality “the race to the bottom” — a focus on cheaply-made products from discount brands that works to undermine product differentiation and, in the end, American manufacturing.

Industry advocates in California, Colorado, and across the West will do well to ensure that innovation and entrepreneurship remain the calling card of food manufacturing ecosystems, and remain key outcomes of Amazon practices, not just lower prices.

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

Somewhere, on a Forbes magazine list of most-hated professions, manufacturer must appear just above lawyer and journalist.

It’s one explanation for the manufacturing-related musings of columnist Tim Worstall who, in a snarky column last month entitled Manufacturing Isn’t Important But Factory Goods Orders Are Rising — That’s Nice, proclaimed of manufacturing:

“It just doesn’t have all that much relevance in a modern economy. I mean, sure, it’s nice, manly men have been doing more manly things with machines and all that, but in terms of how it affects the rest of the economy we’re down at a level of significance where, well, it doesn’t. Affect the rest of the economy in any manner we’ll notice that is.”

In working up a response, I instead fell upon Fast Company’s saving feature, 25 Brands that Matter. Of the 25 “companies whose products you love to love because they stand for something more than merely what they sell,” eight were manufacturers, and two of the top five. It’s a beautiful repudiation:

By Fast Company’s reckoning, technology and manufacturing companies are the pin-ups of the U.S. economy.

It’s unlikely that FC’s editors or readers will draw the same conclusion, let alone Worstall. Today, Apple is known as technology company, Patagonia an outdoor industry brand, and Nike a sporting goods giant.

We’ve been okay with these labels because manufacturing’s been something companies just do offshore, out of sight and out of our globalized view of what should constitute a “modern” economy. But until manufacturing is considered the full extension of a brand’s identity, America’s sector will continue to be marginalized.

It’s ironic that voices emerging to challenge conventional wisdom are often not mainstream business media but instead entertainment-and-culture rags like The New Yorker, who last week explored manufacturing’s conundrum in Joshua Rothman’s smart column, “Should We Subsidize Manufacturing?”

He does all of us a favor by collating the thoughts of economists, industrialists and sociologists like Louis Uchitelle, author of Making It: Why Manufacturing Still Matters. For this group, America’s relationship with manufacturing is cultural as well as economic. As a result, a retreating sector tears at the social fabric of the country.

Uchitelle’s ideas are especially thought provoking. For one, he argues that Americans “are in denial about the importance and prevalence of subsidies.”

From Rothman’s New Yorker piece: “Our factories have always been ‘semipublic institutions’ funded, to a surprising degree, by taxpayer dollars. ‘The false premise that manufacturing is a free-market activity — that subsidies don’t exist or are inconsequential — should finally be put to rest,’ Uchitelle writes. ‘No one anywhere in the world makes steel or autos or shoes or virtually anything else in a factory without subsidies.’ Uchitelle thinks we ought to subsidize manufacturing more, and more rationally. We should also recognize that, when we decide not to subsidize manufacturing, we are deciding to kill it.'”

Uchitelle’s prescriptions are bold: “Subsidies should be increased, and their role emphasized. The dollar should be devalued to encourage exports and slow the financialization of the economy. Import tariffs should be raised and trade agreements renegotiated. Taxpayers should have more say in where factories are located: similar factories should be built near one another, ideally in or near densely populated cities, to strengthen the industrial base and force companies to compete for workers. ‘Buy American’ clauses should be extended: Uchitelle notes that the glass in the new World Trade Center was made in China, as was the steel in the new Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.”

And the coup de grace: “A G.D.P. percentage target for manufacturing. In the nineteen-fifties, twenty-eight per cent of G.D.P. came from manufacturing; today, it’s twelve, and only Britain and Canada lag behind the United States in manufacturing output. Uchitelle argues that a figure of seventeen per cent would put us in line with other industrialized nations. In Germany, he points out, ‘manufacturing output has generated a steady 22 percent of the national income year after year for at least seventeen years, and the government is quite open about its participation.'”

With the the current dialogue stuck at ‘how important is manufacturing?’, bold steps like a G.D.P. target can seem a bridge too far. On the other hand, a new, disruptive agenda may be exactly what’s needed to reorient policy makers, and reticent business columnists, to a new manufacturing reality.

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

Last year, the 2016 Manufacturing and Logistics National Report Card from Ball State University in Indiana raised eyebrows in Colorado’s manufacturing community when we reported the state was given a D. The bad grade provoked well-intentioned efforts to assess the state’s manufacturing shortcomings.

This year, our footprint has expanded west to include California and makes for an even larger data set to parse. Here’s the 2017 Manufacturing and Logistics National Report Card grades for California, Colorado, and Utah, the states where CompanyWeek now publishes.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

By the looks of things, the only subsector grade saving California from Colorado’s ignominious D in overall Industry Health is a A in Productivity and Innovation.

But in other states, including many in the Rust Belt, it doesn’t appear the overall grade correlates at all with subsector scores.

Consider Michigan:

Michigan’s A grade in overall ealth, without an A in the other categories, is a headscratcher. Likewise, Utah would appear to have earned a high overall grade.

The explanation seems to be that per-capita employment is weighted more heavily. According to the Report, Michigan’s manufacturing employment is 11.7 percent of the state economy, a high number compared with most states. The Report Card notes that 5 percent of Colorado employment, and 8 percent in California and Utah, is in manufacturing.

Is Michigan’s sector — or that of Indiana, Kentucky, Iowa, and South Carolina, other states with A grades for industry health — in better shape than California or Colorado’s because it has more jobs?

Maybe, but here’s why that’s a tough argument to make.

Manufacturing jobs have steadily decreased as a percentage of overall U.S. employment. Per-capita employment seems a dated metric; it’s yesterday’s measure of industry health.

That’s not to say workforce doesn’t matter. The opposite. Human Capital is the study’s most important metric. The lack of skilled labor is manufacturing’s biggest challenge — nationwide.

Today’s healthiest manufacturing economies are focused on developing the right workforce. What’s appealing to manufacturing companies is a future workforce flashing STEM skills. States experiencing a net in-migration of young talent, in economies with a rich R&D backdrop, is also a plus. Michigan’s D in Human Capital is telling, as is Kentucky’s D and South Carolina’s F.

Other criteria in the Report Card are important in the future. Sector diversification is manufacturing’s new calling card. Want to begin to solve manufacturing’s labor problem? Showcase its growth industries — beer and distilling, natural and organic good, technology-fueled fabrication in aerospace, and the outdoor industry — that appeal to a new generation. They’re the growth industries of the manufacturing economies in the West.

Global Reach is today a two-way street. Exports are only one side of the global manufacturing coin. Reshoring — shortening supply chains — is the flip side, and states developing manufacturing infrastructure to accommodate brands wanting domestic manufacturing will thrive.

Michigan’s recovery, with automotive manufacturing at the center, has been startling. It’s a testament to the power of industry innovation and deliberate economic development efforts to reimagine manufacturing in a key industry. Other states, like Tennessee (overall health: B+), are led by energetic and capable manufacturing leaders intent on bring new ideas to their communities.

But today manufacturing health will follow economies where talent enables innovation and communities understand the value of manufacturing jobs. If Michigan and other Rust Belt states leverage their manufacturing legacy to recruit a new generation of STEM-inspired employees to manufacture a widening portfolio of industry products, an A will be well-earned.

Otherwise, the centers of modern U.S. manufacturing will tilt toward R&D-inspired, entrepreneurial economies also benefitting from an influx of talent and money.

The race is on, and more than good grades are in the balance.

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