As we expand into California this week after telling the story of 700 or so manufacturing companies in Colorado, Utah, and across the region, it’s a great opportunity for us to revisit why we launched CompanyWeek, and assess what we got right and wrong.

Reason #1: There’s a renewed passion for making things, and companies are transforming entire industries.

What we saw: In Colorado and much of the West, a wave of companies is breaking all the rules about manufacturing. Natural and organic food brands, craft brewers and distillers, entrepreneurs in outdoor industry, engineers and designers in aerospace and bioscience, industrial upstarts rediscovering technology — all, and at once, are transforming America’s manufacturing brand.

What we got right: The wave shows no signs of cresting. Trends favor a continued renewal of domestic manufacturing.

What we got wrong: The Boston Consulting Group noted that, “The U.S. manufactures $3.4 trillion worth of goods annually, nearly three-quarters of what it consumes.” Like everyone else, we called America’s new focus on manufacturing a renaissance. It’s more like an awakening, to new possibilities.

What we learned: For communities having success with manufacturing, industry clusters typically fuel supply-chain development that begets manufacturing. A lesson for developers: Decide what industries are a fit, and develop ecosystems to support and recruit companies. Boulder, Colorado, Ogden, Utah, and San Francisco are thriving manufacturing towns today because of cohesive industry strategies, around food, outdoor industry, and a thriving maker movement.

Reason #2: Powerful trends make the economics of American manufacturing increasingly competitive on the global stage.

What we saw: Companies are weary of managing global supply chains, especially with costs for overseas production on the rise. Today it’s often as expensive to manage factories overseas as manufacture domestically.

What we got right: A new cost equilibrium will keep more manufacturing jobs here, or nearer-shored.

What we got wrong: The domestic supply chain continues to limit growth. Ready to scale an apparel brand and want to keep cut-and-make local? You’ll search far and wide, and may near-shore, to Mexico, in lieu of a domestic manufacturer. We’ve not trained a new generation of apparel technicians, using the latest technology, in decades. We simply can’t reshore or develop some manufacturing jobs.

What we learned: Today, early-stage brands favor local inspiration and production. Shorter supply chains are now brand objectives. Millennials don’t want their food grown and shipped across entire oceans, or their favorite garment made for dollars-a-day labor.

Reason #3: Media have lost interest in manufacturing.

What we saw: Manufacturers lament the public’s perception of their sector. They call it the “Four Ds”: dirty, dumb, dying, and dangerous. It’s far from that, but as companies turned overseas to make things, media tuned out.

What we got right: Business media still can’t agree on the importance or significance of manufacturing — whether it’s a single industry or a service sector; whether a technology company that makes things (think Apple) is a tech brand or a manufacturing company; or if a thriving manufacturing economy alongside technology and service is integral to prosperity or not. Today, manufacturing bewilders business media.

What we got wrong: Media’s important, but industry and other business stakeholders are the arbiters of manufacturing’s success.

What we learned: It’s manufacturing’s responsibility to reimagine how the sector is perceived — and where investments in the manufacturing brand must be made or reconsidered. Media’s complicit in under-reporting the sector’s far-reaching impact, but it’s time for industry to make different decisions to promote its interests.

On that note, the best way to understand manufacturing is through its compelling companies and leaders. We’ll publish a standalone California edition of CompanyWeek, and in every issue, we’ll profile three of four of California’s finest manufacturers. Their stories are the real narrative of a modern, transformative sector.

We’ll do so monthly until the fall, when we’ll publish every week. Here’s why manufacturers in Colorado and Utah have come to value CompanyWeek.

Our journey in California begins this week.

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

Two regional developments promise to infuse much-needed expertise into the manufacturing supply chain. Last week, we reported on the Mountain West Advanced Manufacturing Network. This week: We look at Colorado State University’s National Science Foundation grant to study supply-chain dynamics in emerging clusters of small manufacturers.

The growing number of apparel brands looking to manufacture domestically face two big hurdles. One, there are simply too few qualified patternmakers and sewers. If there’s a poster child for a U.S. industry workforce devastated by the offshoring, it’s apparel. Today, about 5 percent of apparel purchased by U.S. consumers is made here. In 1960, that number was closer to 90 percent.

As we offshored jobs, we also stopped training the next generation of production specialists. In the process, we’ve lost much of our institutional memory on how to train new employees. Today there’s no blueprint, and no uniformity in methods, equipment, and leadership. We’re essentially starting over.

Carol Engel-Enright, Kelly Alford, and other local architects of a new apparel manufacturing infrastructure in Colorado have experienced this firsthand the past several years. Demand for a well-trained apparel and sewn-product production workforce is surprising strong. Has it outstripped the available talent? Maybe. Alford’s enterprise, The Whole Works, closed it doors late last year after a promising, highly publicized run ended with too few production specialists.

But setbacks have also proved helpful. Engel-Enright’s efforts, in particular, have garnered national attention. We chronicled the journey of the Rural Colorado Apparel Manufacturing initiative in previous columns, including an invitation from Walmart to apply for its Walmart’s U.S. Manufacturing Innovation Fund. RCAM lost out in the end.

Engel-Enright is also an internship coordinator and instructor in CSU’s Department of Design and Merchandising, and her persistent work to reconstitute apparel industry paid off in the form of a $385,000 National Science Foundation grant to the university, to study “the interactions and organizational development among emerging small manufacturing businesses, clusters, and a formal network, as supply chain partners.” If it sounds like an academic exercise, it is. But Colorado’s rural communities — RCAM communities — are a worthy testing ground to study supply-chain dynamics, including the “reported shift from vertical integration to dense networks of specialized suppliers that amplifies the contribution of small manufacturers to overall U.S. manufacturing growth and employment.”

Engel-Enright’s CSU grant is coup for the region. One possible outcome? The CSU Department of Design and Merchandising offers degrees in Apparel Merchandising with a concentration in Apparel Design and Production. The graduates of the program may be positioned to assume leadership roles in regional apparel manufacturing. It’s also an important step in developing a training blueprint for the industry.

One challenge that apparel manufacturers and close cousins in outdoor industry won’t have is a lack of demand. A wave of new companies now prefers to make things domestically, where brand values like quality, value, and responsiveness are more easily achieved.

It’s why brands are highly motivated to shorten supply chains and make products closer to where they’re designed and sold. Hap Klopp, founder of The North Face, outlined his reasons last month. Under Armour’s Kevin Plank told CNBC, “We should be bringing jobs back, not just to America, but tightening supply chains all over the world. We have the ability to do it better. It’s time for all of us to make an investment.” It’s why manufacturing will get its jobs back here in the U.S.

Can Colorado and the Rocky Mountain region be home to a 21st-century, cut-and-make infrastructure to accommodate the wave of new brands seeking domestic manufacturing? We’ll see. One one hand, the NSF grant already feels late to the party. Today, more than 300 outdoor industry brands call Colorado home, many that have overcome the talent crunch to build viable production capabilities, however small or geographically diverse. And entrepreneurs are streaming the West to launch new brands.

But RCAM’s already generated national interest. Colorado’s disparate eco-devo community would do well to help sustain the network as it finds its legs.

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

New research from the Reshoring Initiative confirms what many have been speculating: Rising costs for overseas labor and services and important brand considerations are now compelling U.S. companies to reshore jobs or create new jobs domestically.

From the new report:

“In 2014 and 2015 parity was reached between offshoring and returning jobs, indicating that the net bleeding of manufacturing jobs to offshore had stopped. As of 2016, for the first time, probably since the 1970s, there was a net positive gain in U.S. jobs. The U.S. has gone from losing about 220,000 manufacturing jobs per year at the beginning of the last decade, to adding 30,000 jobs in 2016. Measured by our trade deficit, of about $500 billion/year, there are still 3 to 4 million U.S. manufacturing jobs offshore at current levels of U.S. productivity, representing a huge potential for U.S. economic growth.”

As Harry Moser, founder of the Reshoring Initiative, says in the new report, “The tide has turned.” For American manufacturers, it may now make economic sense to manufacture in the U.S. where it didn’t before.

Moser has been documenting trends in manufacturing economics for several years. His contribution has been to provide manufacturers data, to one, help them understand trends (such as: “What industries and companies are reshoring jobs, and why?”), and reevaluate their own offshoring decisions. “We get their attention by showing how much is happening, and then, appeal to them to reevaluate,” Moser explains. “We have a free online ‘Total Cost of Ownership Estimator’ tool, which helps them go beyond their historical sourcing practices.” For companies, that’s always started with price, as in: “Where can I find acceptably competent workers at the lowest possible wage?”

But Moser’s tool incorporates other elements that often add up to 15 to 20 percent of additional costs to send jobs offshore, like “carrying costs of inventory, travel costs, intellectual property risk, and the impact on innovation when you separate engineering from manufacturing (or bring them back together), the lost orders and lost customers when you have volatility in demand and you stock out because you have a two- to three-month delivery where you wouldn’t have stocked out if you had a two- or three-week delivery because you have a local source or make it in your own factory here.”

As he began running the numbers, what he suspected might happen, in fact did. “When companies do the analysis, in some cases — not all cases — it makes sense to bring the work back,” Moser says. “To quantify that a bit, we took the first batch of cases we had with China versus the U.S., and in 5 percent of the cases that the company had done a cost analysis, the U.S. had the lowest price. But based on a total-cost analysis, the U.S. won 53 percent of the time, just by using the correct metrics.”

Is the number improving, given rising wages in China and other historically low-wage markets? “We believe it is,” Moser answers. “One the one hand, Chinese wages have been going up 13 to 15 percent per year. On the other side of that, the Chinese are investing more in automation and productivity than we are, so their productivity rate has been rising much faster than ours has been, and that counteracts some of that wage increase.” The new data seem to confirm the trend.

Moser’s analytics also coincide with a profound change in the how U.S. companies are building brands. Today, offshoring jobs and service contracts in pursuit of the lowest cost provider is out of favor, inconsistent with a new consumer ethos that favors quality and value — often the added value of creating homegrown jobs.

Hap Klopp, founder of The North Face, provides an elegant explanation as to why companies reach a similar conclusion as those using Moser’s total cost of ownership tool:

“The mistake the people in the apparel business are making right now is that they think it’s a race to the bottom because of price, and everyone’s trying to take ‘make’ out of the product. The real differentiation (for brands) is making something of value. If you’re not afraid of making the best, you’ll stand out from the crowd. 80 percent of the crowd are just trying to make something cheap, and the reality is that the cost of making these products at a distance is going up and up and up. The labor costs in China, in India, and in other places is going up much faster than in the U.S., and in eight or nine years the labor costs will be the same. Then the long lead times of getting products from Asia are really going to be a hindrance. There’s going to be more close-to-home product manufactured, and addition to that, ‘value’ is going to take over. And a brand is shorthand for value.”

The two related, but powerful trends — a new emerging price equilibrium based on true total costs of offshoring jobs, and evolving consumerism that values local manufacturing and its positive byproducts — are favoring the U.S.

It’s important new methods evolve to shore up support. In keeping with Klopp’s comment, the business and development ecosystem must rally to establish complete and compact supply chains that support local manufacturing. Gaps in the supply chain are plentiful. Labor tops the list, growth capital is stubbornly hard to come by, and the availability of structured services to accelerate growth companies is spotty. Some industries need more help than others.

But if a wave of new American brands equates success with quality manufacturing, and the economics of making are better here than overseas, maybe for the first time in decades, we may quietly have reached a tipping point. The tide might well have turned. The U.S. could finally be winning the war, if it’s only begun.

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