Local Manufacturing + Urban Manufacturing

You may have already seen this in your various feeds, but this week Allison Arieff authored a piece on local manufacturing in a New York Times blog.

The post, titled The Future of Manufacturing Is Local piqued my interest and fanned the flames of AEDC's passion for urban manufacturing. Just rereading it now got me jumping up and down with excitement. Here are some folks in much larger cities repeating what we've been saying for a while now: the 100-mile diet of "locavorism" is coming to manufactured products, people's relationship with their possessions is changing, and small manufacturers that focus on specialization and being lean will be winners in the next economic wave.

In case you aren't familiar with locavores, they are the folks that help make the Emmaus Farmers' Market such a special place. They are willing to pay a slight premium for high-quality produce that comes from places that they have heard of and is sold to them by the same people that planted and harvested it. In San Francisco, that looks like Rickshaw Bags selling a uniquely San Francisco product out of their own factory. As their found Mark Dwight said, "People want to buy stuff that's made locally. It started with food, but it's permeating fashion, woodwork and the like."

Also, we are watching a rejection of the throwaway culture (Dwight calls it the culture of disposability) that has taken root in America. It turned deck chairs into commodities and allowed the production of those chairs to move off-shore. But now it seems like people are more interested in a higher-quality product that will last more than one season. Additionally, they are looking for products that are made for the environment in which they are sold. A consumer looking for that same deck chair in Phoenix will be shopping for something different than a buyer in Maine. Radically different environments, with radically different local aesthetics.

Finally, smaller manufacturers that have walked away from commodity products are finding their niche here in the US. And they are at home in cities. Small manufacturers are more at home in the smaller shops and buildings that are readily available in our urban environments, but not so much in the 10-acre buildings built on 50 acres of former cornfield in the suburbs.

Read the article yourself and post some feedback here. Learn more at our Urban Made web page and let us know about your favorite urban-made products.