Making it in America - Literally, or How to Find a Factory

The tagline on the front page of the Maker's Row website is "Factory Sourcing Made Easy: America's Best Factories in One Place." Their mission is to make it easier for designers to connect with the manufacturers that will actually make their products. With their company roots in the fashion industry, their database is understandably heavy on clothing manufacturers (hey, we're cheering for them to expand!), and we had to find our injection molder without them.

We want to explain why in this age of Google, it's still tough to find manufacturing, but certainly not impossible, and how to go about it.

If you've been around machine shops or factories in the New England area like we have, you'll notice a graying workforce. Quite simply, as more and more manufacturing was moved overseas, getting a job at a factory, (either as a manufacturing engineer or as a line worker) was less and less attractive. The most junior workers were laid off or left or were never replaced, and now it's not unusual to find shops where 90% of the workforce is over 45.

The end result, at least among injection molders in the New England area, is that they are now essentially small businesses with aging populations that don't have the resources or tech savvy to promote themselves well online or to put good SEO practices in place. In short, your favorite search engine probably won't find them.

A week or two of Googling only turned up a few factories in the area for us and the prospects weren't great. We tried using mfg.com to get quotes as well and we were immediately swamped with wildly ranging bids from overseas companies varying from $2K to $50K. We didn't think we could sort the quality factories from the bad ones without flying to China or hiring an agent, and frankly didn't have the time or resources to do so.

Fortunately, Scott Miller, CEO of Dragon Innovation, tipped us off to the Design 2 Part trade show. In just our first sixty minutes on the trade show floor, we selected from the dozens of companies present to yield a short list that was already better qualified than what we found in weeks of online research.

To be clear, finding a manufacture isn't, and shouldn't, be a trivial process. You're committing resources and time when you pick a factory and you're building a relationship to ensure that they can build the quality parts that you design. We certainly want Maker's Row to succeed in what they're doing, but until they're as ubiquitous in manufacturing as Yelp is for restaurants (fingers crossed!), the best way to find manufacturers will be trade shows, recommendations, a little legwork, and Google, in that order.