Biden Administrated Releases Readout of Labor Leaders Meeting to Discuss the American Rescue Plan and Infrastructure

March 8, 2021 | Posted by unionwear

On February 17th, 2021, President Biden and senior White House officials hosted a meeting with a group of labor union leaders to discuss the importance of the American Rescue Plan and the President’s plans to create millions of jobs in R&D, manufacturing and clean energy. The meeting included unions representing workers from across the country — the backbone of our nation, the working class.
 
During the meeting, the labor leaders underscored a shared commitment to collaborating and coordinating with the federal government to ensure we build back better after this pandemic and that the future of America is made in America, by American workers.

Additionally, President Biden engaged the labor leaders during the meeting in a conversation about their priorities, recommendations, and the importance of ensuring union workers play a key role in building a resilient and sustainable infrastructure that can withstand extreme weather and a changing climate all while creating millions of good paying union jobs in the process.

#unions #labor #jobs #economy #manufacturing

The PPE Saga: From Pandemic to Policy Issue

March 1, 2021 | Posted by unionwear

Unionwear CEO Mitch Cahn was recently quoted by Kate Nishimur in the Sourcing Journal about making PPE domestically during the pandemic. Below is an excerpt of that interview; click on the link above for the full article with additional context.

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It’s likely that the term “personal protective equipment,” along with its acronym, PPE, never crossed the lips of most Americans before 2020. But as the pandemic roiled the country’s healthcare sector, these items—masks, face shields and gowns—became more valuable than virtually any other cargo. And the U.S. was deeply and inarguably dependent on China, its trade war adversary, for the millions of products needed to keep front-line workers safe.

A dystopian drama followed, winding its way through metropolitan meccas like New York and Los Angeles and wreaking havoc on small cities and towns. And as doctors, nurses and the American government cried out with an unending—and often, unmet—need for more life-saving gear, a contingent of American producers rose to meet the call.

“It was really just pure survival,” Mitch Cahn, president of New Jersey-based Unionwear told Sourcing Journal of his company’s move into PPE production. The manufacturer, which deals in sports, military and election-related merch like baseball caps, trucker hats, beanies, scarves and backpacks felt the PPE pull in early March, Cahn said, as horror stories about overwhelmed hospitals dominated the media cycle and the company’s usual business dried up.

Unionwear saw orders canceled as spring sporting events were put on hold and even the presidential primary race became second-tier news. “The other business that we had was doing a lot of gear for the census takers,” he added—a lifeline that was cut when the U.S. Census Bureau delayed the nationwide survey for a period of months. The company had also been under contract for merchandise for the U.S. Olympic team, but the games were postponed until 2021. “We went from being way too busy to having nothing to do in like two weeks,” he said.

According to Cahn, his company’s union, Workers United, is affiliated with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents the nation’s healthcare workers. Having heard about troubles in nearby New York City medical centers, Cahn went through both organizations to reach the Greater New York Hospital Association. “In short order we were making gowns and face shields,” he said. “They knew we could do it, and that we could get FDA waivers for those products—and we hit the ground running and made a lot of them.”

Coincidentally, Unionwear’s capabilities mirror the technical expertise, along with the material and machinery investment, needed to create uber-specific PPE staples like face shields.

“I’d never heard of a face shield and had no idea what it was,” Cahn said, until he was sent a photo by a hospital administrator. The company happens to make three-ring binders, and Cahn immediately recognized the clear plastic as something he already had in his arsenal. “It’s wrapped around every binder that we make,” he said. Meanwhile, the band used to secure the shield around the wearer’s head was similar to the construction of a baseball hat, and the company created a comfortable cushion with the foam used to make its backpack straps. “We had a supply chain already set up for it,” Cahn added, and the company went on to make about 500,000 face shields for doctors across the region, along with hundreds of thousands of gowns.

The company began making face shields with materials from its existing supply chain.
A Unionwear face shield made with materials from its existing supply chain.

The pandemic-driven pivot pulled companies like Unionwear back from the brink, but it also shone a spotlight on the versatility of American producers.

Read more at the link HERE

#PPE #pandemic #business #leadership #innovation

For unions and Amazon, much is riding on vote in Alabama

February 23, 2021 | Posted by unionwear

The Seattle Times highlights a potential turning point for Amazon: a vote to unionize in Alabama of all places.

The focus is on a warehouse in Bessemer, outside Birmingham, where workers contacted the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union. By December 2020, more than 2,000 out of 5,800 employees at the site had signed cards saying they wanted union representation. That was enough for the National Labor Relations Board to schedule an election.

Not only that, but the board announced earlier this year that voting could be done by mail, which typically favors the union. Amazon wanted in-person voting.

With more than 1.2 million employees globally, Amazon is inevitably a target for unionization, as well as regulators. It’s a General Motors of the Digital Age.

At a time when only 6.3% of private-sector workers are union members, what happens in Bessemer, at what is the second-largest U.S. employer after Walmart, has big stakes for organized labor.

As The New York Times reported, “Union organizers are also building their campaign around the themes of the Black Lives Matter movement. Many of the employees at the Amazon warehouse are Black, a fact that the retail union has used to focus on issues of racial equality and empowerment. And leading the organizing effort are about two dozen unionized workers from nearby warehouses and poultry plants, most of whom are also Black.”

Read more at the Seattle Times article HERE.

#amazon #unions #labor #business

The tech company making fashion for the next 100 years

February 18, 2021 | Posted by unionwear

Financial Review profiles an interesting new trend: tech-powered fashion. 

Hoodies to help you sleep? Solar-powered puffers to keep you warm? Jackets made with copper fibres to repel viruses? These are just some of the ideas of twin brothers Steve and Nick Tidball are exploring.

So far, the twins have created a carbon fibre T-shirt to protect the skin from cuts and scrapes, a sleep cocoon designed to be worn in space to regulate astronauts’ circadian rhythms, solar-powered jackets and a jacket made with copper fibres to repel bacteria and viruses. This year it will debut the Garbage Watch, made entirely of tech waste.

They invented a lot of other items as well, and we imagine there will eventually be innovations with hats as well. We are looking forward to seeing what they come up with next.

#tech #innovation #hats #caps #technology

Why we need unions: modern Americans work longer with less vacation than Medieval Peasants

February 15, 2021 | Posted by unionwear

We recently came across this very interesting — and sobering — article on the modern American worker. 

Juliet Schor, a Professor of Sociology at Boston College, explained in her book The Overworked American: The Unexpected Decline of Leisure, that the average American in 1987 was working about 1,949 hours annually, while an adult male peasant in 13th-century England racked up approximately 1,620 hours yearly.

And, according to the latest available labor data, the medieval peasants continue to work fewer hours than Americans. In 2017, the average hours worked by Americans reached 1,780 a year. The United States is the only advanced country with no national vacation policy. 

Unionwear has proudly embraced unions since our founding almost 30 years ago for many reasons, one of which is that happy and well-rested employees are better employees. By paying a living wage, they also tend to stay longer, and lower turnover means more profitability. More companies should do the same.

#unions #labor #business #leadership #madeinusa

What makes manufacturing sales different than other sales? by Mitch Cahn

February 10, 2021 | Posted by unionwear

What makes manufacturing sales different than other sales?

Every manufacturing salesperson has two clients: the customer and the factory.  The salesperson’s role is to get them to meet in the middle. This involves negotiating due dates, manufacturing processes, materials, quantities, and more.

Successful manufacturing salespeople must:

1 – be intimately familiar with the companies process and materials that are both in stock and accessible (and what accessibility means vis a vis timing and quantities).
2 – drive clients toward what the company can do, but sometimes drive the factory toward what the client needs.
3 – negotiate delivery dates. Both client and factory will buffer their dates and the salesperson needs to employ strategies to bring them closer together, like splitting up quantities or sacrificing other client dates to make orders happen. Questioning a client’s assertion of a drop-dead date is a delicate but necessary skill.
4 – configure and deliver price quotes at different quantity levels, often with different quality levels to give clients a choice.
5 – convince clients to change their conception of how their product will look or be manufactured to meet a price point.
6 – relate bad news to the client in a way that keeps them satisfied and willing to reorder (missed due date, short shipment or backorder)
7 – sell your factory on making something a client wants that is currently not in your company’s core competency
8 – know the complete order processing and manufacturing time frame so you know where there may be pitfalls or places you can intervene and expedite.
9 – cross-sell clients into other products made by the company or upsell them to add on features or higher quality products.
10 – know the segment(s) of the market they are selling to — how clients like to buy, how they are reselling or using your product, the competition, and their pricing trends, traditional markups, trends that could cause a spike or slowdown in sales, seasonality, and cyclicality.
11 – know how the company prices its products, where margins are tight and where there is room to negotiate, what factors might cause pricing changes in the near future, what the true bottom line price is at both large and small quantities.
12 – know the different types of clients and how to identify and handle them differently–over communicators, questioners of your business model, like to go over your head, won’t let you ever make money.
13 – understand the fundamentals of written contracts and the key points of all your contracts that might be negotiated–price, delivery, credit, service, guarantees, etc.
14 – know your company’s library of marketing materials, how to change them, and how to create your own
15 – create your own email blasts.
16 – monetize the graveyard of leads (trade shows, web visitors, inbound emails, dead quotes) that your company is probably sitting on.
17 – know your CRM inside and out and use its artificial intelligence to its greatest advantage–scoring and prioritizing who to call and follow up with.
18 – master time management and delegation, whatever that means for you.
19 – know your company culture and be able to project that to the outside world.
20 – always make price the least important part of any negotiation by stressing the qualities of your company and product and coming off as an unbiased expert in your product category.
21 – Understand  MRP, ERP, Capacity Scheduling, Supply Chain Management (in Manufacturing the focus in this discipline is in purchasing, not distribution so much), and Outsourcing.

Tech unions in Silicon Valley have been rare. Here’s why that’s changing

February 5, 2021 | Posted by unionwear

Some of the Bay Area’s knowledge workers — historically hard to organize — are embracing unions.

It was remarkable when several hundred workers from Google’s parent company, Alphabet, announced the formation of a union.

Cafeteria workers, security guards and bus drivers serving tech companies have unionized. But a tech company’s rank and file organizing itself was rare in the industry’s heartland.

To ward off unions, companies offered competitive pay and benefits, even to early workers assembling chips and devices on factory floors. “That was the trade-off,” O’Mara said. It was an approach that gave workers a shared stake in a company’s success.

Such practices have been largely effective in preventing large-scale unionization in the skilled tech workforce.

The new group at Alphabet, called the Alphabet Workers Union and affiliated with the Communication Workers of America, is a different sort of union. While most workers band together to demand better pay and working conditions, the Alphabet union instead seeks to organize workers around issues from fighting gender-based and racial discrimination to policing the ways they see the company as straying from its original “Don’t be evil” slogan.

Because the Alphabet Workers Union is a so-called “minority union” — only a few hundred Alphabet workers have signed on — it does not have the power to negotiate a contract. For now, workers hope to organize across the company to bring the culture of the company more in line with their values.

With increasing dissatisfaction among big tech’s workforce, the Alphabet union suggests the unrest may be entering a new phase. “With each unionization in tech, the power shifts,” said CWA communications director Beth Allen.

Benefits of reshoring manufacturing

February 2, 2021 | Posted by unionwear

There are many reasons to set up, or reshore, your manufacturing in the USA. While patriotism is a great reason to set up shop here, business leaders know you need to make the business case to make it work..

It turns out there are some good reasons to do so. Here are just a few.

Control Over Products and Quality

By reshoring, businesses have more control over product quality. Offshoring means little to no oversight over manufacturing By offshoring you are losing quality control opportunities and faster communication..

Skilled Workforce

The United States has millions of highly skilled workers. Certainly non-Americans are smart as well, but the United States has long been a hotbed of ingenuity. We built the biggest economy the world has ever seen for a reason.

Streamlined logistics

When you offshore manufacturing, your products are regularly in transit. If you discover a problem with a batch upon arrival, you are stuck with a multi-week supply of products that have left the source and not yet arrived at your facility.If there is an undiscovered issue that was not found in manufacturing, you now have a minimum of six weeks of problems – including storing and reworking defective products, lost revenue due to the disruption and managing an influx of customer complaints. By manufacturing domestically these problems disappear overnight.

Available and Affordable Resources

With the up and rising practice of reshoring, resources have become available and affordable. Another factor that has led to this is the fact that the U.S. is a leader in oil production; thus, many costs of the manufacturing process have significantly decreased.

Avoiding complicated taxes and tariffs

When offshoring became fashionable about 25 years ago, most businesses were willing to simply absorb the tariff costs. Now with ongoing trade wars, taxes and tariffs, we are seeing the financial advantages of offshoring manufacturing evaporate before our eyes.

Intellectual property protection

Intellectual property protections in the United States are far superior to those found in many other parts of the world. By keeping your manufacturing at home, you are keeping close control over your valuable IP and are significantly reducing your risk of having it stolen. And if it is stolen, the US has a robust mechanism to protect your intellectual property.

There are more listed HERE.

Covid-19 pandemic is refueling interest in unions

January 21, 2021 | Posted by unionwear

(Summarized from Kaiser Health News and NPR. Kaiser Health News is a nonprofit news service covering health issues. It is an editorially independent program of Kaiser Family Foundation that is not affiliated with Kaiser Permanente.)

The Covid-19 pandemic has sparked renewed interest in unions.

In September, after six months of exhausting work battling the pandemic, nurses at Mission Hospital in Asheville, N.C., voted to unionize. The vote passed with 70%, a high margin of victory in a historically anti-union state, according to academic experts who study labor movements.

The nurses had originally filed paperwork to hold this vote in March but were forced to delay it when the pandemic began heating up. And the issues that had driven them toward unionizing were only heightened by the crisis. It raised new, urgent problems too, including struggles to get enough PPE, and inconsistent testing and notification of exposures to COVID-positive patients.

Research shows that health facilities with unions have better patient outcomes and are more likely to have inspections that can find and correct workplace hazards. One study found New York nursing homes with unionized workers had lower COVID-19 mortality rates, as well as better access to PPE and stronger infection control measures than nonunion facilities.

Even as union membership in most industries has declined in recent years, health workers unions have remained relatively stable: Around 7% of healthcare and social services workers are in unions Experts say it’s partly because of the focus on patient care issues, like safe staffing ratios, which resonate widely and have only grown during the pandemic.

Organized labor is not a panacea, union officials admit. Their members have faced PPE shortages and high infection rates throughout the pandemic, too. But collective action can help workers push for and achieve change, they said.

National Nurses United and the National Union of Healthcare Workers said they’ve each seen an influx in calls from nonmembers, but whether that results in more union elections is yet to be seen.

However, healthcare employers are known to launch aggressive and well-funded anti-union campaigns, said Rebecca Givan, a labor studies expert at Rutgers University. Still, workers might be more motivated by what they witnessed during the pandemic, she said

Here is the full article.

Chris Chapman, owner and president of JAM Image-Inc, joins us in this video to discuss his experience as a customer of Unionwear.

January 19, 2021 | Posted by unionwear

The impact of “Made in USA” on prices

January 12, 2021 | Posted by unionwear

Buying American is a symbol of personal identity and has been a focus over the years for US policymakers, including both the Obama and Trump administrations. This emphasis will continue with the Biden administration.

The common belief is that domestically manufactured products carry a hefty price tag. But what is the bottom line?

According to a study by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, the price premium ranges from 1.9% to 28%. The lower priced items tend to demand the highest premium as one would expect. This study was done prior to the implementation of tariffs on Chinese products, which range from 10% to 30%.

So in the current trade environment, assuming that the US continues to implement tariffs on Chinese products, it appears that the price tag premium is not as significant as one would imagine.

Are Americans willing to spend a little more to continue the revitalization of US manufacturing?

You can read the full study HERE

The top 10 supply chain innovations of 2020

January 5, 2021 | Posted by unionwear

Material Handling and Logistics, an organization dedicated to helping managers who oversee supply chain, logistics and material handling across America’s manufacturing, distribution and retail sectors, lists the top 10 supply chain innovations of 2020.

Innovations include: smart warehouses, a digitized food supply chain, new track and trace standards for container shipping, and much more.

Have a look at the link above for the full list and details.

#supplychain #manufacturing #madeinusa #americanmade #newyear

Unionwear awarded Top-Ten New Jersey Manufacturer

December 29, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

NJBiz Magazine rolled out its Manufacturing Power 50 and awarded Mitch Cahn and Unionwear among it’s top-ten manufacturers. 

It’s always great to be recognized for our hard work and determination. What makes this even more notable is that Unionwear is the only small business that made it to the top-ten list. In fact, we share the top-ten honors with huge firms like Goya, Merck, Johnson & Johnson, Novartis and more. 

With 175 unionized employees who earn a living wage and contribute to the community, we don’t necessarily see ourselves as underdogs. Rather, we are major players in helping reignite excitement about making made in USA a reality for manufacturers.

We are thrilled to be part of the list and are always looking to help others looking to set up shop here or reshore their operations stateside, especially in New Jersey.

Data Shows Reshoring is Creating Jobs Despite Pandemic

December 18, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

A study by American Machinist shows that from 2010 through 2019, over 900,000 announced new manufacturing jobs are attributable to reshoring and foreign direct investment (FDI.) 

During the current year 2020, job creation due to reshoring activity is exceeding FDI, adding that the same trend will continue to influence manufacturing growth and U.S. economic recovery in 2021.

Due to the pandemic, reshoring is outpacing FDI for the first time since 2014. “COVID uncertainty is causing companies to emphasize operations in their home countries.”

Also continuing to reshoring activity is U.S. manufacturers’ determination to shorten or close supply-chain gaps for essential products – which is a notable factor in PPE, medical, technology, and defense manufacturing.

We suspect this trend will continue and hope domestic manufacturers look to capitalize on these opportunities.

How Automation Accelerates Reshoring

December 15, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

A counterintuitive article in Assembly Magazine makes the argument that automation can accelerate reshoring. 

Those who are dedicated to bringing jobs back home sometimes shy away from automation. But that doesn’t have to be the case. In fact, embracing automation can accelerate reshoring jobs, at least to some extent. 

One of the main reasons companies moved overseas was because of the lower cost of labor for relatively mundane tasks. Now that automation is starting to replace the need for labor, companies are finding it more profitable to bring manufacturing back home while hiring more skilled workers. This mitigates risk, increases responsiveness to customer demand, and increases time to market. It also helps that these machines can’t get sick from Covid-19.

We at Unionwear have embraced automation and lean manufacturing for years and will continue to do so. We encourage other companies looking to reshore, or keep manufacturing close to home to do the same.

How reshoring saved a small business during the pandemic

December 10, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

In 2015, a sign making company called JennyGems launched in Millsboro, DE. JennyGems makes “little signs that say quirky things” and other home décor, employing seven people.

For about five years, all of their items were all made in China. When the pandemic hit they were still importing their items. But the pandemic ground all shipping to a halt. So they started manufacturing everything in the USA, using the machinery they just purchased. Almost overnight, 100% of their products are made in USA. 

Marketing themselves as made in America has been very good for them. “People are coming in saying they want to support us because we’re making our products here,” Jenny said. “We’re having other gift shops saying their customers don’t want imports so they want to wholesale our products in their stores.”

In fact, sales are up 50% online and 40% in-store compared to last year. They even bought more equipment and hired more employees to keep up with the demand, going from seven employees to 24.

The pandemic has accelerated a trend already underway, and stories like this prove that made in USA is not only possible but also profitable.

Reshoring Continues to Trend as Chinese Policies Put a Chill on Business Relations

December 8, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

According to this report from the Reshoring Initiative, reshoring manufacturing to the United States is on the rise. In fact, reshoring has outpaced foreign-direct investment (FDI) for the first time since 2014.

There are a couple of reasons for this reshoring. 

COVID-caused uncertainty is leading companies to prioritize operations in their home countries. According to the report, the national demand to shorten and close supply chain gaps for essential products to make the U.S. less vulnerable is most likely to benefit PPE, medical, tech, and defense manufacturers.

Another is ongoing trade tensions between the US and China. China has received widespread condemnation for unfair trade practices. Although their tactics will be different, President-elect Biden will also work toward leveling the trade imbalances between the US and China.

“We publish this data annually to show companies that their peers are successfully reshoring and that they should reevaluate their sourcing and siting decisions,” said Harry Moser, founder, and president of the Reshoring Initiative. “With 5 million manufacturing jobs still offshore, as measured by our $800 billion/year goods trade deficit, there is potential for much more growth.”

Alexandra Powley hired to head up Unionwear’s large contract division

December 2, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Monday, December 2, 2020

Newark, NJ –

Unionwear is pleased to announce that Alexandra Powley, the newest member of Unionwear’s executive team, will be heading up government contracts and corporate partnerships. 

“I am thrilled that Alexandra decided to join our team,” said Unionwear President Mitch Cahn. “She brings a wealth of knowledge and experience and I am confident that she will help us exceed our objectives.

“I am honored to join the team at Unionwear,” Powley said. “They are a solid operation with a top-notch team of experts, and I expect we will accomplish great things together.”

Previously, Powley built multi-million dollar partnerships with multiple branches of the US military, global airlines, and state procurement teams on behalf of Brooks Brothers.

About Unionwear

Unionwear manufactures hats, bags, portfolios, and binders for the “Made in USA” market, including every branch of the armed services, every Democratic candidate for president for the last 20 years, every international union, domestic manufacturers like GM and Budweiser, and brands such as Vineyard Vines and Supreme.  When the pandemic hit, Unionwear used its relationship with the health care workers’ union to transition to face shields and isolation gowns fast enough to have made a significant impact in the NYC hospital system’s ability to cope with the pandemic at its peak.

Unionwear, one of Newark’s largest private employers of Newark residents, won the SEAMS Domestic Textile Association’s inaugural ‘Reshoring Award” for bringing textile jobs back to America in 2019 and was named to Fortune Magazine’s Inner City 100 list. 

Contact

To learn more about this story, please contact:

Mitch Cahn

President, Unionwear

mitch@unionwear.com

A Reshoring Institute survey says Made in USA is popular. But does it drive sales?

November 13, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

A recent Reshoring Institute survey of  nearly 500 Americans asked if they prefer “Made in USA” products. According to the survey, nearly 70% of respondents prefer American-made products. And, slightly more than 83% said they would pay up to 20% more for products made domestically.

However, in my experience, what people say and what they do are frequently at odds. As I said in a previous post, there has to be another reason to buy in America that goes beyond where it is made.

For instance, if people believe the items are higher quality and will last longer, customers might be more inclined to pay a premium. Frankly, made in America is a secondary consideration.

For the most part, people want quality products at a reasonable price. They would not buy a made in USA product if it was perceived to be inferior quality, no matter where it was manufactured.

One big competitive advantage domestic manufacturers have is in the supply chain. We never worry about delayed shipments due to the pandemic or other unforeseen supply chain disruptions. We also have the advantage of addressing manufacturing challenges immediately, compared to those who have to deal with overseas suppliers.

So while made in USA is sometimes a marketing advantage — especially with political campaigns and government contracts — quality and consistency will be most buyer’s primary motivation to pay a small premium for domestically produced goods.

Great gift ideas that are made in USA

November 2, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

As the holiday season approaches, consumers are increasingly deluged with gift ideas. You could spend an eternity on Amazon alone searching for the perfect gift for your loved one. Where to begin?

We at Unionwear believe that it is important to buy made in USA. Although finding gifts that are made in America can be difficult, we found a resource that might make it easier for you.

From Wilson footballs to Crayola crayons to Weber grills to Airstream trailers, this website lists a wide variety of gift ideas from companies that are made right here in the USA.

Unionwear manufactures hats & caps, bags and winter knits that you can customize for the holidays, making them a perfect gift.

So, if you believe in supporting domestic manufacturing, you now have a resource at your disposal.

Rapid Robotics announces $5.5M seed funding to spark reshoring revolution

November 1, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Automation will probably play a big role in reshoring manufacturing and we need to embrace this reality rather than fight it.

Robotics automation company Rapid Robotics just received $5.5 million in funding to expedite manufacturing reshoring. Their machines are powered by a SaaS model and AI and are ready to perform manufacturing tasks out of the box for just $25,000 per year.

According to CEO Jordan Kretchmer, “The need to automate simple tasks is incredibly high, but the ability to do so has been out of reach for a vast majority of manufacturers. The Rapid Machine Operator is the first robotic solution to close that gap, making US manufacturers more competitive and supply chains more resilient.”

This highlights something I have been saying for a while: that companies will only reshore when it is profitable for them to do so. Perhaps machines like this will make it easier for companies to reshore manufacturing and use the cost savings to hire more skilled workers at higher wages. Automation like this will possibly cost jobs unless manufacturers use the productivity gains to retrain and redeploy their existing workforce.

Regardless, innovation and automation are here to stay and will only become more commonplace as time goes on. Domestic manufacturers need to recognize this reality and embrace the changes rather than resist them.

Unionwear enjoyed bipartisan support before made in USA was a thing

October 29, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Every so often, we come across a story that causes us to reflect on how far ahead of the curve Unionwear has always been when it comes to creating American jobs.

Recently, we came across a story from 2015 in Slate Magazine on how our 100% made in USA manufacturing facility has changed America’s presidential campaigns, and how every candidate has to buy made in America products. Democrats and Republicans both agree that good-paying American manufacturing jobs have been disappearing for decades and that bringing jobs back to the US needs to be a priority. And, since the pandemic, both parties agree that reshoring PPE and pharmaceuticals are an urgent national security issue, not just a campaign slogan.

Unionwear has been a unionized manufacturer since 1992, and we have always supported creating good-paying American manufacturing jobs. Let’s hope the politicians in Washington get to work bringing jobs +back to the US and not just using made in America as a once-every-four-years campaign slogan.

#govote #elections2020 #madeinusa #americanmade #promogoods

Plastics Today takes a fresh look at reshoring

October 20, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

The trade journal Plastics Today wrote an article discussing the possibilities, and challenges, associated with reshoring manufacturing to the United States.

First, a little background. Offshoring manufacturing to China became very popular since China was awarded Most Favored Nation trading status in the late-1990s under President Bill Clinton. Drawn to cheap labor and huge new market opportunities, companies rushed to offshore manufacturing to China and other parts of the world.

Although the promise of money savings and opening new markets was appealing, there were drawbacks. Chief among these was a lack of intellectual property enforcement. Chinese companies basically stole and reproduced American products in a way that would be unthinkable in the US. And, once Chinese manufacturers such as Haier took American knowledge, began making their own products and started exporting to the US, they became global competitors to those companies that offshored their manufacturing to expand their market share in the first place.

Early in the 2010s, the idea of reshoring to the US became more popular. But the choice isn’t binary: some companies are moving manufacturing from China to other Asian countries, where some are considering “nearshoring” to Mexico.

And then, as I have said in other blog posts, Covid completely upended supply chains, even products made in nearby Mexico. Shipments stopped coming from China, and much activity from Mexico was stopped for at least a couple of months. Suddenly, all of the benefits of offshoring disappeared and America found itself unable to get PPE or life-saving pharmaceuticals.

So now more than ever, reshoring looks attractive. But how feasible is it? Consumers might pay more for made in USA products — one survey from the Reshoring Institute said that consumers would be willing to pay up to 20% more for made in America products. But companies that decide to reshore need more than just higher prices; they need to invest in innovation and technology to make domestic production truly competitive.

How can we prevent future supply chain disruptions in the US

October 20, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Unionwear CEO Mitch Cahn had the opportunity to speak at New Jersey Manufacturing Day and discuss the recent global supply chain disruptions due to the COVID 19 pandemic.

When asked how we can prevent supply chain disruptions, Cahn said the pandemic exposed weaknesses in our global supply chain that we didn’t even know existed. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that future disruptions of unknown origin will likely expose additional weaknesses that we cannot even think about. 

On the plus side, those domestic manufacturers who managed to survive outsourcing and Amazon have proven to be very flexible. In fact, they learned so much during these tumultuous times that many manufacturers, including Unionwear, were making PPE in a matter of days even though they had zero knowledge of manufacturing such items before. For instance, Cahn said he had never heard of a face shield before the pandemic hit. But after getting specs, he was able to quickly assemble prototypes in less than two days. It was only a matter of repurposing items Unionwear already had — including foam from backpacks, plastic from binders, and headbands from hats — and turn them into useable face shields. 

To prevent supply chain disruptions, companies need to invest in domestic manufacturers. It is imperative to do so, as our national security continues to be at risk. To justify its cost, The Reshoring Institute created a formula that calculates the true cost of importing. These costs include:

• Travel
• Prototyping
• Shipping
• Time
• Lines of credit
• Delays
• Pirating
• Transportation problems
• Reputation cost

When taking these into account, importing oftentimes looks more expensive than domestic manufacturing. 

Ultimately, if the US government is serious about preventing future supply chain disruptions, American policymakers and regulators need to incentivize increased domestic manufacturing. Meanwhile, purchasers need to support these manufacturers by actually buying materials from them and not letting them go out of business. Although domestic manufacturers came to the rescue during COVID-19, we lost tens of thousands of lives because we didn’t have domestic-made PPE. This needs to be a major national priority.

Links:

NJMEP – Manufacturing Day 2020

NJMEP

US Senator files bill to strengthen Made in USA designation

October 17, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

US Senator Tammy Baldwin, Democrat from Wisconsin, reintroduced legislation that strengthens Buy American requirements for the federal government’s purchase of ships. It does this by expanding current law to cover all federal agencies, all classes of ships and more shipboard components.

The CEO of Fairbanks Morse, George Whittier, praised the bill. Fairbanks Morse is a US-based manufacturer of power systems for large contracts.

“The Senator’s proposed Made in America Shipbuilding Act will not only strengthen the defense industrial base by providing American-made components for U.S. taxpayer-funded ships,” Whittier said. It “will give American shipbuilding suppliers the confidence to invest capital and add high paying middle-class jobs.”

As of right now, the status of the bill is unknown. But it is good to see senior politicians are taking made in USA more seriously.

Made in USA is making a comeback, but the reasons go beyond marketing

October 9, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

A few years ago Adweek wrote an article explaining that made in America is no longer a pipe dream but is slowly becoming a reality. American factory jobs grew to 12.3 million by 2016. And, according to the nonprofit Reshoring Initiative, no fewer than 576,000 factory jobs have returned to America since 2010.

While carrying the made in USA label is a feel-good move for many consumers, businesses are wondering what it means for the bottom-line. Because it might feel good to say your products are made in America, that isn’t the main driver for the return of American manufacturing. It almost certainly doesn’t change buying habits.

Why are companies reshoring now? The reasons are varied and complex, ranging from growing labor costs in Asian countries to quality control. Rarely is the branding opportunity a factor. For better or worse, unless someone has a very strong incentive to buy made in USA products (such as political candidates or government contractors) where a product is manufactured rarely factors into a purchasing decision.

Bayard Winthrop, founder of American Giant, a brand that manufactures hoodies in North Carolina, says geographic proximity is what matters most. “There’s a huge benefit to being able to hop on a plane and talk to the people who are spinning my yarn and weaving my cloth,” says Winthrop, who’s based in San Francisco. Winthrop says Made in America marketing is an add-on, not a reason people buy. “I don’t believe consumers are willing to pay at the cash register for [American-made] things—I really don’t,” he says. “What consumers are willing to pay for is great brands and great quality.”

According to the Adweek article, the vast majority of people are not going to pay a much higher price for made in America. One of the main reasons they make everything domestically is quality control. Indeed, according to David Hamilton, fourth-generation owner of Hamilton Shirts, domestic manufacturing is essential for quality control. Hamilton’s shirts start at $265, and many of them are made to order. Production of a luxury product like that cannot be trusted to something being made halfway around the world. “If I’m on the phone with a customer [who has an issue],” he says, “I can walk into the factory and research the problem and resolve it.”

The same thing goes for large brands. 3M’s Post-it barely mentions that their sticky notes have been made in Kentucky for the last 33 years. Why? Distribution. An American plant is both closer to pulp suppliers and to retailers. “It’s a shorter supply chain,” explains global business manager Adrienne Hovland. Made in America is “not one of those key messages we use,” she says. “We have a lot of other things that are compelling to communicate.”

It’s worth noting that the Adweek article was written before the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted global supply chains. I imagine we will see major reshoring in the coming years because of the issues described in this article as well as government mandates. But companies will not reshore manufacturing to enhance their branding, even though that might be an added benefit.

At the end of the day, made in America isn’t a huge driver for reshoring manufacturing. Quality control, supply chain management and holding people accountable for customer service challenges are major reasons for bringing jobs back home.

Union Made Stock Blank Hats

October 7, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Due to popular demand for rush orders and small orders of our union made in USA baseball caps, Unionwear is now offering a stock program to our advertising specialty resellers. Orders ship in 24 hours with minimum orders of one dozen blanks.

While we still offer thousands of made to order styles, we selected our best selling eight styles of union made in USA baseball hats for rush and under minimum orders, and we are committed to keeping several thousand in stock.  These include solid-colored blank hats in navy, black, red, and putty (like a “stone”).  All four colors come in both 100% cotton low style structured with a Velcro closure and 100% cotton unstructured with a tri-glide closure.  All hats have a woven American flag label on the back strap.

Unionwear still embroiders in-house on thousands of different made to order styles, and we can embroider these stock hats too.

Did you know that “union made in USA” can be more affordable than just “made in USA”?  How? Why? Check back here for a future blog post.

These blank hats can be ordered from Unionwear’s promotional product distributors, who can also handle the decoration if it is not done by Unionwear.

We don’t have this info up on our website yet but you can download a white-label, Client-Safe sell sheet HERE

Distributors please email PPESales@unionwear.com, call 973 497-0102, or fill out this FORM to resell.

Unionwear embroidering Biden Harris hats

September 28, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Unionwear continues to make political merchandise for candidates covering the entire political spectrum. We’ve expanded production to ensure that “Made in USA” and the reshoring of the supply chain to the United States are available to the growing number of buyers who recognize how critical domestic manufacturing is to our economy.

The short video in this blog post shows our factory embroidering the front “panels” of the Biden Harris hats. One of the advantages of manufacturing here is we can embroider cut parts flat, which enable us to duplicate logos perfectly with embroidery.

Remember to vote!

US-based trucking company reshoring majority of its manufacturing

September 24, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Writing for Industry Week magazine, Dan Burrows, CEO of Xtream Trucking, explains why he is reshoring a majority of its manufacturing back to the United States.

Like many others, one big reason for their decision to re-shore is profitability. The 2018 trade war between the US and China highlighted the fact that small disruptions outside their control could have a huge impact on running their business. Furthermore, many of their customers are in North America. International freight creates extra steps, including unpacking and inspecting for damage. If parts are damaged, they must powder coat for the shipping damage, repack, and ship again. With a domestic supply chain, they also can eliminate unexpected delays due to clearance at ports.

They are even saving money by bringing manufacturing back. They trimmed costs by about 20% and cut lead time from 8 weeks to 4 weeks on their aluminum mount system. And, they had a 10% reduction in costs and a reduction in lead time from 8 weeks to 5 weeks for their paneling system.

Then, of course, the pandemic hit, throwing supply chains into disarray. The benefits of having no supply chain disruptions have been huge.

Reshoring has become a popular trend in the past 5-8 years. However, companies like Xtream Trucking will only re-shore when the costs of offshoring outweigh the benefits. I think this trend will continue as further supply chain problems arise.

What will business look like when the COVID-19 crisis ends?

September 21, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

The entrepreneurial mindset means there is never returning back-to-normal. Our business will definitely change from pre-crisis to post-crisis. With any luck, we will be better than before. At the moment it seems we will go back to our original business while keeping PPE business, depending on demand and other factors. 

Regardless, there will be vastly increased demand for Made in USA products.

One of the main advantages is that we are making reusable materials that are actually cheaper than the disposable items made overseas. This is good for everyone. It increases domestic jobs. It protects our environment since we aren’t filling up our landfills. And, our customers are saving money on purchases while getting high-quality, reusable merchandise. Literally everybody wins. Including us.

Mitch of Unionwear discusses this topic and more in this video interview.

How Unionwear stays competitive in a high labor cost environment

September 16, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Will some iPhones be made in America? Possibly, maybe, someday

September 11, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Back in 2016, PocketNow, an online website focused on all-things portable tech, reported that Foxconn was considering opening factories in the USA. Thus far, the result has not panned out as our leaders wanted.

A little background: Foxconn is an electronics contract manufacturer with headquarters in Taiwan. It is the world’s largest provider of electronics manufacturing services and the third-largest technology company by revenue. They are also one of the largest employers worldwide with over one million employees. Foxconn’s consideration to open factories in the USA was not motivated by patriotism or even marketing. Rather, like most businesses, their decision was motivated by politics and economics.

Unfortunately, as of late-October 2020, Foxconn’s promise to open American factories has not panned out. And the whole project has turned into a surreal battle for tax cuts and a blame game in Wisconsin. A great quote from this articleillustrates how weird the situation has gotten: “As the divisions bickered, bored employees would come down from the Milwaukee headquarters to race the carts around the empty building, until the batteries finally died.” For their part, Foxconn disputed the report’s claim that the company hired employees only to achieve tax incentives.

This story highlights the challenges associated with reshoring. There needs to be a strategic and business reason to do so, such as better quality control, saving money on shipping costs, and avoiding supply chain disruptions.

Companies like Apple have to factor in all the costs and benefits to see if it makes sense to manufacture domestically, otherwise the initiative will likely fail. Tax breaks cannot be the only reason to do so.

Union Made Logo Face Shields

September 2, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

On March 24, Unionwear made a rapid transition from accessories to manufacturing face shields and has made over half a million face shields for state governments in response to the pandemic.

Our face shields are sturdier than most, using the high quality elastic we use in stretchfit hats, sturdy foam we use in backpack straps, and a 17 mil PET-A for the clear shield.  Using the hot stamping we normally use in our portfolio business we are able to apply a one color imprint anywhere you would like on the shield.

Face shields are the choice PPE for essential workers working in a loud, outdoor environments—such as construction, transportation, manufacturing, and education–because they provide virus protection without inhibiting communication.   They are also preferred when working in close proximity to clients, such as salons, physical therapy, and dentistry.

These shields are Union Made in USA and are available with a very rapid turnaround time.

All our face shields are available from Unionwear’s promo products distributors.

Download a white label, Client-Safe sell sheet here.

Distributors please email PPESales@unionwear.com, call 973 497-0102, or fill out this form to resell.

Union Made Face Masks for Labor Day

August 12, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Just in time for Labor Day and Election Day, Unionwear introduces a broad selection of face masks that are union made and union printed in USA with a removable union label.

Choose between larger imprint areas or more contoured shapes

Unionwear has three shapes to choose from—a rounded front with a perfect fit for breathability and comfort, a flat front for a full-bleed, full-color sublimation print, or a pleated flat front that combines the best of both.

Brushed 100% 7-ounce cotton twill.

All of our masks are made from high quality woven fabrics-not knits.  Heavy but soft, this woven fabric provides up to 10 times the droplet blockage of porous t-shirt or handkerchief materials, while withstanding hundreds of home washings. Unionwear presently stocks this fabric in 24 colors.

Pick the right mask for your budget.

Unionwear offers quality levels from blank, flat singly ply masks with elastic earloops to full-color prints on a contoured face mask with adjustable pull-through ear loops and a second ply with filter pocket.  All union made in USA.

All our face shields are available from Unionwear’s promo products distributors.

Download a white label, Client-Safe sell sheet HERE.

Distributors please email PPESales@unionwear.com, call 973 497-0102, or fill out this form to resell.

Why Unionwear embraces unions

August 10, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

The company was purchased in 1992 with a fully-unionized workforce. Early on, and for largely idealistic reasons, we decided to keep the workforce unionized, because we believed that people should benefit from their hard work. We quickly figured out that working with the union was to our benefit.

When we first bought the company, our number one customers were labor unions, so we changed our name to Unionwear. To expand our customer base we dipped our toes into manufacturing fashionable baseball caps and hemp hats back in the early 1990s, long before they were cool or popular. 

But then, around the year 2000, presidential campaigns started buying our hats as well. That’s when things really took off for us. Because it doesn’t look good when politicians talk about creating American jobs while buying hats from overseas. 

For this and many other reasons, having a unionized workforce has been a strategic advantage for us. As you will see in later posts, it literally saved our business during the Covid-19 pandemic.

How unions help our employees and our company

In a lot of ways, government mandates have minimized the need for unions. The minimum wage is increasing incrementally for starters. Even more, companies with over 50 employees are now required to offer health insurance benefits and PTO (paid time off.)

For us, it has been much easier to deal with unions rather than negotiate with 180 employees individually for benefits. And, it is much less expensive to offer health insurance through a union which can use its bargaining power to bring those costs down.

And there are other advantages to working with a union. Having a unionized workforce brings in significant political and government business, especially for portfolios and tote bags. Most government employees are union members, which gives us a leg-up in securing government contracts. In fact, that represents 30% – 40% of our business.

So, although there are some disadvantages to working with a union, we have turned it into an advantage. We planned on treating our employees well anyway, so we have a good, rather than adversarial, relationship with them. It brought down costs in some areas. And it led to a lot of new business

See the interview here:

ACG: Unionwear Draws on Manufacturers’ ‘Secret Power’

August 6, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

ACG New Jersey earlier this year named Unionwear a winner of its Corporate Growth Award. Mitch Cahn, CEO of Unionwear, recently spoke with ACG Global CEO Tom Bohn for a video on GrowthTV about how Unionwear won ACG New Jersey’s award, the ways the company has pivoted since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, and why presidential campaigns across the political spectrum order Unionwear products.

What led up to Unionwear winning ACG New Jersey’s Corporate Growth Award?

What has Unionwear done to pivot during this crisis?

How was Unionwear able to keep operations running while also protecting workers?

Unionwear makes all of its products here in the U.S., but one would imagine that the supply chain has to be global. How has that held up through all of this?

See the full article HERE

How does Unionwear compete with China? By changing the game

August 5, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Many people ask, “Mitch, how does Unionwear — a unionized manufacturer in Newark, NJ compete with China? Your real estate and labor costs are among the highest in the world.”

The fact is, Unionwear cannot compete with China on cost. In fact, Unionwear is the most expensive manufacturer in the world for their product categories. 

So they changed the game.

Instead, Unionwear competes on value.

There are a lot of misconceptions about competing on value. Here, Unionwear CEO Mitch Cahn clarifies what it means to compete on value.

1. Manufacturers cannot create value with work in process, because parts have no value until clients are willing to pay for them.

2. Manufacturers cannot create value by cutting labor costs. If manufacturers cut labor costs with lean manufacturing but do not redeploy that labor to another task, there is no value created. 

3. Manufacturers cannot create value by focusing on profits. Using productivity as a tool to increase profits is the other side of the labor cost equation, and a NJ-based manufacturer cannot compete on labor.

4. Manufacturers cannot create value by having people work faster. If they are working fast without adding value to the product, they are destroying value. 

Manufacturers only create value when their finished product sells for more than it cost to manufacture. Otherwise, you are not creating value, but are just moving it around.

This is the game Unionwear plays: knowing what it means to add value and focusing on that instead of decreased costs.

Discussion from 2:58 – 4:56:

Face Shields Engineered for Daily Re-Use

July 28, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Face masks hinder workplace communication and don’t protect the eyes or provide a liquid barrier.  So why aren’t clear face shields ubiquitous?  Because the traditional “foam + elastic + clear sheet” face shield was designed as disposable splash protection for surgery–not every-day use.

We’ve reimagined the Face Shield to be something comfortable and truly reusable.

Unionwear is the leading domestic manufacturer of baseball caps. Our products sit comfortably on heads all day, every day. And we’ve been making traditional face shields since NYC’s quarantine started, continuously upgrading our product based on client feedback. We are now launching the Replaceable Universal Face Shield (the “RUF Shield”). Features:

No Foam: Foam is why traditional face shields are disposable.  You can sanitize the clear shield but how do you clean spongy foam that’s been pressed up against a sweaty forehead? You can’t.  We use a black cotton baseball cap sweatband, removable for washing.

No Bulk:  Traditional face shields are bulky. Bulky to ship—especially with FedEx and UPS new penalties for dimensional weight, bulky to store, even bulky to dispose of. The RUF Shield ships disassembled, flat.

No Latex: Latex sensitivity and allergy affect a sizable portion of the population, and due to skyrocketing demand for elastic for masks and shields nearly all available elastic right now contains latex.

No Sizes: Elastic face shields are not one size fits all, which means you need to order in sizes-but who knows his or her face shield size? Unknown size ranges require excess inventory.

No Scratches:  All of our fronts are protected with film—made possible because the shield is not attached until it is ready to be worn. Without this protection PET is bound to scratch during shipping or handling.

The clear shields are sold by Unionwear’s promo products distributors with an MSRP of $1.45 (s) each. The plastic visor/cotton headband that holds the shields are $3.50 (s) each.  Case size is 100 units.

Download a white label, Client-Safe sell sheet here.

Distributors please email PPESales@unionwear.com, call 973-497-0102, or fill out this form to resell.

You can also purchase retail online from RUFshield.com.

Unionwear was featured on CNBC’s “The Profit”

July 27, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Marcus Lemonis is a business turnaround expert who hosts “The Profit” on CNBC. This show highlights businesses that are struggling, and Lemonis tries to help them on the path to profitability. He digs in to identify what is right, what is wrong and recommends improvements. 

In this episode, he visits a New Orleans-based sewing manufacturer called Queork, which makes a wide variety of items made from cork. The business is truly unique but they are struggling with profitability.

Upon inspection of Queork’s facilities, Lemonis realizes the facility is horribly organized, as there is effectively no manufacturing process in place. The lack of process and procedure is costing them a lot in profitability and inhibits their ability to scale.

To find out what they could do better, Lemonis takes them to Unionwear in Newark, NJ to show them how it’s done. There, they meet Unionwear CEO Mitch Cahn who walks them through how efficient processes can dramatically increase their profitability and item quality. Cahn explains that, by implementing manufacturing processes, Unionwear reduced excess labor costs from three hours to about 15 minutes, just looking for thread. By implementing similar changes across their organization, Unionwear has been able to dramatically increase output quality and profitability, even though they are a union shop located in Newark, NJ.

Upon re-evaluation of Queork, Lemonis learns that they moved their facility to a much better-organized space, allowing them to increase production and profitability. Thanks in large part to Unionwear’s example, everyone now knows US-based manufacturers such as Queork can succeed in a challenging domestic manufacturing environment.

Unionwear Maintains a Competitive Edge: American Textile Manufacturer Thrives in New Jersey

July 20, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Unionwear, an American apparel manufacturer based in New Jersey, celebrates the company’s effort to implement lean manufacturing. Founded in 1992, today they employ 175 people. Mitch Cahn, president, and CEO uses his business as an example of why New Jersey is an ideal place to manufacture.

One reason Unionwear can remain incredibly competitive in New Jersey is its willingness to integrate best practices in order to create an efficient and productive manufacturing environment. Lean manufacturing is a strategy aimed at eliminating waste from production by applying process- es and procedures that have a dramatic impact on the efficiency, effectiveness, and profitability of the company. Lean manufacturing utilizes many “common sense” strategies that might at first sound easy to put into action.  However, creating a truly lean manufacturing operation can present challenges, and these processes and procedures are often difficult to maintain over time. There is a clear distinction between understanding the concepts of lean and implementing it on the shop floor.

“We had been struggling to implement lean manufacturing constantly for the last 12 years and it’s a struggle because lean flies in the face of human nature,” said Cahn, the company’s president, and CEO. “The key principles to wrap your head around are reducing waste. Before we started lean manufacturing [employees] were spending 30 minutes working for every hat produced. They are now sending five minutes to produce a hat.”

Lean manufacturing is centered around the idea of creating more efficient processes, working smarter not harder, and eliminating waste in all its forms. Cahn identified that employees were spending too much time searching for fabrics. If Unionwear was able to reduce the time it took to find the correct materials for one employee by 5 seconds, and that employee repeats that process 10 times a day, that could equate to just about three and a half extra hours that one employee can spend on production per year. Scale that up to an entire facility employing 175 individuals and the ROI is undeniable.

Additionally, Unionwear began to focus on “Made in USA” branding. This proved to be a major selling point for American companies and Cahn was confident people were willing to pay a premium for ‘Made in USA’ products. He stated, “We do not have to be as inexpensive as goods made in China. We just need to be in the ballpark,” They are able to maintain a competitive price point due to their implementation of lean as well as through a comprehensive grasp of proper supply chain management and computer automation.

“We want stuff coming right off the truck and going into a product and then we want that product coming right off the production line and being shipped to a customer. That reduces our expenses of keeping inventory and storing inventory.” – Mitch Cahn

Cahn sits on the board of directors for NJMEP, a chairman of the Newark Workforce Development Board, and a director of the Newark Regional Business Partnership. He is a champion of New Jersey manufacturing and insists the state offers an incredible environment for manufacturing because of its workforce, access to ports, and its manufacturing infrastructure.

His impression of New Jersey manufacturing comes from years of experience in the sector and state. Cahn’s success is a testament to his leadership, the ability to implement lean, and brand his products as “Made in USA”.

Unionwear worked with NJMEP to develop a comprehensive lean manufacturing plan and to put it into practice. NJMEP’s lean manufacturing services are designed to make implementing this proven and effective business strategy manageable for a business of any size. For more information on lean manufacturing services, contact NJMEP and begin taking advantage of all the resources, support and experience available.

Market forces are driving the resurgence of Made in the USA

July 16, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Although many factors have contributed to the manufacturing returning to the USA, the main driver is what drives most decisions: money. A mere 10 years ago, items made in the USA would have cost 200% more than items made in China. Now, it’s down to 25%.

There are two major reasons why this is happening:

Labor cost: not long ago, China faced an overpopulation crisis. In response, they set out on a  One-Child Policy. Because of this, there are now fewer people entering the workforce. And, those people who are entering the workforce want to work for Apple, not work in factories. This shortage of labor has driven up wages.

Politics: the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen, China employs 1 million people, making tons of American goods. A series of investigations found horrific labor violations. As a consequence, employees received two, back-to-back 40% wage increases over two years. They also reduced the number of hours worked from 100 to 60, leading to 25% – 30% wage inflation year over year. At first, Foxconn and other factories responded by cutting corners, leading to many product failures, such as poisoned pet food, thus increasing expenses anyway. Companies tried moving out of China to “cheaper” places like Bangladesh, but those countries didn’t have the infrastructure, raising prices even more.

So, when you factor in shipping and other associated costs, the economic benefits to overseas manufacturing has all-but evaporated, leading to a resurgence of domestic manufacturing.

The Joe Biden campaign is using Unionwear branded hats

July 13, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

We are the primary brand chosen by political campaigns.  Here are the details:

“JOE” on Navy, 100% cotton baseball cap with size-adjustable back strap.
Purchase is a donation to Biden Victory Fund.
Orders ship within 10 days.
Union Made and Made-In-USA.

To view and purchase, please click HERE

Manufacturing needs to embrace innovation, especially during a pandemic

July 6, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

In 2018, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made this very insightful remark at Davos: “The pace of change has never been this fast, and it will never be this slow again.”

While this holds true in normal times, it is especially true in the middle of a pandemic.

COVID-19 has upended a whole host of sectors, including the entire hospitality industry, live events, and most industries which require person-to-person contact, such as beauty parlors and hair dressers.

Meanwhile, other sectors have never been busier. Those firms which enable working from home such as Zoom, and home delivery services like Amazon, have seen their valuations skyrocket.

One overlooked sector, of course, is manufacturing. Because things still need to be manufactured, manufacturers must innovate to stay alive in an industry that is constantly changing. For instance, how do manufacturing employees work from home? Is that even a viable option when making physical products? Do these firms have the right technology in place to maintain productivity and profitability?

The answer is, sometimes yes, and sometimes no. Over five years ago, Unionwear embraced new technologies such as cloud mobile ERP and MRP, which made our work significantly more productive, so we were more prepared than others. We figured out how to have a number of manufacturing employees working from home while COVID was at its peak so we could avoid production disruptions. We innovated and developed a full line of PPE products in a matter of weeks. And we came up with innovative ways to avoid disruptions to our supply chain.

For me, there are two big lessons to learn from this. One, manufacturers who embrace innovation will stay in business in the short-run and become more profitable and efficient in the long-run. Two, there is a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurs to assist manufacturers in embracing innovation, both from a consulting side and deploying hardware and software solutions.

We are in the middle of unprecedented challenges and an equal number of opportunities. If manufacturers want to stay profitable in the long-run, they must embrace innovation.

Unions who embrace lean manufacturing improve job security

July 2, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

In 2013 APICS of Greater North Jersey hosted Unionwear CEO Mitch Cahn to talk about his lean manufacturing journey. According to their website, APICS is “the industry leader in supply chain certification, training and networking. For more than 60 years, APICS has provided world-class supply chain training and certification to foster supply chain talent and improve end-to-end performance.”

Mitch has been living and breathing lean principles for years now.  Indeed, in this video Cahn says, “I didn’t support the lean program, I was the lean program.” 

Running a profitable manufacturing firm in New Jersey with unionized staff is a daily challenge. One of the keys to Unionwear’s survival and success has been to embrace lean manufacturing. In fact, without lean manufacturing, they would not be able to afford union labor. Even though well-paid employees are expensive, happy employees stay longer and embrace lean manufacturing because they want the company to succeed.

From Baseball Hats to Face Shields & Isolation Gowns

June 24, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

As one of the few remaining manufacturers in the US, Mitch Cahn & Unionwear is trying to fill the void left by all of the cost-cutting, outsourcing companies that have contributed to our crippled supply chain for lifesaving healthcare products, including personal protection equipment. They have turned a factory that was gearing up to make baseball hats for the Olympics, the US Census, and presidential campaigns into a facility making face shields & isolation gowns for frontline healthcare workers.

source: The Righteous Capitalists

NJBIZ: Manufacturers grateful for federal help, worried about the future

June 22, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

A group of business owners and executives told state legislators June 10 that federal loans provided crucial assistance in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown, but said they are worried about the state’s business climate and what will happen when the funds run out if the economy does not recover quickly.

“I pushed the button to upload my documents one second after the loans were available,” said Gary Fails, the president of Carlstadt-based City Theatrical Inc. “We were among the first companies to get funding.”

The loans enabled the company to retain all of its employees, but, he noted “as one of the first companies to get funding, we’re also one of the first companies to have the funds run out.” City Theatrical produces lighting products and accessories for live events, a business that is unlikely to return this year. “Broadway shut down and our business disappeared and our sales dropped by 90 percent, Fails said.

Fails’ comments, along with those of other owners and executives, came during an online hearing convened by the bipartisan state Legislative Manufacturing Caucus and the New Jersey Manufacturing Extension program.

While some executives described problems getting loans from the federal Paycheck Protection Program they were eventually resolved and allowed them to keep employees on staff.

Newark-based UnionWear usually makes promotional hats and other apparel, but pivoted to producing personal protection equipment when the COVID-19 outbreak hit. “In early March, we were about to have our greatest year ever,” said company President Mitch Cahn. UnionWear had orders to make products for presidential election campaigns and for Olympic athletes.

The PPP loans, Cahn said, allowed him to offer hazard pay to workers. He was able to offer a “significant bonus to convince people to come back to work.”

When a worker at Newark-based ZaGo Manufacturing Co. contracted COVID-19, the company was able to allow him and everyone he had contact with to be away from work for a month, thanks to PPP funds. “Our employees knew that that if they were exposed, they wouldn’t be hurt economically,” explained Gail Friedberg Rottenstrich, ZaGo’s CEO. The company makes self-sealing screws, nuts and bolts.

Cahn also raised an issue that many of his peers echoed: the regulatory environment in New Jersey. He said UnionWear did not get any orders from New Jersey for its PPE because the state did not override the need for approval from the Food and Drug Administration, an action other jurisdictions have taken. “We work with Detroit and Los Angeles, but nothing locally,” Cahn said.

Several lawmakers on the call, including Manufacturing Caucus co-chair Sen. Linda Greenstein, D-14th District, vowed that the Legislature would examine the issue.

Social distancing rules could also pose problems in a state where expanding structures can often be expensive and time-consuming. Marotta Controls CEO Patrick Marotta, told the lawmakers that in preparing his most recent budget, he planned to squeeze more employees into the company’s existing space. “That’s completely out the window,” he said.

The Montville-based maker of electronic components for the military owns 25 acres of land, but cannot add another building because of Highlands Council rules. So Marotta is trying to find a second location and is “looking at New Jersey restrictions as opposed to restrictions in other states.”

While the participants in the call generally praised the government response to the pandemic, many are concerned about what the recovery might look like. As Dax Strohmeyer, president of Triangle Manufacturing Co. Inc., put it: “If the demand isn’t there, it doesn’t matter if you can stay open.” The Upper Saddle River-based company is a contract manufacturer of medical devices and its business was hurt by the prohibition on elective surgical procedures imposed in March. Gov. Phil Murphy ended the ban effective May 26, though some limitations remain in place.

Strohmeyer is concerned that when his PPP funds are exhausted, he may be “in the tough position of furloughing and laying off people to realign our costs and revenue.” He added that when demand does return, he won’t easily be able to bring qualified workers back.

All of the owners and executives heaped praise on the NJMEP and CEO John Kennedy for providing essential guidance on reopening and interpretation of government mandates.

Source:  NJBIZ.com

Unionwear is the merchandise provider of choice for Trump, Biden and others

June 19, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Unionwear in Newark, NJ made hats for the Warren, Bloomberg and Trump campaigns. Mitch Cahn, CEO of Unionwear, has been overflowing with orders of merch. Before the Coronavirus pandemic, the factory had been making election swag for both parties since 1992.

“I want to make sure that people have a way to speak freely and use our products to get their messages across,” said Cahn. “Some will appeal to young people, some will appeal to women, some will appeal to old white men.”

Before the Coronavirus hit, Unionwear was making between 2000-3000 hats in a single day. The factory orders usually come from agencies working with campaigns or candidate-supporting groups. That’s because political campaigns often want to hire US-based businesses for their merch.

The 2016 election was also a busy season.

Cahn continues: “The one time we saw a very surprising spike was with the original ‘Make America Great Again’ hat. The demand overwhelmed the supply. There are only a handful of factories [that could produce these] in the United States working on that hat for Trump.”

This sort of swag often doubles as campaign contributions, and it adds up. The Trump campaign sold more than $20m worth of merchandise between 2016 and 2018. 

But not all campaigns make money on merch. Mike Bloomberg did not make money on his hats. He funded his run out of his own pocket.

Political swag is as old as the Presidency itself. Buttons bearing George Washington’s initials were sold at his first inauguration in 1789. But the business really took off in the mid-90s, when Mitch was just getting started.

“When the Internet came around and e-commerce became more viable, we got into the political market in a big way,” Cahn commented. But it wasn’t always easy. “All of our clients had moved overseas. And then we were left with a baseball hat factory and a lot of employees, and not a lot of places to get business from.”

Mitch had to transform the company, but he didn’t have to look far. He began selling to unions, who were looking to buy from Unionized businesses like his. He also began selling to military agencies, some of which are required to buy US-made goods.

Then came the political campaigns.

“The first order we got was a small order for the Bill Clinton campaign and was maybe 150 hats. Our first big break was with the Al Gore campaign [in 2000.] We sold probably more hats than we ever sold for any one particular client before. It was probably 200,000 hats overall.”

But having lots of swag may not translate into lots of votes, especially in 2020.

“The candidate that ordered the largest amount dropped out of the race early, Andrew Yang. That was definitely the most hats we’ve sold in this election cycle.” 

Yang’s campaign sold more than 30,000 “Make Americans Think Harder” hats, which made up about $1.2 million of campaign revenue and are still for sale on his website.

And, what does Unionwear do with its merchandise once a candidate drops out?

“We have this down to a science. We are producing in small batches. Someone would have to drop out unexpectedly for us to get stuck with anything.”

Business Insider: Presidential candidates buy hats from Unionwear for three primary reasons

June 17, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Before the Covid-19 crisis, Unionwear CEO Mitch Cahn spent the past 28 years supplying hats to a wide variety of clients. Being one of the only unionized, domestic manufacturers of hats and other items, Mitch has found a significant advantage in providing swag to organizations that purchase products that are made in the USA. These groups include labor unions, some military organizations, and especially Presidential campaigns. 

Presidential candidates buy hats from Unionwear for three primary reasons:

1- Candidates are eager to show off their commitment to American job creation

2- Some candidates, such as Donald Trump and Andrew Yang, earn a profit off of selling their hats, providing much-needed financing to their campaigns

3- Unionwear’s prices are not significantly higher than those made overseas, thanks to their commitment to lean manufacturing and just-in-time ordering. This also means there are almost never leftover hats, even if a candidate drops out of the race suddenly

How did Unionwear get started selling merchandise to candidates as diverse as Al Gore, Donald Trump, Mike Bloomberg, and Andrew Yang?

After making a whopping 150 hats to Bill Clinton’s re-election campaign, their big break came from Al Gore’s 2000 presidential run, where he sold an estimated 200,000 hats. He has made hats for nearly every presidential candidate since.

“The candidate that ordered the largest amount dropped out of the [2020] race early, Andrew Yang. That was definitely the most hats we’ve sold in this election cycle,” said Cahn. 

Yang’s campaign sold more than 30,000 “Make Americans Think Harder” hats, which made up about $1.2 million of campaign revenue and are still for sale on his website.

“I want to make sure that people have a way to speak freely and use our products to get their messages across. Some will appeal to young people, some will appeal to women, some will appeal to old white men,” Cahn said.

Although currently manufacturing face shields and washable gowns for first responders, Unionwear is still taking orders for hats and other apparel. This crisis won’t last forever, but Unionwear plans on being around for a long time afterward.

Mitch Cahn, President of Unionwear, on Lean and Pivoting to Shields & Gowns

June 16, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Mitch tells us how, a month ago, orders for political campaign hats and items evaporated as the Democratic presidential field consolidated. So, Unionwear needed to pivot and they started calling hospitals to find out how they might be able to help by making personal protective equipment (PPE) to help in the Covid-19 crisis.

Read more here

2020 vision: Candidates who want ‘Made in USA’ hats can call Unionwear — but there’s more to business than slogans

June 15, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

No matter whose team you’re on, there’s money to be made in presidential campaign-branded baseball caps — epitomized by those red “Make America Great Again” hats.

And Unionwear is one of the few companies in the running for that profit.

Mitch Cahn, president of the 180-person manufacturing team in Newark, says there are not a lot of textile products such as hats being made in the United States in general today — most of the work has gone to China or other emerging economies. 

But, certain customers need to send the right message by choosing U.S. manufacturers for merchandise. That includes any would-be commander-in-chief.

Read more here

Rootstock: Unionwear Switches to Manufacturing PPE in the Fight against COVID-19

June 15, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Under normal circumstances, Unionwear is the leading manufacturer of union, made-in-USA headwear, bags, accessories, work wear and safety gear. 2020 was shaping up to be a great year for the New Jersey-based company – between the presidential campaign, the Olympics, the US Census and other events, Unionwear’s employees would be busy all year.

But when the Democratic presidential campaign abruptly ended and the coronavirus pandemic arrived, circumstances became anything but normal.

“A lot of our jobs were canceled,” says Mitch Cahn, Unionwear President. “We do a lot of event merchandise, and a lot of events were canceled and some of our military projects were scaled back to make funds available for emergency relief.”

Like many companies coping with the challenge of operating with mandated social distancing amid sharply reduced economic activity, Unionwear quickly went from trying to keep up with orders while working at full capacity to not having much to do at all. The company cut their staff, sent workers home and tried to figure out how to succeed in a world changed by COVID-19.

Then they decided that they needed to come up with a new business model to carry them through the crisis.

The pandemic created a huge demand for personal protection equipment (PPE) to keep front-line health care workers, law enforcement and essential employees safe. Unionwear not only wanted to shift production to keep operating but also to make a difference.

Read more here

ACG Global: Mitch Cahn discusses winning ACG New Jersey’s Corporate Growth Award

June 10, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

In the latest installment of ACG Global’s At Home with the Middle Market, Unionwear’s President, Mitch Cahn, discusses why Unionwear won ACG New Jersey’s Corporate Growth Award (1:15) and their experience being a union shop (2:55).

Mitch explains how Unionwear was able to participate in the PPP due to some assistance from the Newark Mayor and Invest Newark (9:48), how they’re able to grow by purchasing the assets of bankrupt textile businesses (11:32), and more.

NJ.com: Unionwear, Workers United team up to produce PPE for coronavirus first responders

June 9, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

A healthy relationship between company and union has been the driving force in getting health care providers more and more personal protective equipment when it is needed most.

Unionwear, a Newark-based company that is known for its production of hats, backpacks and binders, has quickly shifted its focus to creating face shields and surgical gowns.

Workers United has been reaching out to companies who could provide needs for those on the front lines in combatting the coronavirus, ensuring their employees are still working.

In uncertain times, it was a perfect match.

Please read more here

njpac: The New Home Front: Newark Manufacturers Innovate to Fight Covid-19

June 8, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Mitch Cahn of Unionwear was featured in a new series called NJPAC Business Partners @ Home.  These interviews will offer virtual conversations with executives leading their businesses in creative, effective and useful ways in the fight against the pandemic.

The first video conversation features three Newark business leaders who’ve rapidly pivoted from producing their traditional wares to manufacturing the vital materials—masks, sanitizer, medical face shields, isolation gowns—needed by front-line medical workers.

To learn more, please visit here

The Athletic: How a Newark factory that was going to make U.S. Olympic hats is now making PPE

June 8, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Mitch Cahn saw his entire summer’s worth of production laid out. His shop was going to produce hats for the U.S. Olympic team, manufacturing the line that organization would wear and sell. It was already manufacturing hats for all of the Democratic presidential nominees. Then his company would make more hats for the fall. Presidential merchandise was a lifeblood for Unionwear and the Newark, N.J., factory where they are produced.

As one of the few textile manufacturing factories in the United States, Cahn said, its “Made in USA” emblem was a premium companies want to be associated with. When a presidential candidate or the team representing the U.S. abroad wants a hat, they also want it, well, made in the U.S. — and that’s Cahn’s business.

But everything went awry quickly in early March. All but two of the Democratic candidates dropped out. Then the novel coronavirus pandemic started to hit the United States in full force, dramatically slowing down business along with the rest of the country. A few weeks later, Unionwear cut their staff, too, sending workers home and trying to figure out how they would operate in this new world.

Read more here

A new kind of union leadership is transforming Philadelphia

May 3, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

According to Philadelphia Magazine, a new kind of union leadership is changing Philadelphia, and getting results.

Jerry Jordan of the Philadelphia Federation of Teachers, Chris Woods of AFSCME 1199C, and Ryan Boyer of the Laborers District Council are making their mark. Jordan’s PFT spent north of $340,000 on political campaign contributions last year; Boyer’s Laborers spent more than $2 million. When the pandemic hit and hospital workers at Temple demanded hazard pay, Woods promptly called all of his political allies to let them know about his membership’s plight. Hazard pay arrived shortly thereafter.

What is notable here is that all of these union leaders are black. “We’re forced to be much more than a labor organization,” says Boyer. Indeed, the unions are getting squarely involved in social justice issues as much as bread-and-butter labor union ones.

To stay relevant, some labor unions are going beyond bread-and-butter economic issues for their members. The PFT also assembled in front of the Comcast Tower, demanding free internet so students whose families couldn’t afford access could still attend virtual school during the pandemic.

And it’s why AFSCME 1199C reemphasized its campaign for social justice during the George Floyd protests. “We want to be in conversations not just as relates to police, but to the whole criminal justice system,” says Woods. “Because these are issues that affect our members.”

Business Insider: The Same Factory Makes Hats for Trump, Biden, and Bernie

March 10, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders aren’t exactly close on the political spectrum.

But at the Unionwear hat factory in Newark, New Jersey, they’re side by side.

Unionwear has been making campaign merchandise for US presidential candidates for nearly three decades.

The company caters to both Republican and Democratic candidates of all political stripes. This election cycle, the company has made campaign hats for Trump, Sanders, Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, and Elizabeth Warren, among other candidates.

Garment worker Maria Gallardo expressed a common sentiment: “We have to make money for our families, whether we agree or disagree with their message,” she said.

This year’s crowded field of candidates has been good for business. Cahn said Unionwear makes between 2,000 and 3,000 hats in a single day, with most orders coming from campaign-affiliated agencies or groups of supporters.

The 2016 election cycle was a particularly busy time for the company — Cahn said the company was surprised by demand for Trump’s famous “Make America Great Again” hats.

“Demand overwhelmed the supply,” he said. “And there are only a handful of factories in the United States. Everyone was working on that hat for Trump.”

Political campaigns often prefer merchandise companies that are based in the US, making Unionwear a go-to option.

Yet the candidate it’s provided the most merch for isn’t Trump, or Sanders, or even Bloomberg and his seemingly endless campaign budget.

That honor would go to Andrew Yang, the Democratic entrepreneur who dropped out of the race in February. Unionwear made many of the 30,000 “MATH” hats — that’s “Make America Think Harder — that Yang sold during his longshot presidential bid.

Its first political hats were for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign.

Political swag is at least as old as the presidency itself — buttons bearing George Washington’s initials were sold at his first inauguration in 1789.

But the merch business really took off in the mid-1990s, when Cahn was just getting started with Unionwear.

Cahn started the business in 1992. His initial attempts to sell to high-end clients like Neiman Marcus and Ralph Lauren were successful but short lived when the garment industry started to migrate to China en masse in 1994.

“We were left with a baseball hat factory and a lot of employees,” he said. “And not a lot of places to get business from.”

He didn’t have to look far for new clients, though. He began selling to American unions, which were looking for products made by unionized businesses like his. He also began selling to military agencies, some of which are required to buy US-made products.

Then came the political campaigns, starting with a small order of 150 hats for Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign in 1992. But Cahn said business didn’t really take off until Al Gore, then vice president, ran for president in 2000.

“We sold probably more hats than we had ever sold for any one particular client,” Cahn said. “It was probably 200,000 hats overall.”

All of Unionwear’s production takes place at its New Jersey plant. That makes the company an attractive option for political campaigns, who often want to hire US-based companies to make their merchandise.

Unionwear contributes to a multibillion-dollar political marketing industry. Campaign managers and political strategists are increasingly looking to merchandise like hats and other apparel as powerful branding tools, according to New York magazine. Trump’s campaign alone has made $45 million off his “MAGA” merchandise.

So what happens to Unionwear’s supply of hats once a candidate drops out, like Democrats Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg did recently?

“We have this down to a science. We are producing in small batches,” Cahn said. “Someone would have to drop out really unexpectedly for us to get stuck with anything.”

Fox: Merch Madness-Trump and Dems Use Same NJ Hat Factory

March 10, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Fox News’ Alex Hogan reports from Unionwear where nearly every candidate for the 2020 presidential election has chosen to manufacture hats and bags. Candidates choose made in USA products for their campaigns to demonstrate their support for the American worker and domestic economy.

ABC: What do Trump, Bernie, Biden Share?

February 18, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Despite all of the political differences between republicans and democrats, both parties have turned to Unionwear in Newark, New Jersey to manufacture their campaign hats during election season, since 1992.

“We’ve worked with virtually every campaign since we started the business. One of our first orders was for the Bill Clinton campaign in 1992,” said Mitch Cahn, President of Unionwear.

For the 2020 campaign season, Unionwear has manufactured hats for most of the democratic candidates as well as various support groups of President Trump.

According to Cahn, it is during presidential campaign years when many businesses turn to American manufacturers to produce their promotional goods to ensure their products are “Made in USA”.

“We have all sorts of businesses who order promotional products for their business thinking “This is made in China, maybe I should get this made in the USA, I don’t want us to look bad,” said Cahn.

For Cahn, whose company has manufactured products for entities like the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Census, manufacturing “Made in USA” items with the highest standards of production is an obligation that has set Unionwear apart from the rest.

“When consumers buy products “Made in USA” they know that the workers who produce those products are supported by the same labor laws and environmental laws that the consumer benefits from,” said Cahn.

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Righteous Capitalists Podcast Features Unionwear

February 15, 2020 | Posted by unionwear

Who says that the only way for a manufacturer to make money is to send production outside of the USA? Not Mitch Cahn. After graduating from Wharton and working on Wall Street, Mitch decided he wanted to create something. So, in the early 1990’s he bought the distressed assets of a hat manufacturer and very purposely brought back the unionized workers that had been employed there. Twenty-eight years later, Mitch’s company, Unionwear, is the only manufacturer of American made baseball hats produced by unionized employees. In fact, he is the go-to source for every presidential campaign and anyone who wants the world to know that they care about where their merchandise is made and who makes it.

Listen here:

https://www.therighteouscapitalists.com/podcastepisodes/ep012mitchcahnunionwear

Candidates who want Made in USA call Unionwear

November 18, 2019 | Posted by unionwear

No matter whose team you’re on, there’s money to be made in presidential campaign-branded baseball caps — epitomized by those red “Make America Great Again” hats.

Promotional products made by Unionwear include hats, backbacks and tote bags.

And Unionwear is one of the few companies in the running for that profit.

Mitch Cahn, president of the 180-person manufacturing team in Newark, says there are not a lot of textile products such as hats being made in the United States in general today — most of the work has gone to China or other emerging economies.

But, certain customers need to send the right message by choosing U.S. manufacturers for merchandise. That includes any would-be commander-in-chief.

Promotional items with the coveted “Made in USA” label tend to get a boost from the presidential race, but with the popularity of President Donald Trump’s iconic headwear from the last election cycle, Cahn said baseball caps are especially relevant now.

“That hat really drew attention to hats as a campaign accessory,” he said. “That helped our business out immensely. We actually did some of those hats at the beginning of the Trump campaign before he settled on another manufacturer. At the same time, we did hats for the Democratic candidates and, ultimately, Hillary Clinton.”

When it came time for the presidential campaign season to get underway once more, Cahn said his business was busier earlier in the election cycle than it has ever experienced.

Right now, the business is busily manufacturing large quantities of hats for several of the Democratic candidates. Cahn didn’t name the clients, but he did add that three of the four candidates using Unionwear were at the top of polls.

Unionwear also makes accessories such as laptop bags for other clients, including the military and labor unions. It boasts that it compensates its Newark garment workers with union wages and benefits. And that’s a selling point around campaign season.

“Because someone who wants a union-made baseball hat really just has one choice — so that’s going to come up during presidential elections,” Cahn said. “A lot of candidates want to appeal to unions however they can.”

But, when the showdown for the country’s top job ends, local manufacturers are left with the competitive pressures of keeping products American-made.

And that goes double for keeping them New Jersey-made, given the higher costs of real estate and the minimum wage set to rise to $15 by 2024, Cahn said.

“Most of our competition is in the Southeast, where a lot of the country’s garment industry is,” he said. “There, the minimum wage is still at the federal minimum of $7.25. So, unless that goes up, by 2024, it’ll cost us twice as much to pay an entry-level employee here as it would in Georgia.”

That’s why the manufacturer is expecting to do some reinvestment in the automation necessary to sew and produce garments, even if the orders are coming in left and right for hats with campaign logos and slogans.

Cahn said he has no intention of replacing his workforce, but instead wants to give each person the potential to do more tasks.

One of the only reasons it hasn’t happened already is that the development of automation tools has been slower in the textile sector compared with other manufacturers.

“Most automation works well with hard goods, because they’re easy to grab and have finite measurements,” he said. “Things that are soft, you run into issues of robots being unable to grab fabrics and feel wrinkles in the fabrics.”
But, even with more options available now for the hat-maker, it’s safe to say there’s going to be more robotics on the manufacturing line come next campaign cycle.

“Several years ago, it wasn’t something we’d even consider, because the labor was a lot less expensive and the automation was a lot more expensive,” Cahn said. “The price of automation has come down tremendously and the price of labor keeps going up. So, now, it just makes sense.”

republished from http://www.roi-nj.com/2019/10/14/industry/2020-vision-candidates-who-want-made-in-usa-hats-can-call-unionwear-but-theres-more-to-business-than-slogans/

Fox Business Visits Unionwear’s USA Made Booth

October 8, 2019 | Posted by unionwear

Fox News’ Opened the First-ever Made in America conference with live broadcase from Unionwear’s booth at the Indianapolis Convention Center.  Carly Shimkus was suprised by the depth and quality of Unionwear’s product line and discussed how USA made products demonstrate their manufacturers’ commitment to the American economy.

The Baseball Cap: How To Make It In America

July 19, 2019 | Posted by unionwear

Clips from German television show Galileo, videotaped by Jynx Productions of a typical day in Unionwear’s baseball hat manufacturing facility in Newark, NJ.

Unionwear Wins Inaugural Reshoring Award

May 20, 2019 | Posted by unionwear

The Reshoring Initiative and SEAMS, the domestic textile manufacturing association, presented their inaugural Manufacturing Reshoring Award to Unionwear for bringing cut and sew jobs back to the USA. Unionwear’s 180 workers in Newark, NJ make baseball hats, backpacks, and other bags for the promotional products, fashion, and uniform industries.

Unionwear’s technological innovations have leveled the playing field with imports by highlighting small batch, quick turn manufacturing. Unionwear’s predictive configuration tool at http://www.trillionhats.com allows it to sell custom made products using a traditional webstore experience rather than a cumbersome online configurator, while its mobile ERP platform automates purchasing, production scheduling, manufacturing, and shipping. The result is “made to order” as seamless as ordering from Amazon.

The baseball cap industry’s mass relocation to China since the 1990’s, and Unionwear’s success in keeping manufacturing stateside throughout, was thoroughly explored earlier this month in the three part serial podcast documentary “American Icon” on iHeartRadio’s Red Pilled America podcast.

The Reshoring Award was presented at SEAMS’ annual conference in Savannah,GA on May 9, 2019. At the event, Contempora Fabrics won the Textile Reshoring Award and Mara Hoffman Designs won the Brand Reshoring Award. SEAMS members had reasons to celebrate, with domestic textile manufacturing showing strong, sustainable growth to $70 billion and over 100,000 jobs, numbers that will continue to climb due to the recent tariffs and the upcoming presidential election, when interest in “USA Made” traditionally peaks.

Podcast: The Fall and Rise of USA Cap Manufacturing

May 5, 2019 | Posted by unionwear

Red Pilled America took a deep dive into the history of the baseball cap, and used the story of offshoring ballcap production to tell the story of American apparel manufacturing.

Episode 24 focuses on Unionwear’s history. Founded as a fashion industry contractor, Unionwear was nearly shuttered when unintended consequences of trade deals resulted in most of the textile business moving to China in the mid 90’s.

Unionwear took a systematic approach to seek markets that would only buy American: starting with unions, moving to political campaigns, the US government and military, then other manufacturers and nonprofits, and now back as a fashion contractor.

Hosts Patrick Courrielche and Adryana Cortez intersperse Unionwear’s story with a fascinating analysis of the economic, regulatory, and systemic changes that resulted in American manufacturing losing its edge, and what it would take to regain it.

The podcast has started a kickstarter campaign to sell a Red-Pilled America cap, pictured above.

The podcast is broadcast by iHeartAmerica and is available on Apple Podcasts

Unionwear Hires José Bellon from Coach to Run Domestic Manufacturing Operations

January 15, 2018 | Posted by unionwear

Unionwear is pleased to announce the hiring of their new Domestic Operations VP, José Bellon, formerly of Coach Ready-To-Wear Apparel. With this move, Unionwear and CEO/President Mitch Cahn hopes not only to maintain but to improve the already award-winning company.

Mr. Bellon was carefully chosen for his skills and experience. He is a native of Cuba but grew up in Miami. Raised in a hard-working community, he became acquainted with a large variety of people. This experience taught him how to work well with others. He brings good business sense, honesty, and a drive for excellence to a company with an already outstanding reputation.

Mr. Bellon takes great pride in the industry in which he works and plans on staying there a long time. He is proud of the “Made in USA” label and encourages other entrepreneurs whenever he can. He would, in fact, like to help future entrepreneurs realize their full potential and assist them in keeping America vital by eliminating outsourcing to other countries.

Though he is proud of his heritage, as a Latin leader he wants to promote American, union-made products as the new Domestic Operations VP for Unionwear, helping the company to grow above and beyond its wildest dreams.

Unionwear, formerly the maker of little more than baseball caps, has expanded its line considerably over the years. In addition to producing political campaign and promotional gear, the company lists knit caps and scarves, winter wear, and bags of all shapes, designs, and sizes its website.

As of late, Unionwear and company President Mitch Cahn acquired the assets and personnel of DLX Industries. This means for online shoppers that, in addition to what Unionwear already carried, they will now also deal in business accessories such as portfolios and binders.

Besides displaying pride for America and offering American-made, customizable products at affordable prices, Unionwear is involved in the community. Just recently, they played a major role in assisting the winner of the “Dream It, Do It: What’s So Cool About Manufacturing” Award. This annual award was developed to stimulate students’ imaginations and introduce them to the possibility of manufacturing  careers.

José Bellon is proud to be a new member of a company that not only enjoys the success the American public has given them but gives back to the community in return. Because of his devotion to excellence and both company and community growth, Mr. Bellon is a perfect fit for Unionwear and what it represents.

CEO/President Mitch Cahn and his 175 union-proud employees would like to extend a warm welcome to Mr. José Bellon in the hopes of a long, productive, and satisfying future

DLX Industries’ Management Team Bring Portfolio-Making Expertise and Equipment to Unionwear

November 1, 2017 | Posted by unionwear

Unionwear has acquired the remaining assets of DLX Industries, the promotional, union made in USA sewn leather portfolios and binder manufacturer from Brooklyn. Unionwear has hired DLX’s Sales and Marketing Director, Cindy Kronen, and Plant Manager Phil Stern. Ms. Kronen brings with her 20 years of sales and marketing experience. Phil Stern, DLX’s plant manager for 17 years, joins Cindy (along with other key employees) as they set up a new shop in Newark New, Jersey.

Unionwear, a union manufacturer of bags and hats, started out as the New Jersey Headwear Corporation with only 15 workers back in 1992. A contract with Ralph Lauren helped put the young enterprise and President Mitch Cahn on the map. Today, 25 years later, the company has 175 employees who manufacture and embroider headwear, bags, accessories, safety gear, and work gear. Recently, they have created promotional gear used nationwide in political campaigns. They are a principal textile supplier to homeland security, the postal service, federal and state governments, and the military.

DLX specializes in the manufacture of business accessories and promotional products. Their mission, now as part of Unionwear, will be to provide high-quality, domestically manufactured, union-made products at affordable prices. They offer innovative designs and products of various materials and colors. DLX’s most popular products have been sealed and sewn vinyl and leather items such as Binders, Portfolios, Checkbook Covers, Check Presenters, and Desk Accessories.

Following the merger of DLX and Unionwear, if you are seeking union-made stitched and/or sealed portfolios, binders, and vinyl folders, you need look no further. They will now be created in Newark, New Jersey by Unionwear, which will manufacture the same business presentation products, with the same attention to quality, that you have purchased from DLX over the last decade. The facility is fully operational, and their product line can be found at https://unionwear.com/portfolios-and-folders.

“Made in USA” has become not only a declaration but a theme. The difference in pricing between Made in China products and Made in USA products is diminishing. Companies like Unionwear aim to reduce the purchase of imports by promoting affordable products of outstanding quality made right here in the United States.

Workers United, Local 155 represents the employees at Unionwear. The company considers the union label a badge of workplace justice, quality, and a living wage. Their employees earn holidays, vacation days, pension, and health insurance. And they want the public to know that the “Made in USA products cost less than Union Made products” way of thinking is a myth, a fallacy. The cost differential between union domestic and non-union factories has been eliminated (or at least substantially narrowed), thanks to the Democratic Congress’ intervention. This intervention affected the rights and laws concerning affordable healthcare, equal pay, family leave, and the federal minimum wage earned by domestic workers.

Verizon Fios Showcases Unionwear Hat Factory

October 31, 2017 | Posted by unionwear

A recent Verizon Fios video explores and examines Newark, New Jersey’s Unionwear, a manufacturer of scarves, hats, backpacks, and much, much more. The video opens with an interview with Unionwear CEO and President, Mitch Cahn, regarding the company’s background.

Mr. Cahn explains, “Unionwear is the manufacturer of baseball caps, military hats, sewn hats, backpacks, duffel bags—any sort of sewn accessory that can be made from woven fabric. By saying that these products are union made, it’s a type of shorthand for the fact that our products are made by happy, content, productive workers.”

When asked how they price their products competitively, the CEO says that one way of making sure that their products are competitively priced “is through the use of Lean manufacturing. Just because wages are higher doesn’t mean that labor costs necessarily need to be higher.”

Next, Mr. Cahn and the interviewer take a look at the factory itself. The camera pans over a section of the manufacturing facility as the company president explains that they are looking at roughly 1000 baseball caps before they are actually constructed. He runs through aspects of the production, such as fabric,  a hydraulic clicker press that cuts the fabric for the hats into triangles, and other sections containing various parts of the soon-to-be baseball caps.

As he holds a completed baseball cap in his hands, Mr. Cahn runs his fingers along the various parts, demonstrating how each piece fits into the finished product. He offers up a little tidbit of information: every baseball cap has no less than 23 parts.

Moving to a different section of the factory, the video now focuses on workers at their various stations. This is where the tail end of the cap manufacturing process takes place, the sewing being done by hand and sewing machine. All the pieces come together here. Next will be the embroidery.

Depending on the cap, some parts receive embroidery while others do not. To achieve the best quality, the embroidery is done on cut parts of the hat before it is completely assembled.  Because the embroidery is done on a flat panel instead of a curved finished cap, the artwork’s registration is improved, the imprint area is larger, productivity is improved, and expenses are lower. Workers now must finish the crown, attach the visor, and complete the baseball cap.

As the company president and the interviewer move to the section of the facility where the “baseball cap is virtually born,” the camera pans widely across the facility. It shows numerous stations and workers as various stages of the assembly process are being completed.

Mr. Cahn describes this final stage: “We’ve made the crown of the baseball cap, the embroidery has been added, we’ve made the brim, and now the crown and the brim will be attached together, and the label and sweatband will be added. Everything, once sewn together, is steamed, bagged, and boxed.” And voilà, you have a baseball cap, ready for distribution.

This video gives an impressive view of a baseball cap’s creation—from its infancy to the completed, final product. Not to mention all of the people who participate in the process. Knowing that these products, each and every one, are all put together with the bare hands of union employees is one of the major factors that sets this company apart from all the rest. These products are made in the USA, by hand.

Unionwear—American-made, America proud.

Unionwear Wins NJBIZ “Excellence in Manufacturing” Award

October 15, 2017 | Posted by unionwear

Mitch Cahn, the President of Unionwear, and the Chairman of the Newark Workforce Development Board, has won the Raymond Hopp Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Manufacturing. The announcement was made official at National Manufacturing Day. The fifth annual event was held on Friday, October 7, 2016. This celebration aims to improve public perception of the manufacturing industry’s economic value and to expand knowledge of manufacturing careers.

The Excellence in Manufacturing Award was established in memory of the president of HK Metalcraft, Raymond Hopp. Mr. Hopp was extremely dedicated to the New Jersey manufacturing community’s workforce development and was considered a strong advocate for their cause.

This very special award has specific criteria that the ideal candidate must meet:

• Demonstrate clear respect for cultural awareness and diversity
• Show a willingness to explore and learn new technologies
• Display passion for continuing education
• Be active in associations that indirectly or directly support manufacturing
• Understand networking’s importance
• Be a forward-thinking, creative, innovative business person/entrepreneur
• Show, through their treatment of employees, peers, and business associates, that they are a highly moral businessperson
• Have been involved in the New Jersey manufacturing community for a minimum of 20 years.

Back in 1992, Mitch Cahn started the New Jersey Headwear Corporation, which would one day become Unionwear. He landed a contract with Ralph Lauren for ball caps and had 15 individuals doing all of the sewing. Now, with 175 employees, Mr. Cahn’s Unionwear is responsible for nationwide promotional gear used in political campaigns and much more. Additionally, he is a principal textile supplier to the federal and state governments, post office, homeland security, and the military.

As president of Unionwear, and in years before that, Mr. Cahn has been publicly recognized as a passionate individual who works relentlessly to do as much as possible within his platform and position. A recommendation specifically for this award credited Mitch with not only meeting but exceeding the challenging expectations and requirements to win the Raymond Hopp Award for Excellence.

Mr. Cahn’s commitment to fellow manufacturers and education is evident; he participates in numerous events and organizations, including but not limited to Grants and Incentive Programs for Urban Manufacturers; Cloud, Mobile, Manufacturing Technology on the Shop Floor; Designing for Manufacturing; Worker Rights Compliance in Procurement; Continuous Improvement and Lean Manufacturing, marketing “Made in USA”; and more.

Numerous fellow entrepreneurs and friends celebrated Mr. Cahn’s achievement. Cohn Reznick (of Cohn Reznick LLP) offered an official pat on the back via Twitter: “Congratulations Mitch Cahn of [Unionwear USA] on receiving the Raymond Hopp Award for Excellence.” Cohn Reznick LLC is one of the top advisory, tax, and accounting firms in the United States.

Thanks to devoted entrepreneurs such as Mitch Cahn and his devotion to manufacturing high-quality products, consumers have a viable and laudable alternative to cheap imports.

Unionwear Wins NJBIZ “Excellence in Manufacturing” Award

October 15, 2017 | Posted by unionwear

Mitch Cahn, the President of Unionwear, and the Chairman of the Newark Workforce Development Board, has won the Raymond Hopp Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Manufacturing. The announcement was made official at National Manufacturing Day. The fifth annual event was held on Friday, October 7, 2016. This celebration aims to improve public perception of the manufacturing industry’s economic value and to expand knowledge of manufacturing careers.

The Excellence in Manufacturing Award was established in memory of the president of HK Metalcraft, Raymond Hopp. Mr. Hopp was extremely dedicated to the New Jersey manufacturing community’s workforce development and was considered a strong advocate for their cause.

This very special award has specific criteria that the ideal candidate must meet:

• Demonstrate clear respect for cultural awareness and diversity
• Show a willingness to explore and learn new technologies
• Display passion for continuing education
• Be active in associations that indirectly or directly support manufacturing
• Understand networking’s importance
• Be a forward-thinking, creative, innovative business person/entrepreneur
• Show, through their treatment of employees, peers, and business associates, that they are a highly moral businessperson
• Have been involved in the New Jersey manufacturing community for a minimum of 20 years.

Back in 1992, Mitch Cahn started the New Jersey Headwear Corporation, which would one day become Unionwear. He landed a contract with Ralph Lauren for ball caps and had 15 individuals doing all of the sewing. Now, with 175 employees, Mr. Cahn’s Unionwear is responsible for nationwide promotional gear used in political campaigns and much more. Additionally, he is a principal textile supplier to the federal and state governments, post office, homeland security, and the military.

As president of Unionwear, and in years before that, Mr. Cahn has been publicly recognized as a passionate individual who works relentlessly to do as much as possible within his platform and position. A recommendation specifically for this award credited Mitch with not only meeting but exceeding the challenging expectations and requirements to win the Raymond Hopp Award for Excellence.

Mr. Cahn’s commitment to fellow manufacturers and education is evident; he participates in numerous events and organizations, including but not limited to Grants and Incentive Programs for Urban Manufacturers; Cloud, Mobile, Manufacturing Technology on the Shop Floor; Designing for Manufacturing; Worker Rights Compliance in Procurement; Continuous Improvement and Lean Manufacturing, marketing “Made in USA”; and more.

Numerous fellow entrepreneurs and friends celebrated Mr. Cahn’s achievement. Cohn Reznick (of Cohn Reznick LLP) offered an official pat on the back via Twitter: “Congratulations Mitch Cahn of [Unionwear USA] on receiving the Raymond Hopp Award for Excellence.” Cohn Reznick LLC is one of the top advisory, tax, and accounting firms in the United States.

Thanks to devoted entrepreneurs such as Mitch Cahn and his devotion to manufacturing high-quality products, consumers have a viable and laudable alternative to cheap imports.

Unionwear Completes Restructuring As Core Biz Thrives

October 14, 2017 | Posted by unionwear

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Unionwear, a New Jersey manufacturer of hats and bags, has had its repayment plan approved by Judge John Sherwood, and will emerge from a Federal court supervised restructuring it filed earlier this year to cut down on union pension related debt.

President Mitch Cahn will retain control of the business after a capital contribution by Reshoring Capital was approved. Operations will be spun off into a wholly owned subsidiary, USA Made Brands.

Said Cahn, “Everyone here is elated. We weren’t sure our company would emerge intact, and never thought our sales would end up exceeding our record year in 2016, when we were a primary supplier of USA Made baseball caps and tote bags to nearly every presidential candidate. In the past, sales would always dip the year after an election. But our sales have grown by 35% since the filing.”

Prior to the Chapter 11 Unionwear was unable to borrow from traditional sources to expand due to the withdrawal liability created by the failure of its union’s pension fund.

“The withdrawal liability was completely out of our control so I was not willing to invest personal funds or take insider funds until we could at least contain the problem.  Once we were able to exit the National Retirement Fund we could at least stop the withdrawal liability from growing. Reshoring Capital was willing and able to provide us the DIP financing to carry us through the chapter 11 and provide exit financing, and I was able invest personal funds in several things necessary to scale.”

These investments include:

• Two entire new lines of business – we are now making leather portfolio folders and binders as well as knit hats and scarves.
• New equipment made available as other textile businesses close, which seems to have spiked again this year as the NYC and LA sew shops have been hurt by wage and rent costs.
• New management personnel-a plant manager from coach with 20 years of experience in lean manufacturing

Cahn says 2017 will be the  best year in Unionwear’s 25 year history and that Unionwear is opening 2018 with a tremendous backlog of business.

“Our balance sheet is much stronger as is our team and the excitement here is translating into sales and productivity.  The restructuring forced us to be smarter than we’ve ever had to be with our cash flow. It forced us to successfully implement just in time inventory management and an MRP system.

Additionally We’ve been able to finance this growth without adding new debt and We have been able to manage the growth despite the burdensome regulatory requirements a restructuring imposes on small businesses.  It was a year long distraction that is now behind us and we are positioned well to capitalize on the growth in interest in USA Made.”

As part of the restructuring, Unionwear’s employees moved from a failed defined benefit plan from which they would be unable to collect to a defined contribution plan with a match.

Unionwear CEO Keynotes Manufacturing Summit at Legendary Brewery

October 1, 2017 | Posted by unionwear

On October 12, 2017, at the Anheuser-Busch Brewery in Newark, Mitch Cahn, Unionwear’s own CEO and President was the  keynote speaker at the Commerce and Industry Association of New Jersey (CIANJ) Manufacturing Summit.

The CIANJ summit concentrated primarily on enhancing the manufacturing sector of New Jersey. From energy needs and transportation to tax implications and environmental regulations, its purpose was to bring together environmental professionals, manufacturers, lawmakers, and other stakeholders. Why bring all of these people together in one room? To decide what needed to be done to grow New Jersey manufacturing, a candid discussion had to take place.

The hope of those organizing this event and holding it at Newark’s historic Anheuser-Busch Brewery, was that those attending would leave with a deeper comprehension of how our economy and manufacturing are related in the world today. Manufacturing is key—it’s critical. And to grow the sector, some things need to change.

As a speaker at this type of event, Unionwear CEO/President Mitch Cahn is considerably qualified. This individual started what would one day be Unionwear with humble beginnings and a mere 15 workers. Today, not only has he increased his union workforce to 175, but with their help, he has grown the company into one of the only headwear producers still manufacturing in the United States of America.

The man who started out making baseball caps for Barneys New York, Ralph Lauren, Izod, and Gant is now the primary manufacturer of much of today’s political campaign and promotional gear. So successful has Mr. Cahn become that he and his “Made in America” company recently purchased the assets of business accessory manufacturer DLX industries, retaining many of its personnel, as well.

At the manufacturing summit, Mr. Cahn spoke about the fact that business has never been better. There is a slight problem, however, that he imagines many other manufacturing plants are also experiencing: Business is outgrowing the supply of machine operators. It’s hard to keep up. But with a problem like this, he wonders, why are domestic manufacturers being depicted as victims in the national dialogue?

One such recent source of “national dialogue” was an article in the New York Times. The writer portrayed a grim picture of domestic manufacturing, discussing the assumption that owners of manufacturing plants hoped their kids would grow up to find some easier way to make a living! To add insult to injury, the article also strongly suggested that despite all the pronouncements, praises and promises by politicians, they were actually doing little to help the industry.

In this article, the owner of a well-known engineering and plastics firm painted a very “woe is me” picture. While Mr. Cahn agrees that domestic manufacturing isn’t the easiest way to make a living in today’s world, he also notes that many of the problems in the industry are in the hands of company owners, CEOs, presidents, etc. There is a solution to every problem. It is not always easy, and sometimes you have to work at it, but you cannot let the growth of your business be impeded by systemic factors. Thinking outside the box is the kind of ingenuity that allows us to invent products, produce them on a mass level, automate that production, and finally, outsell our competitors.

The planners who put this manufacturing summit together could not have chosen a better candidate to speak. His invigorating words of encouragement and support will undoubtedly boost the morale of those needing it and inspire those fighting the good fight to keep going.

Note: The entire keynote given by Mitch Cahn can be found by clicking here.

Shop 250,000 USA Made Products on Unionwear’s New Website

September 15, 2017 | Posted by unionwear

Unionwear, Inc. is pleased and proud to announce the launch of their newly re-designed website. The modified site now offers easier navigation, online ordering, better search capability, more content, and other enhancements to improve customers’ online design and ordering experience.

With its updated look and feel, the refreshed site allows clients to find the products they need and get answers to their design issues in less time. With more than 200,000 hat and 50,000 bag SKUs, customers are bound to find just the right accessory for their corporate events, employee uniforms, special gifts for clients, and more.  Unionwear.com has added thousands of SKUs of union made in USA knit hats and scarves and union made in USA sewn portfolios and binders—and is the last union manufacturer in America in each product category!

With thousands of colors, shapes, fabrics, and logos from which to choose, customers can design the perfect, one-of-a-kind products for themselves or others. And the best part? If clients don’t see what they’re looking for, all they have to do is give Unionwear a call. They can customize any order and provide every customer with precisely what they need.

On the new web site, Unionwear also offers their clients access to industry trend information, the latest news on trade justice and labeling, product comparisons and ratings, etc. This updated and user-friendly site will better serve the ever-changing needs of customers.

Located in Newark, New Jersey, Unionwear manufactures and embroiders accessories, bags, baseball caps, knit caps, safety gear, and work wear. With their “Made in USA” label, business is booming, the turnover is low, and morale is high. All 175 employees have a stake in the success of the company, and they can identify with customers who value the community and are concerned about how and where a product is made.

Founded in 1992, the New Jersey Headwear Corporation began with just a handful of employees and Mitch Cahn at the wheel. His first lucrative contract was with Ralph Lauren Clothing making baseball caps, but as the business grew, Unionwear was created and was hired to create products for local and national political campaigns. Over time, they became the principal supplier to the military, the post office, and federal and state government agencies—all clients for whom a “Made in the USA” label is vitally important.

Both Unionwear and their customers recognize that when you manufacture a product locally, you add value by creating jobs and supporting the community. While many manufacturers outsource their production lines, Unionwear takes pride in keeping their business where it belongs—in the US.

Their growth and sustainability have been built on the stable foundation of employee satisfaction and strong client relationships. Low turnover means excellent products are being made by experienced and resourceful stitchers, with high productivity on the shop floor, incredible pride in their workmanship, and fast deliveries. This keeps clients happy and influences repeat orders. Additionally, recent international shipping problems have made local American manufacturing more attractive than ever.

Unionwear would like to extend an invitation to all their past, present, and potential customers to view their new, updated website at https://unionwear.com. There, shoppers can see how they make quality products as well as explore the many choices now available from this union-proud company.

Unionwear Celebrates 25 Years of “Made Right Here”

August 8, 2017 | Posted by unionwear

At a time when pride in America and demand for “Made in USA” products are increasing, it’s surprising how many companies still insist on outsourcing their manufacturing internationally. Yet, despite the reduced costs that these companies will likely negotiate, their prices either stay the same or continue to rise. This does not bode well for the American public, any way you look at it.

But Unionwear refuses to give in to overseas outsourcing and price gouging. Perhaps that is why Unionwear, a company that features union-made products and whose slogan is “Made Right Here” is still in business after 25 years.

In 1992, Unionwear President Mitch Cahn started the New Jersey Headwear Corporation as a contractor for fashion designers in the a new product category: the fashion baseball cap. In those early days, the company had a mere six individuals doing all the sewing and assembly. Ball cap contracts with Ralph Lauren’s Polo, Barneys New York, Gant, and Izod helped put the company on the map and increased staff numbers to 35 machine operators. the company was churning out hundreds of thousands of hats per year by 1997.

The name Unionwear came about after the textile business shifted toward Asian production in 1998. Mr. Cahn realized that his company was one of only a few still manufacturing union-label baseball caps within the United States. While Craft Hats, King Louis, and West Penn were moving their production overseas and closing their United States manufacturing facilities’ doors, Unionwear would not only stay put but also expand.

Fast-forward to today, and one cannot help but notice how the company has stayed true to itsroots, keeping production within our borders and prices affordable. His headwear company has now branched into other product lines and employees 175 proud union workers.

Unionwear has manufactured presidential campaign wear and other political logo products. This Garden State factory has been the go-to manufacturer when it comes to Made in America gear for Sanders, Cruz, Clinton, Bush, McCain and countless other candidates. Unionwear has consistently produced customized orders to suit the needs of their clientele.

Presently, in addition to baseball caps of varying styles, Unionwear deals in knit scarves and caps, winter gear, and bags of all shapes, sizes, and designs. And just recently, Unionwear acquired the assets and personnel of DLX Industries, expanding their product catalog to include portfolios, binders, and other business accessories.

Unionwear continues to win awards for their meaningfully contributions to society; they care deeply for the public that put them where they are today. And although employee salaries have gone up, and costs are certainly not going down, Unionwear still manages to provide affordable, high-quality, American-made products to their customers.

Please join us in congratulating Unionwear for a job well done. They’re keeping jobs where they belong—right here in the United States of America. Happy 25^th anniversary, Unionwear!

Unionwear Wins “Dream It, Do It: What’s So Cool About Manufacturing” Award

January 1, 2017 | Posted by unionwear

Unionwear and the Louise A. Spencer School in Newark deserve sincere congratulations for winning this year’s video competition, What’s So Cool About Manufacturing? This award, given annually, stimulates the imagination of students, inviting them to pursue careers in manufacturing. Its secondary aim is to boost the profiles of New Jersey’s factories.  A range of awards are bestowed by judges in each regional contest, and online votes for the Viewers’ Choice Award are tabulated at WhatsSoCool.org.

In 2013, Allentown Pennsylvania’s Manufacturer’s Research Center (MRC) created the What’s So Cool About Manufacturing? contest, and now hundreds of schools in the region participate. Teams of teachers, coaches, and students receive professional guidance, software, and camera equipment as they learn to edit, record, and script their video stories. The objective? To change students’ perceptions of manufacturing careers.

The winning video, which runs two minutes and 30 seconds, begins with several schoolgirls admiring a shirt worn by one of them and discussing where it came from. Realizing that anything purchased from “the mall” originates from somewhere else, they ponder what goes into the manufacturing process. Enter Unionwear and Mitch Cahn, President. He discusses his manufacturing company and how it works.

The video also features Agi Tamrakar, a recent graduate of NJIT who elaborates on his education and internship with Unionwear. Upon completing his masters, he accepted a permanent, full-time position at Unionwear.  Mr. Tamrakar also explores the many facets of the manufacturing industry. The video concludes with the original schoolchildren reiterating how cool manufacturing is. The video is informative and enjoyable, and the performance given by the schoolchildren is admirable.

Dream It, Do It promotes advanced careers in manufacturing for educators, adult family members, and students. Dream It, Do It is a companion of the What So Cool About Manufacturing? video contest and provides career resources. Additionally, Dream It, Do It selects and manages a dream team of dynamic manufacturing professionals. This team makes presentations at community locations and schools for students and teachers.

ABC News Tours Hillary, Bernie Campaigns’ Unionwear Shop

April 23, 2016 | Posted by unionwear

ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos

ABC News takes a deep dive into Newark, NJ-based Unionwear, a union shop producing all those Hillary, Bernie, and Anti-Trump logo products.

TRANSCRIPT

Josh: What’s up guys? I’m sure you’ve seen this before. We all have. This hat is actually currently made in downtown Los Angeles, but ground zero for campaign merchandise here in Newark, New Jersey at Unionwear. It’s not just Donald Trump’s campaign who has hired advertising companies. It’s Hillary, it’s Bernie Sanders, it’s Jeb Bush, it’s Mick Huckabee. Take a look at this table guys. There is New Jersey’s own Chris Christie. So these campaigns, they hire advertising firms that then use this company, Unionwear, to make all of these hats. Even some candidates who are no longer in the race. There’s Jeb Bush for 2016. So we’re seeing a little bit of it all. There’s also handbags here. I want to take you back there. Another funny thing, this place has been involved since Al Gore run. Ever since 1992, they have been making merchandise like hats and bags for the conventions. These employees are all engaged as well. I want to bring in the president, Mitch Cahn. Mitch, hop on in right now, live on ABC Digital. Talk about how your business has been impacted by the 2016 election?

Mitch Cahn: We’ve had to make more hats than ever. There have been so many candidates this year. We probably made baseball hats for nearly every candidate in the race. We’ll be doing work for the conventions. We’ll be doing work for parties in all 50 states.

Josh: What is it about your business, Unionwear here in Newark that it is so appealing, connected to these presidential campaigns on both sides?

Mitch Cahn: Well, for one thing, every single product we make is made in the USA. Every product is also union made as unions are a very big voting bloc in the election. We’ve made a name for ourselves by making presidential merchandise over the last 25 years.

Josh: Why don’t you show us some of those hats? Want to bring that Hillary hat?

Mitch Cahn: Sure. Here is a Hillary hat that we’re making. We are also presently making hats for Bernie Sanders and making hats – we’ve made hats for Jeb Bush and Scott Walker and Chris Christie during this election cycle.

Josh: Got it. Ben and Amna, while I have Mitch here and we’re standing here in Unionwear, you guys have any questions for us before we take you on a little tour and show you how these hats are made and introduce you to some of the employees as well?

Ben: Yeah. It’s actually funny because when like a team loses the Super Bowl, I always wonder where their hats go because they all of sudden bring out the winner hats. Oh, you won the Super Bowl. It says winner. What is the most obscure hat that he has? Like is there a hat from like 15 years ago that a candidate ran, and he just keeps the hat because it’s got to be very cool nostalgia.

Josh: Yeah Mitch as we know, not every candidate is successful. You’ve been in the business for a while. What is the most rare hat that you have? Have you kept any of them as collectors items?

Mitch Cahn: I keep some fun ones. I have a Kucinich hat. I have hats from John Edwards. I have hats from Joe Lieberman. I’ve got a lot of hats from senate candidates as well that are in our showroom.

Josh: While Mitch is talking and definitely chiming in with another question, got to love this Scott Walker army hunting hat.

Amna: Oh, look at that.

Ben: Wow, that’s duck hunting right there.

Josh: I will not put it on for you guys.

Amna: Josh, why don’t you take us on a little tour of the facility? Let’s see where these things are made.

Josh: Definitely. Mitch, let’s do a little tour. Why don’t we start with the Drumpf hats and what’s being made at this station right here?

Mitch Cahn: Sure. We start over here where we cut fabric into little triangles. In this area right here, we take the triangles, we call them panels and we sew them together to make the crown of the baseball hat. You can see the back of a baseball cap right there. This will end up being a Trump parody hat. It’s kind of a parody hat of the ‘Make America Great Again’ hat. Once the fronts and the backs of the hats are completed, we take them over to our embroidery area.

Ben: Josh, when you have a moment, can you ask him who orders these Trump parody hats.

Mitch Cahn: This is where we take the front of the hat and we do this before the hat is made. We’ll sew down a logo on the hat. So Melba, tell us exactly what you’re doing at this stage?

Melba: We’re running a sample of the Bernie Sanders logo.

Josh: Do you mind if I hold that real quick?

Melba: Yeah, sure.

Josh: So guys, the pattern goes on this USB, which goes inside this machine. Melba here at the embroidery station, she makes those. Mitch, we had a follow-up question on those Trump hats. Actually funny story guys. I’m not sure if you’re fans of John Oliver’s show, but John Oliver is kind of the reason why those hats are doing so well. Tell us about those Make Donald Drumpf. Hats?

Ben: Make Donald Drumpf again.

Mitch Cahn: Yeah. John Oliver is selling a hat on hbo.com that says ‘Make Donald Drumpf again’, which is a parody of the ‘Make America Great again’ hat.

Josh: Drumpf is of course—

Mitch Cahn: The family name of Trump. Apparently, it’s an extremely popular baseball cap.

Josh: Tell us what popular means. How many have you sold? Why are you continuing having to make these hats?

Mitch Cahn: We are – well, HBO is selling the hat. We’re making all sorts of parody baseball caps here, including that hat. Maybe around 30,000-40,000 parody Trump hats just this month. Almost as much as some of the other candidates’ hats.

Josh: As we continue to tour, another kind of funny interesting thing. Of course, Unionwear, this is a union company, and many people would think that the Republican Party not always particularly fond of unions. They do make the hats made here, because this is a company that can get them out fast, and they specialize in this type of campaign gear. But for Republican candidates, they will not put the Unionwear label on the hats. So it will not say the word ‘union’ anywhere on those hats. For Democrats of course, they do say union made.

Mitch Cahn: I’m sure there’s one around here somewhere. We just got them out.

Ben: Josh, is any candidate off-limits or is it all fair game for the parody hats? Will he do any candidate?

Josh: Mitch, are any candidate off-limits or you will do any particular candidate or company that comes to you with business.

Mitch Cahn: Yeah, we will do work for all candidates unless it’s someone that I as the president/owner of the business completely disagree with their positions. I don’t want to help somebody get elected who I absolutely do not want to see be President of the United States.

Ben: Who is he voting for then?

Josh: So far, that has not happened in this campaign.

Mitch Cahn: No.

Ben: Ask him who he is voting for?

Josh: Do you mind telling us who you’re voting for?

Mitch Cahn: No, I’m not going to say who I’m voting for. But I appreciate all the candidates giving us work here and supporting domestic manufacturing. It’s very important.

Josh: While we still have you guys, why don’t we show them some of the handbags that you guys make. I know Ben has been in the market for, in particular, this Hillary handbag. I think you’ll like it, Ben.

Ben: Absolutely. I need this, a man bag — wow, this bag is huge. It’s got all kinds of secret compartments.

Josh: It is huge. Made in America right here in Newark, New Jersey.

Ben: I’d be worried to wear Make America Drumpf hat–

Mitch Cahn: We make tote bags, backpacks, garment bags, all sorts of luggage, handbags. Here’s some samples. Some of the tote bags we’re making for the Hillary Clinton campaign right here.

Josh: So Mitch, just walk us through the process. An advertising company reaches out to you and says we want a handbag or a tote bag to sell, wear and how – talk us through how that works.

Mitch Cahn: They usually come out here first and vet us to make sure that we are completely made in America, and we’re not going to embarrass them. Then they’ll send us designs. We’ll prototype the designs, sent it to them for approval. Then just start making the merchandise, it will end up on the website of the candidate. Probably end up in the convention centers and at official campaign events.

Amna: So I guess a question for Mitch is the merchandise any indication of how a candidate is doing. I notice he does both Hillary and Bernie hats. Does one outsell the other?

Josh: Mitch, a question from our anchor, Amna in New York. What’s doing better, the Bernie merchandise or the Hillary merchandise?

Mitch Cahn: It’s really hard to say. They are actually selling about equally.

Josh: What is equally? Can you give us any sort of ballpark?

Mitch Cahn: We will do several thousand dozen hats per month or so for each of the candidates.

Josh: Off of your question Amna, when a candidate’s campaign kind of starts to tank, of course, they’re going to put in less orders. So sometimes, this might be the first place here in Unionwear where they know. We in the media, we’re reporting on it, but they kind of know – they didn’t put in that order. Mitch, tell us about maybe a story from the past when that’s happened.

Mitch Cahn: I usually find out about a candidate leaving the race from the news, but it has been exciting. A few times I’ve known about the vice-presidential candidate before the convention. We had to sign confidentiality agreements. In a way that sports champions are crowned with baseball hats, they have merchandise ready for those vice presidential candidates.

Josh: Which candidate was that?

Mitch Cahn: I think that was when it was Lieberman.

Josh: Lieberman running with Al Gore. So talk about how that process went. Did the campaign call you and say –this is the design we want but do they have security here.

Mitch Cahn: Yeah, the ad agency. They didn’t have security here. They called at the last possible minute and said we’re going to need these for the convention. We’re going to tell you who it is at the last second. You have to sign this that you won’t tell anybody. I probably knew for about 15 seconds before the news already hit the internet.

Josh: So guys, when it comes to our Veep sweepstakes kind of guessing who the vice-presidential candidate is, now I know that my assignment will be living in a tent outside Unionwear in Newark, New Jersey waiting to see what orders they get.

Amna: I think that might be smart. Hey, one last question for Mitch, Josh. Can anyone place orders because I’m thinking if we want to try to get some hats made for maybe a Ben Aaron run in 2020.

Ben: Oh, you’re in trouble.

Amna: We may try to get those orders in now.

Ben: You don’t want to know my family name.

Josh: Yeah, Mitch, can you walk us through the process of – I know we’re not candidates. We’re not with the campaign, but can anyone order merchandise from you. How do they go about doing that? How does the visual of the logo and that come. Do they give it to you? How does that happen?

Mitch Cahn: Sure–we have tens of thousands of products on unionwear.com. You can select your products there and upload designs. Someone
will call you back with a price quote. It’s a relatively painless, quick process. During election season, it usually takes about three-four weeks for orders to be delivered.

Josh: Got to tell you guys, a lot of the rallies that I’ve been to, there are people outside those rallies especially Donald Trump rallies with tables of merchandise. That merchandise is actually made in China a lot of the times or overseas. They are, I guess you could say, counterfeit merchandise not made here, because the candidates made in America, such a big issue and important to them, they don’t want their gear made anywhere else. So if you see a table outside, most likely that’s not made in America. How will our viewers be able to find made in America campaign gear, Mitch?

Mitch Cahn: Usually just be going to the candidate’s websites. They all have web stores. The political parties also have web stores. Official web stores like demstore.com or gopshop.com where you can find the official merchandise.

Josh: Well, that’s the scene here in Unionwear at Unionwear, Newark, New Jersey. Back to you guys.

Mitch: Thanks.

Ben: Josh, thank you so much. We appreciate it. We’ll be expecting a strange random hat to be delivered at some point to this desk. We really appreciate it, man. I’ll be in big trouble. Make Colonomos great again. My real name is Colonomos.

Amna: Is that it?

Ben: It will be a bad thing. It wouldn’t even fit on the hat.

Amna: That’s going to take the whole width of the hat.

Ben: Yeah, it will go all the way around the hat.

Guess Whose Caps Are Outselling Donald Trump

April 22, 2016 | Posted by unionwear

At a nondescript factory near Branch Brook Park in Newark, workers have an easy way of gauging the popularity of any given presidential candidate.

As the only unionized American manufacturer of baseball caps, Unionwear has made logo-embroidered hats for candidates of all stripes.
If a candidate is doing well, his or her campaign might put in a large order for hats, said Mitch Cahn, president of Unionwear. Not so well? The campaign might cut back to putting in small orders on a week-by-week basis.

And just which hat has been popular? That would be “Drumpf,” the ancestral name of Donald Trump’s family, derisively parodied by British comedian John Oliver on HBO, which placed a large order for the hats.

“They put it on their website as a joke and sold way more than they expected,” Cahn said.

This small sector of Unionwear’s business has cropped up every four years since Al Gore’s campaign debuted candidate-themed apparel, Cahn said.

“There was really no way before the internet for these campaigns to sell their merchandise,” he said. “It’s not like they could have traveling stores everywhere they campaigned.”

That kind of campaign merchandizing raises money and turns voters into walking billboards – as well as building a connection with voters.
While the candidates differ on many things, they at some point have all ordered Unionwear hats, from Hillary Clinton to Ted Cruz to Trump, briefly.

And their detractors have ordered parody hats as well. Other Trump-related parody hats include “Make Donald Debate Again” and “Make America Gay Again,” Cahn said.

Unionwear stumbled into this customer category almost by default. Cahn had made a name for the business selling hats to high-end retailers like Nordstrom and The Gap. However, by the late 90s, almost all garment manufacturing had fled the United States for Asia.
The company held on until, lo and behold, they started to get orders simply because they were one of the few American, unionized manufacturers left standing after the brutal purge, Cahn said. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, they changed their name from New Jersey Headwear Corp. to Unionwear.

Anyone can order hats, whether it’s the official campaign, a political action committee, a union supporting a particular candidate, or state political parties.

Hence the hats Unionwear has made for the non-existent campaigns of Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Vice President Joe Biden, and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.

Cahn said he’s noticed a difference between the orders for Democratic candidates versus Republican ones: The Democrats want to include the “union-made” label, while the Republicans prefer that be left off.

All, however, realize their campaign regalia must be made in America.

Early in the campaign cycle, Trump’s now-famous “Make America Great Again” baseball cap came under scrutiny when some said the item was made in China. It wasn’t; the cap in question was a knock-off sold online commercially, not by any official party or Trump-connected organization.

Trump used Unionwear for about a month last fall, then switched to a California factory, Cahn said. All told, they provided the campaign with more than 20,000 caps.

Although political attire isn’t a huge slice of Cahn’s business, the spotlight a presidential election puts on American manufacturing drives new business, he said.

“Every presidential campaign cycle there’s a news story that a candidate had an item that was made in Bangladesh,” Cahn said. “Then companies say to themselves, ‘Hey, We should probably look into getting something domestically.'”

Kathleen O’Brien may be reached at kobrien@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @OBrienLedger. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

NJ News12 Explains Why Most Campaign Hats Are Made in NJ

April 22, 2016 | Posted by unionwear

TRANSCRIPT

Reporter: And with all the political buzz generated during this election season, one local company is helping those presidential candidates make a statement, one baseball cap at a time. Nadia Ramdass explains.

Nadia Ramdass: Clinton, Cruz, Sanders and Trump; while these political heavyweights may differ on their political views, there’s one thing they all have in common. When they want Made-in-America gear, they turn to this factory in the Garden State.

Mitch Cahn: Anyone whose looking for hats made in America is coming here.

Nadia Ramdass: Unionwear tells us they are the only unionized American manufacturer of baseball caps. The Newark-based manufacturers’ companies include the military, progressive companies and political candidates. Unionwear has made promotional campaign hats, bags and other items for many Democratic and Republican presidential candidates for the last 16 years.

Mitch Cahn: By getting a product made in America, candidates sending a message that domestic manufacturing is important enough to their campaign that they’re going to make it an issue on their campaign.

Nadia Ramdass: The folks here at Unionwear can also gauge the degree of success for political candidate based on the volume of purchase orders over time.

Mitch Cahn: If somebody’s selling tens of thousands of baseball hats and somebody is selling no baseball hats, that would be a sign of one candidate’s being supported more than the other candidate most likely.

Nadia Ramdass: Cahn and his workforce expect to produce over one million hats by the end of the presidential election season; an opportunity he’s proud to have.

Mitch Cahn: I think it’s great that we are considered a symbol of made in America. Newark in particular is one of the strongest manufacturing cities in the country.

Nadia Ramdass: Nadia Ramdass News12, New Jersey.

Presidential Elections Heat Up USA Made Gear Manufacturers

April 22, 2016 | Posted by unionwear

With the presidential election season heating up, demand for candidate promotional products is growing by leaps and bounds. One supplier that knows a thing or two about the election rush is Unionwear, a custom apparel and accessories facility based in Newark, NJ, that offers made-in-the-USA items by employees represented by New York City-based Workers United, Local 155. The company has been producing election merchandise since 1996, when it designed a few hats for the Clinton-Gore campaign.

Four years later, in 2000, the Gore campaign gave away baseball caps from Unionwear to online donors, and the volume skyrocketed to more than 100,000 pieces. In 2008, the company made every hat for the Obama and McCain campaigns, as well as both conventions. This year, Unionwear is producing merchandise for seven campaigns, including Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

During the fall – even before the real election time kicked into high gear – the company was completing about 2,500 units a week for the major candidates, a number that the organization expects will triple by this summer.  “Campaigns look for distributors who can handle everything from product development through fulfillment, including running the Web stores,” says Unionwear President Mitch Cahn. “Those distributors with experience in the political merchandise market have an advantage because they can project volumes and work on a week-to-week basis with their suppliers.

All campaigns vet their suppliers to make sure the goods are really made the way they’re labelled so merchandise doesn’t become a source of embarrassment.” In addition to headwear, Unionwear produces a number of different merchandise items, including all-over dye sublimation backpacks, tote bags and computer bags. They’ve even produced basketball jerseys and yarmulkes for Obama, what they called Obamakahs. “

There is a strong wave of USA made consumerism right now, but it shouldn’t be confused with patriotism,” says Cahn. ”While ‘American Pride’ sounds good, what actually causes buyers to connect with ‘USA-made’ are deep convictions about issues that support of domestic manufacturing can cure, including Worker Rights, Localism and the Maker Culture, which emphasizes the craft behind the product. Companies and campaigns are sensitive to being judged on their commitment to everything from helping rebuild our economy to the working conditions at vendors’ factories.”

Source: Counselor Magazine, Hail to the Chief Source: http://www.brandedgear.com/news/hail-to-the-chief/

Leader Bag’s Domestic Manufacturing Challenges

April 20, 2016 | Posted by unionwear

How did Leader Bag Co come to be?

Leader Bag Co was born from a love of beautiful design, and the desire to create a family-centered product that is truly missing from the marketplace.

When Meghan Nesher was pregnant with her son, Julien, she went shopping for a diaper bag that would work for both she and her husband. Coming up empty-handed, she opted for a Brooklyn Industries messenger bag; great for function, not so much for fashion. After a few months of use, she switched to the Fjällräven backpack; stylish and more comfortable, but not super functional. It was around this time that Meghan and her sister-in-law Liz Elliott, also a new mom, had their lightbulb moment: Why isn’t there a diaper bag that is beautifully crafted, simply designed and practical for both mom and dad?

Leader Bag Co :: Baby Business

Meghan, Liz and third sister-in-law Jess Nesher formed and funded Leader Bag Co as a family business in 2013. Since inception, we’ve enlisted the help of technical designer and manufacturing guru Jay O’Neill to bring our idea to life, and the uber-talented Lotta Nieminen to create our brand aesthetic.

Your brand is still only a year old, but what’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced so far?

As a team of four, we all bring different strengths to the table, but at the same time, we all have strong opinions about pretty much every aspect of the business. We value playing to each other’s unique talents, but it’s not always easy with lots of cooks in the kitchen. We are constantly perfecting our team’s balance.

Manufacturing in the US – we were totally warned over and over that this was going to be difficult. All of us are perfectionists, and we’re all demanding, and I don’t think Unionwear knew we’d be so high-maintenance. Lucky for us, they have tons of pride in their work and are always striving to exceed expectations – which they did and continue to do.

Best thing you’ve learned?

Mistakes are opportunities, either to learn from or to create something new.

Your signature diaper backpack, the Julien, is a slick answer to a universal need; what kind of R&D did you pursue in the early stages?

Since we were all new moms, we did a lot of research for ourselves in the diaper bag market. We spent time looking at bags we didn’t like – even bought a few to compare. At the same time, we collected non-diaper bags we liked too, mostly based on modern aesthetics and strong craftsmanship.

We made lists of all the gear we stuffed into our baby bags and measured everything to make sure we designed the right size storage. We talked through where we would take the bag and what features we might need; for example, a hook to hang it in a bathroom stall while you change baby at a restaurant.

We collected tons of images on shared Pinterest boards – including inspiration for the brand, the bag and the lifestyle we wanted to promote.

Jay led us through multiple rounds of bag sketches – all different flavors and styles – until we settled on one we liked. He took the sketches to technical drawings, collected materials and had samples made. We went through at least three rounds of samples with Unionwear before we got our pack just right.

We put our samples on everyone’s backs, asked for feedback and took photos. We were careful to remove any design elements that seemed “girlie”, and made sure the shoulder straps were long enough to fit a really tall dad.

What features make the Julien awesome for carrying baby essentials?

The fact that it’s a backpack is key. We are all about leaving both hands free for tending to baby and being fully involved in family activities. Style-wise, the backpack is better for dad too – he’ll feel much more comfortable than if he were asked to carry a one-shoulder bag.

Ultimately, the Julien is awesome because of its storage and organization. We loved the idea of doing a drop-in “pouch” that can house some basics like a change mat, a few diapers, diaper cream and wipes. This way, you can just reach in and grab it for a quick change while you’re out.

We also made sure there were tons of compartments for all the essential gear. Outside, there are four decent-sized pockets for easy access, plus a clasp for hanging your keys. We also added stroller straps and hooks so you can easily hang it on your stroller when you don’t want to carry. Inside, there are four baby bottle (or water bottle) pockets, a sleeve for the change kit (or even a computer or iPad), a zipper pocket, and a few other larger pocket compartments. It’s wipe-clean and very utilitarian, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the outside.

When you’re running on no sleep and wearing the parental uniform of tracksuit pants and an old t-shirt, why is a luxe bag like the Julien important?

Being a parent isn’t always an elegant, effortless job. Especially when you’re a new parent running on empty and feeling overwhelmed.

The Julien immediately elevates your look: leather and canvas with rose gold details, all mixed with fine Made in the USA craftsmanship. And it’s effortless – it looks great with everything, is comfortable and keeps you organized so you can focus on what’s important: being present for your kid. There is absolutely nothing more chic.

Who else is making rad baby-related carry? Who inspires you to be better?

No one, in our opinion, is making a great diaper bag we’d want to carry! We do like Fawn and Cub’s change mat, and Ida Ising’s change mat/bag design.

Accessory and clothing companies outside of the diaper bag industry inspire us to be better, and companies that are producing their goods in the USA: Clare Vivier, Emerson Fry, Mansur Gavriel, Marine Layer, imogene + willie, etc.

What’s next for Leader?

There is a ton of room for us in the baby market right now. We see a lack of simple but beautiful and useful design, especially in kid accessories – which creates a whole lot of space for Leader to play.

What do you personally carry daily? And why?

Our Leader bags, of course!

Slate: What Do Bush and Clinton Have in Common? Unionwear

December 7, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

TRANSCRIPT: Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, John McCain, Barak Obama, Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Jeb Bush all have something in common: the White House, yes, but also, this baseball cap factory in Newark, NJ, and more specifically, this guy:

“What they do is incredibly dexterous, I can’t do once what they do all day, which is take that thread and just throw it through a little hole.”

In 1992 at the age of 25 Mitch Cahn quit his job on Wall Street and bought a bankrupt hat factory in Jersey City at an auction sale. The idea was to make baseball hats for the fashion market including brands like the Gap. It was a trend at the time, but there was a hiccup. By 1994, American manufacturing was fleeing to cheaper manufacturing overseas and undercutting Mitch’s prices.

Mitch needed a new plan, so he turned to groups with vested interests in manufacturing goods in the US, and at the top of that list was political campaigns which is where this story gets interesting.

Cue James Carville: “Bush is buying up to $10 million in printing in Brazil. The president don’t buy American for his campaign.”

Making campaign gear offshore created the potential for a political scandal.

Cahn: “We are making hats for almost all the candidates, we are doing work for Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, Jeb Bush, If someone is having a hat made here, then they are making a decision to use American Labor.”

Campaigns aren’t the only clients who rely on Mitch’s US based factory.

There are socially complaint companies and non-profits who want to avoid any possible connotation that their products could be made in a sweat shop. The US Military. Promotional gear for labor unions and other companies looking to cobrand with the USA Made label. And the fashion industry.

But political campaigns are where Mitch has really dominated the market. Now located in Newark, his factory has been pumping out millions of hats from behind these doors, manufacturing for every Democratic primary candidate since 2000, as well as John McCain, George W. Bush, and Jeb Bush.

The bad optics of a made in China label aren’t the only thing driving political business to Mitch.

“The market is moving to small batch customization”, said Cahn. “Consumers are expecting to get products that they order in 2 or 3 weeks and you can’t wait 60 or 90 days for goods to come in on a ship. Your generally have to order a much larger quantity of goods when you bring things in from China, than you can domestically, and there is no way you can get things turned around a week or two.”

Which is key in the ever changing landscape of politics. Campaigns rarely have the luxury of folks ordering a set amount of products months in advance. They rely on quick turnarounds and flexible order sizes while replenishing their online stores. A bonus for the campaigns, especially those seeking much needed endorsement from a big union: Mitch also uses organized labor.

Once mostly the norm amongst textile manufacturers, Mitch’s pro union stance is a rarity these days, which is something he is proud of.

“Any difference in wages is made up of any increased productivity by our workers who are generally more content in their job. This was a union shop since the day we opened.
I believe over half of our people have been here for at least over 15 years.”

As manufacturing costs remain relatively flat in the US while rising dramatically in places like China, Mitch’s pro labor stance could become more prevalent. It is possible other manufacturers will follow Mitch’s lead and we’ll see more textile work come back to the USA. For now Mitch’s made in Newark factory is still producing the vast majority of the hats you see in the presidential campaign trail. But the most popular hat he has ever produced, you might have a guess if you have been tuned into the 2016 campaign season.

“Probably the hat we make the most here is the hat that says Make American Great Again which was made popular by Donald Trump and we are making that for the company selling the Made in USA version of that hat.”

Trump unsurprisingly uses a non union factory in California to produce the authentic version, but with all the polarization these days. It’s nice to know so many other politicians on both sides of the aisle can agree on thing. Newark is a great place to make hats.

ASI Radio: Election Year Bonanza for USA Made Products

December 2, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

This podcast can be heard on ASI Radio Strategy Sessions

Andy:  Welcome to the Strategy Session Podcast, where ASI’s editors provide tips and tactics to help promotional product professionals improve their businesses.  In every episode we go one-on-one with a business strategy expert to gather winning insights.  The conversations are sure to be insightful and entertaining.  This week on the strategy session podcast, I welcome David Bronson from Unionwear, which specializes in Made in the USA items. How are you today, David?

David:  I’m doing well, sir, how are you?

Andy:  Great.  So, we’re going to talk about Made in the USA items and the increased interest in that.  So, are you seeing more buyers looking to purchase items that are made domestically?

David:  Oh yes, we have seen a surge, not just in interest but in actual orders.  We’re helping dozens of new markets and industries co-brand with the most valuable brand in the world—Made in the USA. When we look at what’s driving sales, it’s not patriotism, it’s more strong convictions about issues that domestic manufacturing solves. Social compliance, for example.  When someone buys an American-made product, he or she knows the workers who made the actual product are regulated by the same labor, safety and environmental regulations that the buyer benefits from. A lot of companies market their own products as Made in the USA, and they want premiums that are also Made in the USA so they send a consistent message.

Andy:  So, as far as what’s driving the trend, you just talked about social compliance.  Is that something that’s different today from maybe five years ago?  Are people more interested in the issue of social compliance than they were before?

David:  Yes. And it’s not just social compliance. We’re the only union cap company in the country, so they know that our workers have been vetted, if you will.  The prices of imports have risen steadily by 20 to 25 percent for almost the past five years, while domestic pricing has remained flat.  So while Made in the USA is not yet as competitive with imports, the premium paid for Made in the USA keeps decreasing. A lot more customers are willing to pay a premium for social compliance and consistent messaging.

Andy:  What else is driving the trend?  What other factors are leading the surge in Made in the USA orders?

David:  Distributors ask me questions about the total cost of ownership.  Importing products has a lot of hidden cost—there are high minimums, pre-payments, inventory, duties, taxes, shipping from overseas, sampling, travel, even in-factory inspections.  We ask distributors to look at their client base to see if they have any clients that could appreciate co-branding with a Made in the USA label.  We’ve seen a lot of renewed interest in baseball caps because of the Presidential campaigns—the baseball caps such as the ubiquitous “Make America Great Again” cap.  And we all know who that is…

Andy:  Right.

David:  It’s a top item for political campaigns.  Bags are popular, too, because they don’t require as much labor relative to materials as other products. But really, when you think about the hat, they can still wear that visibly in jacket weather.  Candidates and supporters can wear that even though they’re wearing a suit at a rally or any kind of event, and it’s highly visible, because it’s on their head.  We’re getting a lot of that increased business.

Andy:  All right, how can distributors capitalize on this surge in interest in Made in the USA products?

David:  I think distributors need to look at who they know or who they’re doing business with that might really care about Made in the USA. We keep hearing that there could be eight billion dollars spent on political campaigns over the next year. That’s the largest number that we’ve ever seen in this country.  The battle is on, and it’s really been heating up, and for promotional items, they have to buy Made in the USA.

The traditional markets that we’ve had are Made in the USA for political or legal reasons. The Department of Defense buys these items for recruiting. Labor unions and government agencies…

Andy:  Sure.  Outside of government entities or political campaigns, what other buyers are most interested in items that are made in America?  What markets should distributors try to target with these types of products?

David:  The people that really are promoting themselves as Made in the USA or socially responsible include manufacturers like Lincoln, tech companies like Google, green companies like Whole Foods, non-profits like American Legion. We’ve grown what we call the small batch customization market the past year, where distributors want something turned around quickly, without large quantities or timing. Someone like Google has a need for it, and we have found a way to meet that need. They needed to be at a certain price, and we tweaked it a little bit.

One of the things at which we’re really strong is re-engineering products so that the Made in the USA label can work and be competitive.  It’s our niche. It’s the one misconception that everyone has: “Oh, everything’s less expensive in China.” It doesn’t have to be.  We can change a handle on a bag, take out a pocket or make it an inch different. We know how to make it work with our production department.

The distributors really get it, and they want something custom that is Made in the USA. We can say, what’s your budget?   If they tell me they can spend $2500 for this giveaway or $40,000 for a bag that’s going to be at a place like Whole Foods, whatever it may be, we work backwards.  We ask for the budget so we know what fabric to use; we know how much time it’s going to take, and we put that into the equation and come up with a costing, then share it with the distributor.  Really, we’re an extension of their sales and marketing team, working with them from the ground up and building a product to hit their budget.

Andy:  So what was Google looking for?  Why were they so interested in purchasing Made in the USA items?

David:  Google has a big push for it, which we love to see. A couple of the distributors that work with them, one in particular, just said they want to have as much made in the USA as they can for a program that they’re running.  Sometimes people who want Made in the USA don’t always live up to billing on it, because they may get some sticker shock on some items.

Andy:  Right.

David:  But then we have certain items where we say, “Wait a second! If we’re within 5 to 15 percent of the cost, why wouldn’t you buy Made in the USA?”  Think about the global impact, the carbon footprint when we’re making it here.  We’re not shipping it from a port overseas, bringing it all the way over here and then cutting, embroidering, or finishing.  Maybe the customer doesn’t have a Made in the USA or union requirement, but they just want something that’s totally custom. We’re doing dye-sublimation now, and we embroider flat panel; we can do things in embroidery so wide, so high, that a hoop can’t handle it. We’re growing with the times for those distributors that really care about something creative.

A lot of the people who care about Made in the USA like to say, “Wait a second, you actually do this here?” Yes, we’ve been here for 23 years.  We’re right outside of Manhattan by about 12 miles. It’s pretty cool!

Andy:  Very good.  Let me bring the conversation back to price. You touched on it a little bit.  Price does tend to be the big objection when it comes to purchasing Made in the USA items.  So, I’m gathering that this isn’t the objection that it once was, but how should distributors overcome that objection if they’re still receiving it in the market?

David:  It really is on a project-by-project basis. As I mentioned earlier, we re-engineer products to fit a budget so that Made in the USA can be competitive.  There’s a misconception that, because wages are lower in China, the price is always lower.  Imports actually have a much higher overhead than domestic goods. They have the inspections; suppliers have to deal with the language issues.  We redesign a product so it’s much less labor-intensive than the same product coming from overseas. Eyelets on a hat, for instance… Adding them is time-intensive and increases the cost.  Eliminate the eyelets, and you’ve saved 60 cents a hat. And if it’s a mesh-back hat, what are the eyelets needed for?

Goods made in China are usually designed with extra labor to save on materials. We do the opposite here. We want to save on labor and make it a better, leaner way. Our clients seem to be willing to spend just a little bit more for that Made in the USA label, especially when they see the quality of the product.

Andy:  But ultimately you’re seeing the price differential coming together a little bit; the difference is not as stark as it once was?

David:  Yes, it’s been about a 20 to 25 percent increase in the price of products being imported over the last five years, but domestic pricing has remained the same.

Andy:  All right, I want to go back to the Presidential election a little bit.  Obviously that’s big in the news right now and will be for the next year.  Do you foresee that the impact of that marketing power trickling down to the local elections that will take place over the next year, as well?

David:  That is one of the things that we’re revving up for, Andy, especially when we talk about the baseball caps. That’s where the marketing funds are being spent on this election. Candidates like Donald Trump have already shown in filing that they’ve spent more money on hats and shirts than on any other line items.

A number of candidates have been publicly called out for selling products that were imported. They’re self-correcting, and we’re seeing a lot of that increase.  Some of our competitors aren’t making Made in the USA anymore because the costs have gone up. We’ve stayed the same, and when you look at the baseball cap as just one item, it is the ideal item, because sizing isn’t an issue, either.  Wherever you go, you can wear it. It’s all about getting the candidate’s name out there and creating a bond between the wearer of the hat and the candidate. And what’s better than a hat?  You’re not going to see a t-shirt if they have a jacket over it. That’s still a popular item, but we’re hitting winter now.  The hat is like a walking billboard.

Andy:  So, I’m guessing that you’re kind of doing back-flips every time that Donald Trump shows up in his hat, huh?

David:  People say, “Why do you have this hat?” and “Why do you have that hat?” We try to explain to them that we’re a Made in the USA factory; we’re not taking any political stance.  We’re a promotional product manufacturer, one of the few that actually makes something.  We’re not just importing it and putting a logo on it.  Whoever wants to buy these products, especially for a political campaign, and they need them to be made in USA, we’re open arms for.

Andy:  There you go, David Bronson, the man who will make a hat for anybody.

David:  Well, I don’t know if we’d say anybody yet…  But in most cases, yes, we’ll do it.

Andy:  All right, David. Thanks very much for joining me today on the strategy session podcast! We really appreciate your time.

David:  Thank you very much for your time, and I hope to see you at the next show, Andy.

Andy:  Sounds good, we’ll speak to you soon.  This has been the latest episode of ASI’s Strategy Session podcast.  To listen to all of our podcasts, go to www.asicentral.com/podcast.

PPB Factory Floor Tour: Unionwear’s USA Made Hats and Bags

December 1, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

Original article and photos of factory tour found at PPB Magazine.

Unionwear stitches pride into every U.S.-made, union-made cap and bag.

Twenty years ago, textile imports and overseas manufacturing were on the rise, as companies sought ways to do more business with less overhead. But at the same time, Unionwear/Konvex (UPIC: MADEINUS) was founded with a focus to keep manufacturing and production on American soil. Now the New Jersey company is a proud supplier of caps, bags and military goods that are both U.S.-made and union-made.

“We produce more than 600 different kinds of hats and bags in 360 color combinations,” says David Bronson, national accounts manager at Unionwear. “The most complicated bag we make is a casualty care bag for the U.S. Army, which requires 75 steps and over 100 pieces to produce. It is a fanny pack that holds medical supplies for Army medics.”

The simplest product, Bronson says, is a ski hat. To produce the popular cap style, machines knit yarn into a tube and employees cut the tube and sew it to shape. Unionwear customers’ top picks from the supplier are brushed cotton unstructured hats, structured cotton twill hats and tote bags.

To ensure a quality-finished product that’s wearable, usable and long-lasting, Unionwear has invested in dozens of pieces of specialized equipment—each dedicated to a single step in the process of assembling hats or bags. Additionally, Unionwear team members are experienced in the manufacture of such items. “We require employees to have five years of industrial sewing experience before they are allowed to finish products in our facility,” says Bronson.

“Our experience in making both hats and bags has benefitted the production of both products,” he adds. “In addition, we have become experts in decorating unfinished hat and bag parts, which enables us to get much better quality, larger embroidery fields and lower prices.”

Read on to see how Unionwear pieces together its popular line of hats.

The caps begin as a roll of fabric, which is drawn out and cut for the quantity needed per order.

Each panel of the cap is then die-cut according to the type of cap it will be—structured, unstructured and fitted are a few styles Unionwear makes.

At sub-assembly stations, the panels are sewn together and eyelets are sewn in as well. Embroidery is done at the flat-panel stage, as on this back panel.

More than 100 embroidery machines run daily at Unionwear

Visors are produced and attached to the crowns of each cap.

Next, the trimming, cleaning and quality-control process begins.

Finished products are inspected again before being polybagged, boxed and shipped.

ABOUT UNIONWEAR

Founding date
1992

Principal
Mitch Cahn

Number of orders filled per year
5,000

Number of employees
140

Size of production facility
70,000 square feet
140 sewing machine operators

Dedicated production lines
Baseball caps
Promotional tote bags
High-end tote bags
Military packs
Bucket and boonie hats
Patrol caps
Duffels, attachés, messenger bags and backpacks

Types of specialized equipment
Hat taping machine
Robotic blocking unit
Sweatband-making machine
Double-needle hat taping machine
Bucket-brim stitching machine
Hydraulic die-cutting clicker
Tajima embroidery machines
AS Technologies roll fuser
Zipper
Automated web-cutting machinery
Programmable tackers
Programmable box stitchers
Roll-to-roll zipper-to-gusset attach
Self handle machinery
Roll slitter for making handles

Make America Great Again Hat Brought To You By Lean Manufacturing

November 11, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

This podcast can be heard on Lean Blog

TRANSCRIPT: Mark Graban:  Hi, this is Mark Graban. Welcome to Episode 234 of the podcast on November 16, 2015. Today’s guest is Mitch Cahn; he is president of Unionwear, a manufacturer of hats, bags and apparel in Newark, New Jersey. I first learned about Mitch and his company at the Northeast LEAN Conference recently, and I blogged about that. You can find a link to it at leanblog.org/234. Now, what caught my eye was the political hats they produce, including the famous red “Make America Great Again” hat that Donald Trump wears, among hats produced for other candidates. Beyond the surface of those hats is a fascinating story about competing instead of making excuses. As Mitch explains here in the podcast, Unionwear has been very successful, even though it’s producing in one of the highest-cost parts of the world. Unionwear has had to compete against imports from China and lower-wage southern states here in the US, and LEAN has been a major part of their strategy for improving productivity, reducing cost and being fast to market. Now, whether you work in healthcare or manufacturing, you’ll really love the story, the principles and the ideas behind Mitch, his company and his employees.

So, can you start off by introducing yourself and your company, Unionwear?

Mitch Cahn: Sure. My name is Mitch Cahn; I am the President of Unionwear. I started the business in 1992, and we’re based in Newark, New Jersey. We manufacture baseball caps and all sorts of headwear, and sewn bags, like backpacks, laptop bags, tote bags, garment bags, and messenger bags. Everything is 100% made in USA, and everything is made with union labor.

Mark Graban: What prompted you to start the business?

Mitch Cahn: I started the business in 1992. I bought a bankrupt baseball cap factory. Before that, I was working in investment banking, and I really didn’t like it. I wanted to be the client—I wanted to make stuff. So I spent about a year trying to come up with an idea to start a business, and then I came across this small baseball hat factory that had been foreclosed on in Jersey City, New Jersey, and I came up with enough money to buy the equipment at an auctions sale. I was going to do something different with that business—I was going to start selling baseball caps to the fashion industry, which was not a thing in 1992. You couldn’t go into The Gap or Macy’s and buy baseball caps back then, and I was actually successful very quickly. The idea caught on, and we picked up customers like Ralph Lauren, Nordstrom’s, and Izod, and we were helped by the growth of outlet stores at that time. However, by 1994, our entire business model collapsed because all of those clients started manufacturing in China. It happened really quickly; I didn’t see it coming. It was only a couple of years after Tiananmen Square; China became this giant in the market economy, and one of the first items they went after was baseball hats, because it’s almost all labor.

So we needed to come up with a new business model quickly, and around that time we came up with the idea of selling products specifically because they were made in the USA—going after the Made in USA market. We started with labor unions. We actually named the company Unionwear because unions were at that time one of our natural markets. We were the only union shop that made baseball hats. They were natural market for us, and then, by the year 2000, we expanded into political campaigns when the Internet made it possible for Al Gore’s campaign to raise money by giving a baseball hat away to every donor. We had that contract, and that’s been a big part of our business ever since.

We slowly looked into other markets that we found were buying American. After our LEAN transformation in 2007, we were competitive with non-union shops in the deep south. We could even compete with shops in Puerto Rico for military business—now that’s huge part of our business as well. In 2007, we bought a bag factory, and we did a LEAN transformation of that factory. Now that’s about half of our business. We’ve continued to expand our markets as the prices of imports continue to surge year after year, while our domestic pricing really remains flat. We’ve been able to break into more markets, particularly B2B markets that are looking at co-brands with the Made in USA label, which is really the most valuable brand in the world.

When someone gives a baseball hat or bag away, they don’t want that product to say “Made in China”. A lot of socially responsible companies give bags and hats away—Whole Foods, Google, and a lot of other companies—and they buy our products because the union label shows that the products were definitely not made in a sweatshop, and the Made in USA label shows that the products were not shipped halfway around the world. We’ve also been able to return to the fashion business over the last five years for the first time since the early 90s; we’ve been more competitive, and fashion businesses have been going for smaller batch manufacturing.

Mark Graban: It sounds like there’s a sense of purpose here, whereas a lot of industries and companies go with the flow. When business started going to China, all the lemmings said, “Hello, we have to go to China!” Even before you discovered LEAN, why was it important to you to stay in New Jersey?

Mitch Cahn: Well, I always reminded myself (and that’s the first ten years I was in business) that if I wanted to make money, it would have been a lot easier for me to stay on Wall Street. I didn’t want to make money; I wanted to make products. I find the manufacturing process extremely rewarding—I come into work, and someone meets me with an idea and leaves a sample. Then I have to figure out how to manufacture that sample, what machines to buy and what people to staff. To figure all that out and then go out in New York City and see people wearing and using the products is very rewarding. So, that was one part of it—I enjoy the maker experience. Second, from the outset I wanted to make sure that all of our employees were well compensated and had the same benefits as white-collar workers. Our union was the Ladies Textile Workers Union, and they said we were the first company (and we’re still probably the only company) that went to them before we started the business. We wanted to start a union shop because I knew we were going to give our employees the benefits that union workers would earn anyway. We might as well take advantage of the relationship that the unions had and use that for marketing purposes.

Mark Graban: I’m curious to hear more about LEAN. How did you first get introduced to the idea of LEAN?

Mitch Cahn: Around 2004, we faced with a lot of increasing expenses that were not really affecting the rest of the country. New Jersey was raising its minimum wage significantly ahead of the federal minimum wage. We were going to see our wages go up by about 30-40% pretty quickly. We also had big increases in health care at that time, and most of our competition was non-union shops in the South, and in right-to-work states. In most non-union shops, until ObamaCare, there was no health insurance offered, and we started to see the cost rise over a four-year period. We used to pay $50 a worker for health insurance, and by 2004, it was about $180. Then our real estate prices right outside the New York area started going up pretty quickly. So we couldn’t compete with the South, even for the Made in the USA work, and I was very concerned with our ability to remain a viable company. I started looking for a magic bullet, and I stumbled upon a LEAN 101 seminar that was being run by a New Jersey Manufacturers’ Extension Program (MEP). I took it, and it really blew my mind. For anyone who isn’t familiar with this program, it’s a national program, a one-day class that trains everyone from executives to factory workers on the whole LEAN process.

It puts people in a simulated factory making clocks. At the beginning of the day, everyone is using their own traditional methods to set up a production line and manufacture very simple clocks with the other executives—these are people who believe they know everything about manufacturing. At the beginning of the day, all these executives working together, with all their brainpower, might produce about 15 clocks an hour. Throughout the course of the day, LEAN principles are introduced one by one. Then they do another simulated flow, where the manufacturers take the principle they just learned and apply it to this mini-production line, and their volume increases. From the beginning to the end of the day, this group of executives will increase their production from 15 clocks to 300-400 clocks an hour! It really opened up my mind to the possibilities in my factory. I still remember when I came back, and all I could see was the opposite of LEAN. I was so angry! I was angry at everyone who worked for me for not seeing that they were doing non-value-added work all day, completely forgetting that I had just gone ten years without seeing any of that myself.

Mark Graban: Yeah, it becomes hard when you suddenly see waste and problems that you would have looked past before.

Mitch Cahn: I just wanted to do everything at once, and of course you can’t do that, but I did go back to MEP.  I hired them for a small project while they submitted a grant proposal to the New Jersey Department of Labor to do a LEAN transformation for us. I brought in the consultant from NJ MEP, and he met with our plant manager at the time and me. The plant manager was very old-school, a traditional manufacturing production line person with about 30 years’ experience, and he was very skeptical of the consultant. All he wanted to know was how he was going to make our machine operators sew faster, and the consultant said, “I can’t do that. I don’t know anything about sewing, to be totally honest with you.” The plant manager asked, “How are you possibly going to improve our production here?” and the consultant said “Well, I’m only going to focus on what they’re doing when they’re not sewing. I worked in food companies, paint companies and car companies, and it’s always the same things. All I do is look for those things, and I train your workers and your management to eliminate those things through designing the factory differently and training people differently.” The plant manager was not convinced, but I brought the consultant in anyway, and we started with a really simple project. He went for the low-hanging fruit, and he took a look at our embroidery operation. We run about 12 embroidery machines here in the middle of our production process where we embroider our own hats and bags.

He spent a day observing that process and asked me, “How long do you think your machines are down between orders?”  I remembered this from the spreadsheet that I looked at when I bought the machines, and I said about 20 minutes. He’d made a videotape, and he said, “Well, how about an average of about 2 1/2 hours?”  I didn’t believe him. I watched the videotape, though, and I saw that the machines were indeed down as he’d said. In the past, I’d walked around and saw everyone working hard and running around, so I couldn’t understand why the machines were down for so long, and this was something that was going on 15 to 20 times a day—that was the average number of orders that we are pushing through the embroidery department a day. It turned out to a very simple problem with a very simple solution.

Our embroidery manager was a Chinese National who spoke English, and our embroidery operators were mostly from Spanish-speaking countries; they spoke a little English. The manager gave the instruction to go pick out threads of certain colors for an order. From the time she gave the instruction to the time they brought back the proper cones was about two and a half hours. Why? Based upon the instructions from the customer, she told the staff to look for, say, dark gray and dark green. The employees would go out to the shelves of closed white boxes with the thread color names on them, and the names were things like cement, and soup and canary and so on. They had to open box after box to find the right color thread. If they were lucky, it was the thread the embroidery manager had envisioned in her mind. If they weren’t lucky, they had to go back and return with another armful of threads. Then they would have to count out the threads—threads were shipped to us in boxes of 12, and our machines had 20 heads on them. So they’d count them out, they’d have to find the beginning of each cone and they’d have to bring them to the machine, put them on the machine and thread them, and then go back to get the next color. So the consultant’s first project was to get rid of all the color names and get rid of the boxes. We put everything in giant zip-lock bags. We color-coded our factory thread department like a rainbow, and we referred to everything by color number. We took all the threads and inventoried them in units of 20 to correspond to the machines’ 20 heads. Bags would come out to the table; the embroidery machines would be loaded. When it was over, cones would go back into the bags and be put back on the shelf. The whole process went from about two and half hours to 15 to 20 minutes pretty quickly, and we were easily able to see the power of LEAN in that department. We were sold.

So we went ahead, we got the grant, and we spent about two years putting in every facet of LEAN into the factory. We put in 5S, we put in all sorts of Kanban, we did single cell flow, and every one of these steps was really a phenomenal success for us. The 5S is something that we do every year, and it’s something the owner really needs to be involved in. For example, no one who works for me is going to throw a machine away. I’ll say, “Hey, we’re never going to use that machine! No one is going to pay for it, I just looked on eBay; we’re just going to sell it for scrap.” No one else will say that. So I need to actively show up, ready to get dirty for a couple of days.

Mark Graban: You mentioned the MEP programs, and for people who aren’t familiar with that, it’s a federally sponsored and funded program, but the MEPs operate at the state level. Some of the MEPs are doing work with healthcare organizations—the Ohio MEP, which works under the name TechSolve, is working with both manufacturers and healthcare providers. You talked about your healthcare costs going up. If you went into a hospital, I know you would see the parallels of why it takes so long between cases in the operating room. You talked about sewing—we’re not asking the surgeons to work faster, we’re just trying to maximize the amount of time during the day they can actually be surgeons, and that makes a huge difference in healthcare. Hopefully it’s going to help get costs under control. There are big parallels there.

Mitch Cahn: Yeah, there are a lot of parallels between healthcare and manufacturing, and coincidentally, while we were going through the first LEAN transformation my first son was born. The consultant, Dave Hollander, who shepherded us through this whole process, always tells how I came back from the hospital with all these ideas—it was Mt. Sinai in New York, which was already implementing LEAN—that I wanted to put in our factory. We still use a lot of those processes, like color-coded folders. There are so many LEAN improvements that we made, but one of the first principles that they taught us was to get rid of tables. Tables are evil! Unless you are using the table for a particular job, it’s going to be filled with garbage, on top and underneath, because that’s human nature. I noticed that in hospitals, if anybody needs a table, they get a rolling cart, so we gave everybody their own rolling cart. We designated places on the cart for everything that they need, and we gave them a small personal space on the bottom for their own stuff. We still use that, and apart from the productivity gain, the amount of space we gained was great.

Mark Graban: There is a good general LEAN principle: put everything on wheels! Be flexible so you can rearrange cells, rearrange the layout, make changes as customer demand changes to create different capacity—that’s definitely a great lesson. There was a letter that you had posted at the Northeast LEAN Conference. Could you talk a little bit more about the idea?  I think a lot of manufacturers still don’t get the idea that they can’t create value by cutting labor costs. You have to redeploy labor in creating more value. Can you talk about what that’s meant for you and the company?

Mitch Cahn: Okay, we have a single-minded focus on creating value. Once the people who work here understand what that means, then it becomes a mindset, and it becomes very easy to implement any of the features of LEAN. We are here to create a finished product that needs to go right into a box and get shipped to a customer, and that customer will only pay for the value that we added to that product. So, if we’re making products, and we’re putting them in boxes, it’s inventory. We’re not creating value at that time; we’re just creating inventory. If we are creating work in process because people are working faster, that’s not finished product that we can sell. We’re not creating value. Now, if we are able to improve our productivity so that we’re creating a lot of value, and because of that I lay people off, I’m not actually creating value by doing that, either. Creating value means if I have a 100 people, and they used to make 1,000 hats a day, and now they can make 2,000 hats a day, and then 50 people can make 2,000 a day, I’m creating value by taking those other 50 people and creating another product with them. That to me is creating value. One of the keys to our success is our ability to measure the amount of value that we create. We have a process that we use. We do a lot of custom products—baseball caps are a very cookie-cutter process, that’s only about half of our business. The other half is bags, and every bag that we make is different. One day we’ll be making tote bags, the next day we’ll be making messenger bags. They’ve got totally different value street maps, and they’ve got totally different plant layouts.

So the first process for us is to figure out by doing a traditional time study, what is the cycle time of this product? What is the amount of time that the worker is actually adding value to the product, just picking two pieces of fabric and sewing them together? Or cutting that fabric—that’s really all we do that adds value. Everything else we do, such as looking for thread, waiting for instructions from a manager, redoing work or building up work in process, that’s not adding value. So if we take an attaché, and we know that attaché has 20 minutes of time that’s spent just adding value to that product, we can then measure our output in terms of minutes of work created against the amount of time that our workers worked. So we say, based on our time studies, our workers created 10,000 minutes of work today, but based on our time clock, they worked 20,000 minutes. That means they spent 50% of their time creating value. We measure this all the time. It enables us to get our pricing in check, enables us to know if we’re meeting our margins just by walking on the floor and seeing if there is work in process or if there are people moving around.  It’s created goals for everybody to know whether the shop is LEAN and creating value or not.

Now, when we started this process, before we did any LEAN stuff, we were adding value only 20% to 25% of the time. The rest of it was all spent on non-value-added work. By the end of the process, we were adding value about 65% of the time, so our productivity almost tripled. It was difficult for most of our line workers to grasp the concept of what we were trying to sell to them, so we changed our measurement from percentage of time working efficiently (or adding value) to hours per day, and then people finally started to get it. We said, hey, you know, believe it or not, you’re only spending about two hours a day sewing, but you’re getting paid for eight. We’re asking you to spend about five and half to six hours sewing and get paid for eight, and they got it. That actually seemed like a great bargain to them. We were able to retrain everybody on LEAN principles; we made our own videos highlighting about 50 different non-value-added tasks that were regularly performed in the factories, so we could help people identify them.

Mark Graban: There are many things that are interesting and impressive about your story, but I think one of them is your involvement as an owner. LEAN is not just an operations strategy; it really is a key piece of your business strategy—it’s how you’re running the business and trying to be successful in the long term.

Mitch Cahn: Yeah, I think if I were to describe my job, I’m in charge of LEAN here. Everything else kind of takes care of itself, but LEAN is a battle against human nature, and it constantly needs improvement. If you’re doing LEAN properly, you need to continually improve, because if you are able to clear up one bottleneck, there’s going to be another bottleneck created somewhere else. You clear up that bottleneck in sales, and there’s going to be a bottleneck in production. You clear up that bottleneck, then you find a bottleneck in order processing. So I leave the top line growth up to the salespeople, and I take care of the growth and capacity by implementing LEAN principles throughout our entire organization.

Mark Graban: At the conference you displayed hats you’d produced for Jeb Bush and for Hillary Clinton, and there was the bright red, very familiar Donald Trump “Make America Great Again” hat. I was wondering if there were any stories, particularly behind the Trump hat. I’m curious about getting that business and trying to deliver a large number of hats relatively quickly. Are there any stories that you can share about that?

Mitch Cahn: As for Hillary Clinton’s campaign, we have been doing work for a company called Financial Innovations for decades. They’ve been managing the Democratic candidates for President for quite some time, ever since Bill Clinton. We have a very strong relationship with them. One of the reasons our company is regularly chosen to produce products for candidates is that we can produce goods quickly. Candidates don’t buy for the long-term—a lot of the primary candidates right now don’t know if they’re going to be around in two or three weeks, so they’re ordering every week. Instead of ordering 25,000 hats at a time, they’re ordering 2,000 or 3,000 hats a week. They need people who can turn things quickly, and because of our LEAN principles we can do that. We don’t have a lot of work in process on the floor, so we’re able to rush orders for people who need them. Another reason is that we’re a union shop, and the union label assures political campaigns that we’ve already been vetted for any sort of social compliance issues. That’s a smaller issue for the Republican side, though we have done a ton of Republican work. We did all of the work for the John McCain campaign, and we’re doing about four candidates right now. They just ask that we don’t put a union label inside the hat, for whatever reasons.

The second reason that we’re chosen is that we have a reputation. The candidates don’t want to get bitten by going to unknown manufacturer and finding out the products were actually made overseas. Our reputation as a military contractor says to them that we have been vetted by the military, and military goods need to be made domestically—not just all the labor but even all of the components for those products need to be sourced domestically. So I think that’s why they come to us. We never work with the campaigns directly; we always go through advertising agencies. The particular agency that we worked with on the Trump hat came to us from the Made in USA Foundation. They were concerned after they’d seen these hats being made overseas and contacted that agency, who told them that they don’t need to put “Make America Great Again” on a hat that says Made in China.

Mark Graban: Right. It’s interesting that of the three hats that were on display, the Trump hat was the only one that did not have Made in the USA embroidered on the brim. I think some people misunderstand LEAN as being about cost, when the primary thing is about improving flow, as you’ve described so well here—reducing setup times, improving productivity as a way of being more responsive to customers. Those are really powerful things, and they can lead to being cost-competitive, as it seems you’ve done at Unionwear.

Mitch Cahn: Yes, it has, and in many ways that you wouldn’t anticipate. LEAN has developed our dedication to measuring time and doing value stream maps for nearly every product that we manufacture. Our production process is data-driven. Over the last five years, much of our business has been re-shoring, where companies, usually in the fashion or promotional industry, have been getting products made overseas but are starting to reconsider. In the past, our hats might have been ten times as much as the hat made in China, but now they’re only 25% or 30% more. Companies are much more likely to switch now, so we’re constantly getting products that have been manufactured overseas, and we’re asked to quote on them for domestically made product. We look at the way these products are made overseas, perhaps in China, and it doesn’t make any sense to us. Take a tote bag for example—they throw labor at it to save on materials. It’s a dead giveaway when I see a tote bag that has a seam running along the bottom. If you cut that tote bag in two pieces, you’re going to get a lot more bags out of the roll of fabric than if you cut one big piece, but it adds a lot of labor and makes it a weaker bag. It makes no sense unless you’re trying to save on materials.

So we take these products and we reengineer them in a way that is LEAN and uses the least amount of labor possible. Between our productivity increases and our ability to reduce the amount of labor that goes into the product, we’re able to compete on many items, particularly in the fashion business.

Mark Graban: I really appreciate you being able to share your story both at the Northeast LEAN Conference and for taking time to talk with me here today, Mitch. Again, my guest has been Mitch Cahn, President of the company, Unionwear. Mitch, I was wondering if you want to talk about the company’s website, or ways people can learn more about your business, or if you have any final thoughts for the listeners.

Mitch Cahn: Sure, our website is unionwear.com. We have over 40,000 Made in USA products that you can search for and order directly on the website. You can contact me through the website if you have any questions about LEAN. I love helping other manufacturers who are just getting started in the LEAN process. I just want to warn you—it’s never a good time to start, but once you start, you will be rewarded. You’ll never finish, but you will be continuously improving.

Mark Graban: Well said, and thank you, Mitch, for that final thought and for being a guest here today on the podcast, I really appreciate it.

Mitch Cahn: You’re welcome. Thanks.

Introducer: Thanks for listening. This has been the LEAN Blog podcast for LEAN news and commentary updated daily is at www.leanblog.org. If you have any questions or comments about this podcast, email Mark, at leanpodcast@gmail.com.

Alternet: Buying America-Many Ways To Express Values with your Wallet

August 12, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

Buying America: The Many Astounding Ways You Can Express Your Values with Your Pocket Book
Shopping can be an ethical act.
By David Morris / AlterNet July 27, 2015

“Every person ought to have the awareness that purchasing is always a moral – and not simply an economic – act,” Pope Francis announced early this year. How can we spend our money as if our values matter?

In some sectors and for some values this is fairly easy. Food is an obvious example. Those who want to protect the environment and human and animal health will find abundant labels guiding them to the appropriate product: USDA Organic, free range, hormone free, grass fed. For those who want to strengthen community, shrink the distance between producer and consumer and support family farmers a growing number of grocery stores label locally grown or raised.

For those who want to support farmworkers as well as farmers, however, little guidance is available. The recently launched Equitable Food Initiative and Food Justice Certified labels hope to fill this gap. The former identifies food that has been harvested by workers paid a fair wage and laboring under safe and fair conditions. The latter offers three tiers of certification covering farm, processor and vendor/retailer. Only farms have been certified.

As for grocery stores, we can easily identify those cooperatively or locally owned. Going one step further along the supply chain we can use the Restaurant Opportunities Center United (ROC)’s Diners Guide to Ethical Eating downloadable app to identify restaurants that treat their workers well. Extra credit is given to non-chain businesses. To earn a favorable rating the restaurant must pay its non-tipped workers at least $10 an hour and tipped staff at least $7 an hour, grant all employees paid sick days and enable internal promotion.

The ethical consumer who wants to patronize a locally owned retail store in general can visit Independent We Stand and download its mobile app. Or go to AMIBA and BALLE to find a list of independent business alliances in over 100 cities many of which have hundreds and even thousands of individual member businesses.

There are few guides to locally and rooted manufacturers. But 3-year-old San Francisco Made offers an excellent model, interconnecting and nurturing its 325 member manufacturers located in that city.

The vast majority of products we purchase will come from regional and national firms. One can easily check to see if the company is American and sometimes that will be necessary even when we think we know from the product’s name what nationality the company is. As Roger Simmermaker, author of How Americans Can Buy American and My Country ‘Tis of Thee points out, “Swiss Miss is American (based in Menomonie, Wisconsin) and Carnation is owned by the Swiss.”

For those who want to go beyond where a company is headquartered to who owns it, a list of companies owned by their employees is available from the National Center for Employee Ownership.

Finding American made products as opposed to American corporations requires more legwork. Almost 8 in 10 American consumers say they prefer to buy American made products according to Consumer Reports. (Another survey found that for Americans ages 18-34 the percentage drops to 4 in 10.) Patriotic buying has gained considerable cache in the last few years and is beginning to change corporate behavior.

Consider this story of Florida orange juice. In 2007 Pepsi and then Coke began to mix oranges from other countries with Florida oranges. Florida’s Natural, an agricultural cooperative owned by 1100 growers, whose motto is “we own the land, we own the trees, we own the company” added a logo to its packages sporting an American flag and the words “Product of U.S.A.” For a few years Pepsi and Coke thought price would trump homegrown but in early 2012 the Tropicana Products division of PepsiCo began to proclaim in print ads, “Grown, picked and squeezed in Florida,” (Florida’s Natural responded with its own new tag line: “All Florida. Never imported. Who can say that?”)

A 2013 survey of more than 200 U.S.-based investors interested in the luxury sector, found 80 percent of them concerned that the reputational risk associated with offshore manufacturing is beginning to offset the cost savings for luxury goods manufacturers. After Ralph Lauren proudly unveiled its new uniforms for the U.S. team for the 2012 summer Olympics it was discovered that every piece of the uniform was made overseas. A considerable public backlash led the company to promise to make the U.S. uniforms for the 2014 Winter Games from USA components.

Mitch Cahn, the CEO of Unionwear, a Newark, New Jersey clothing manufacturer told John Oliver about why both Democratic and Republican candidates buy his company’s hats. “Both want to demonstrate their commitment to made in USA. Plus, whenever one of their vendors messes up and sources something from overseas or switches. When they get caught, which they invariably will, it’s going to cost them so much more money to fix the problem, backpedal, apologize, change their message, that it’s easier and cheaper to just patronize clean shops.”

Finding out if a product is made in the United States is easy. All imports must carry country of origin information on the outside of the package. Finding domestic products that are largely made of domestic components, however, may be more challenging.

How American Is That American Product?

Even if we buy American made how much of the value of the product is actually made in America? For automobiles, textiles, wool and fur products the law requires disclosure of the percentage of a product’s domestically produced content.

The 1994 American Automobile Labeling Act (AALA) requires all automobiles and trucks to prominently display a sticker showing the percentage of its value made in the United States. The AALA has several shortcomings. For one, it does not distinguish between Canadian and U.S. production. It does not take into account where the profits go (e.g. is the company foreign owned). Finally, it allows the “content percentages to be calculated on a “carline” basis rather than for each individual vehicle and may be rounded to the nearest 5 percent.”

The more sophisticated Kogod Made in America Auto Index, released annually by American University incorporates the (AALA) but adds seven further criteria: site of body, chassis, and electrical parts manufacturing (50 percent); site of engine production (14 percent); site of inventory and capital expense allocation (11 percent); site of transmission production (7 percent); site of assembly labor (6 percent); site of research and development (6 percent); and finally, where the profits in each aspect of the transaction go (6 percent).

In 2014 the Ford F-150 truck, the best selling vehicle in America topped the Kogod charts with 87.5 points out of 100.

As a general rule, automakers are more likely to build larger vehicles with higher profit margins in the U.S. and smaller ones overseas. The Kogod index seems to bear this out. The F-150 and Chevy Silverado score in the 80’s while the Chevy Spark and Ford Fiesta have scores of 15.5 and 19.5 respectively.

Aside from cars and textiles and furs, no U.S. supplier needs to identify where the product is made or its components. But if the company boasts that a product is “Made in the USA” or “Made in America” it must “contain no – or negligible – foreign content” according to regulations issued by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the product’s final assembly or processing must take place in the United States.

Nevertheless, the buyer who sees a Made in America sticker must still beware. The FTC investigates several complaints a year, almost all submitted by manufacturing competitors and the vast majority end in a settlement with no civil penalty. The civil penalties themselves are modest. California has its own higher and more rigidly enforced standard. No component of a product advertised as Made in the USA can be imported. In 2011 California’s Supreme Court ruled that the company Kwikset could be sued for using the label on one of its locks because the screws in it were manufactured in Mexico.

Americans don’t like to be misled by faux patriotic corporate advertising. As Consumer Reports notes, “Readers who have sent us complaints seem most irritated by foreign-made products whose makers have patriotic names (American Mills, Americana Olives, Great American Seafood, United States Sweaters, the U.S. Lock company) or whose packages have flag-waving slogans (“true American quality”) or symbols (pictures of the flag, eagle, Statue of Liberty).”

Over 90 percent of shoes and clothing sold in the United States is imported. One will almost always pay more to purchase Made in the USA but often their quality is far superior. If you buy a Brooks Brothers suit, 70% of which are made in Massachusetts, or tie, 100% of which are made in New York or shirt, 15% of which are made in North Carolina the quality is first rate and the clothes last considerably longer than cheaper imported items.

More than 97 percent of American denim jeans are made abroad but you can still find American made denim. In the 1990s Lawson Nickol was working for a U.S. jeans manufacturer who like almost all other jean manufacturers decided to move production to China. He resigned and in 2002 with his son BJ Nickol founded the All American Clothing Co. They started manufacturing their own clothing in 2007. Unique among jeans manufacturers, their customers can enter a code and trace their jeans back to the farm that grew the cotton.

One of the new firm’s biggest challenges was finding suppliers. “The apparel industry has lost 85 percent of cut and sew people in the USA since 2002 when China became king”, Nickol notes. He’s had to pay more for their materials and labor which makes their clothes more expensive which Lawson concedes but proudly adds, “…I buy a lot of higher cost products that are made in the USA in order to support tax base, jobs, SSN, police, firemen, hospitals, infrastructure, military, freedom, etc, etc. I don’t buy foreign jeans and help to support labor atrocities, child labor, poor manufacturing quality, give money to the foreign governments…”

Despite higher input costs his jeans prices are still competitive with denim giants like Levis. Why? “One of the things we don’t do a lot of is marketing and advertising,” says Nickol. American Clothing sells 95 percent of its products online. Nickol adds, “We don’t have as big of margins.”

Sluggish wages in the United States and soaring labor costs in countries like China, coupled with the growing realization of the costs inherent in the rigidity of long supply chains and the potential for product piracy, has made it increasingly possible to buy American in many sectors. Whirlpool already makes 80 percent of the products it sells in the U.S in its U.S. plants and it prices them competitively. In 2000, it manufactured most of its front-loading washers in Germany. Now the company is moving that production back to its Ohio-based facilities. “On the one hand, U.S. labor costs are often higher than in other countries,” says Whirlpool’s Casey Tubman. “But when you look at the higher productivity for American workers and consider the fact that it’s very expensive to ship something as big as a refrigerator or washer, we can quickly make up those costs.”

There are several useful web sites that identify American made products. (Look here, here, here, here, and here.)

Going Beyond Buy America

The same Consumer Reports 2013 survey that found that 78 percent of us prefer to buy American products also found that other values were equally or more important to us. Ninety-two percent preferred products from companies that give back to the local community; 90 percent preferred companies that treat their workers well; 82 percent prefer firms that express public support for causes we believe; 79 percent prefer a company that engages in environmentally friendly practices.

If you are one of the 90 percent who care how companies you want to buy from treat their workers one good indicator is whether the product is made with union labor. For clothing you can look for the UNITE label (the union created from the merger of the Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees and the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union). Those seeking to buy a specific car made by union members can find a list here. Those seeking web sites that offer extensive links to union made products can go here and here.

Those wanting to know more generally about the character of the company with whom they are doing business can check out whether it is a Benefit Corporation. This new type of corporation is required to consider its impact not only on shareholders but also on workers, community, and the environment. Benefit corporations are required to make available to the public an annual benefit report that assesses their overall social and environmental performance against a third party standard. Twenty-eight states currently permit a corporation to become a Benefit Corporation. A list of Benefit Corporations by state is available here.

Certified B corporations are Benefit Corporations which must achieve a minimum verified score on an Assessment by B Lab, a 501©(3) organization. Recertification every two years is required against an evolving standard. A list of Certified B Corporations can be found here. About 60 percent are American corporations. Each year B Lab publishes a list of its top Certified Benefit Corporations by size and category. Companies are broken out by midsized, small, micro enterprises and sole proprietorships and are graded based on their environmental, worker and community impact.

For example, in 2014 King Arthur Flour and New Belgium were among the top rated B Corporations on labor issues. The 200 year old King Arthur, a company of 388 workers at the busiest times of the year, has a minimum hourly starting wage for full-time workers of $11.25 an hour. New Belgium’s lowest wage for non-temporary workers is $12 an hour. King Arthur Flour and New Belgium are 100 percent employee-owned companies. Both have profit sharing plans. At King Arthur Flour low income employees receive a heavily subsidized Community Supported Agriculture shares.

As Stephen Lurie at Vox observes, despite its high rating, King Arthur Flour puts its USDA organic label on the front of its packages and its B Logo on the back.

Assessing the character of a company is complicated and by its nature incomplete. Some might want to know how willing companies are to pay their fair share of taxes to sustain our public schools and roads and colleges. In 2015 Bloomberg compiled a directory of 299 companies detailing how much of their total profits they’ve stashed abroad to avoid taxes. Bizvizz has an ambitious but spotty downloadable app allows you to use your phone to take a picture of a brand and discover what tax rate the corporation that makes the product pays and in many cases, where its political contributions go.

Often those who want to make ethical purchases will have to assess which of the values they embrace are more important. For example, what do we buy when the organic farm treats its workers poorly? Would you choose a conventional tomato picked by well-treated workers than a local heirloom variety harvested by oppressed workers as the food writer and activist Eric Schlosser declared he would? Or would you choose the tomato that stresses the environment? A Toyota Camry is among those vehicles with the highest percentage of its components coming from the United States. But its plants are not unionized and the company’s profits do not stay in the United States.

With much fanfare Walmart has launched a new Buy America initiative. Would you now shop there given that Walmart’s policies may have single-handedly resulted in the outsourcing of hundreds of thousands of U.S. manufacturing jobs and the erosion of U.S. workers wages? Or that more than 20 years ago it launched a similar campaign and began hanging “Made in America” signs in its 750 stores until NBC’s Dateline offered significant evidence the initiative was “more an advertising gimmick than a substantial plan.” At the beginning of its current initiative Walmart publicized a contract with 1888 Mills, a Georgia towel maker to produce American-made towels for the company’s stores. But 1888 Mills, which has an overseas workforce of some 14,000, will be adding only 35 jobs low paid jobs at its U.S. factory to meet Walmart’s multi-year purchase agreement.

Sometimes different values can lead customers to the same supplier. As I noted above, both Democrats and Republicans buy their caps from Unionwear in election years to demonstrate their support for domestic jobs. John Oliver calls it “electoral jingoism”. But CEO Mitch Cahn points out one key difference between the political parties on their values beyond domestic sourcing, “Democrats brag about their products being union made and the republican don’t want anyone to find out about it.”

Wanted in Global Markets: The “Made in USA” Label

August 12, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

When they came face to face with an angry broker whose business was threatened by their new website, Maker’s Row, Matthew Burnett and Tanya Menendez knew they were on to something.

“He came to our office and threatened to shut down the site because that was his livelihood,” Burnett said in the Brooklyn, New York, office of Maker’s Row, the site they believe is making it easier and cheaper for entrepreneurs get their products made in the U.S.

“It was a telling sign of the disruption that was going on in the industry,” Menendez said. She recalled the incident had left her looking both ways when leaving the office. “This is like a big guy, who comes in … huge presence. We felt really uncomfortable, but it was also really enlightening for us.”

Despite the decline in U.S. manufacturing, a “Made in the USA” label is still desirable in global markets.

It brings a certain assurance that products are made according to high production standards, using safe materials. Over the years, that label has also become synonymous with high labor costs. But the cost of foreign labor is on the rise, and it’s beginning to level the playing field for U.S. manufacturers.

Finding a domestic manufacturer, however, can be time consuming. Most brands don’t like to share manufacturing information because they don’t want to help their competition. “It was almost taboo to ask,” Burnett said.

Plus, many older manufacturers don’t have their own websites, which only compounds the domestic sourcing challenge.

One way to find a manufacturer is to get help from a broker, if you can find one. They aren’t always easy to track down. If you can afford the broker costs, you buy a list of manufacturers that might be able to make your product. It’s a system Burnett found troublesome.

“Some of these consultants were basically hoarding the information and charging $5,000. It’s impossible. Five to $10,000 for any small business?” Burnett said. “I would never pay that. I couldn’t pay it. I’m paying $10,000 for maybe my first run of products.”

Before starting Maker’s Row, Burnett founded two small businesses. He studied design in school and was lucky enough to design watches for Marc Jacobs and DKNY. It was a dream since his childhood in Detroit, where he saw his grandfather make watches.

In 2007, he began to market his own brand, Steel Cake. Using connections he’d developed through big designers, he had product made in China, which presented hurdles. Larger orders get priority, and it can take months for shipments to arrive in the U.S. So Burnett had to build inventory without knowing whether it would sell.

He also couldn’t afford to have staff on site to monitor the process for quality control. One costly mistake was enough to put him out of business, “There’s this manufacturing error that occurred in about $35,000 worth of lost merchandise. I couldn’t take it,” Burnett recalled. “It ended up being just too much of a gamble being so far away from my manufacturing facilities.”

So he got out of watches and began crafting leather goods, sourcing materials and manufacturing locally in New York City. His new brand, Brooklyn Bakery, began to take off, but the search for manufacturing help took months, diverting his attention from designing, marketing and selling goods.

Enter Menendez. She’s a marketer with experience at Google and Goldman Sachs. She not only helped Burnett find manufacturers, but also helped build a direct-to-consumer business, bringing Brooklyn Bakery to shopping sites and eventually building a consumer site of its own.

Together, Burnett and Menendez saw the power that local production brought to small business owners.

“We’d get the shipment back within a few days, and it was amazing. It was a very low-risk, very profitable type of business,” Menendez said.

Burnett said that managing the size of orders was the key to their success. “When I was producing domestically, I wasn’t producing a thousand of each product. I was producing a dozen of each product. That means that I’m able to test the market. See what works and press the pedal to the metal, when I see that something is moving.”

As they met with manufacturers and other entrepreneurs, especially the start-ups selling their wares on websites like Etsy and Shopify, Menendez and Burnett began to realize that the search for manufacturing help was a constant issue. So they decided to do something about it.

Maker’s Row went live in November of 2012. Within months, they learned it wasn’t just small businesses that needed help finding U.S. manufacturers. The problem was much bigger than that.

“Big brands are having this problem, too. We see that Wal-Mart is signing up. We see that Burberry is signing up. These are the kings of industry that we’re looking at here,” Burnett said. Big brands using Maker’s Row was a big surprise “because if anyone was to have this information, we thought that it would be the big brands.”

Supporting local manufacturers

The timing is certainly good for Maker’s Row.

There’s a lot of confidence among U.S. manufacturers these days. A recent survey by the Boston Consulting Group revealed that 16 percent of the 252 U.S. manufacturers who responded are reshoring jobs from China, a 20 percent jump from a year ago, and more than double the number from February 2012.

Back then, Burnett and Menendez were just beginning to wonder how they could find enough manufacturers to make Maker’s Row a success. It was a tough sell at first, but they began to list manufacturers on the site for free, which turned out to be a smart move because some of them saw almost immediate results.

“People started to see leads before Maker’s Row asked them to sign up for their service,” according to Mitch Cahn, who runs Unionwear, a maker of baseball caps and bags in Newark, New Jersey. With leads in hand, it became much easier for Burnett and Menendez to sign up other manufacturers.

“We get several inquiries a day from Maker’s Row,” said Cahn, who bought a former baseball cap factory in nearby Jersey City in 1992, when, he said, there were about 400 baseball cap manufacturers in the United States. These days, he said, there are only about four but he believes the playing field for domestic manufacturers has leveled because the cost of labor overseas is climbing dramatically, making “Made in USA” more of a reality, than a lofty ambition. “There had been interest before but it was really a lot of talk,” he said. “Now that the price differential is so much smaller, people are saying, ‘Hmmm, I may spend another 20 percent to get a product ‘Made in the USA.’ Five years ago, it might have been another 100 percent.”

Local governments have gotten on board to help Maker’s Row, hoping to help their local manufacturers at the same time. They’ve had a large number of sign-ups in Los Angeles and Chicago, too. In about two years they’ve signed up approximately 5,000 manufacturers. A good thing, because there are also about 50,000 brands using the site to look for help. Subscriptions to Maker’s Row begin at $25 a month.

Shifting manufacturing

It’s a similar story at Genil Accessories in Brooklyn, where Gina Bihm and her staff make bow ties and neckties for the likes of Vineyard Vines and Marc Jacobs. Despite her big-name clients, Bihm says she also tries to help the little guy create a sample, if they can find her. “I don’t turn away no one. No one,” she said.

Bihm said the recession that began in 2007 nearly put her out of business. At the time she was shipping out about 20,000 pieces per year. In 2008 and 2009 work was hard to come by. Her entire staff, once numbering about 20 full-timers, was cut to zero. She needed a loan to pay the rent on her work space. She still has only 11 full-time employees, but she says business is better than ever. With bow ties back in vogue, they’re making about 4,000 units per week now, and that was before she found Maker’s Row. They’re practically around the corner from each other, but Bihm only signed onto Maker’s Row during the summer. “The phone calls doubled. I picked up about seven new customers and they all came from Maker’s Row,” Bihm said.

The 2-year-old website also works for entrepreneurs, including Andrew Kessler, Ari Klaristenfeld and Alexa Nigro, who began making their scarf product, called the “Scough,” with built-in carbon breathing filters, by hand in Brooklyn last winter. Within months they were having trouble keeping up with demand. They looked two months for a manufacturer before trying Maker’s Row. Two weeks later, they’d found MCM Enterprises, nearby in Brooklyn.

“We found that it was cheaper for us to manufacture here in the U.S. than it would be for us to produce in China or India,” Klaristenfeld said.

“We’re starting to send thousands and thousands of Scoughs to China which is this really interesting anomaly, where we’re making something in Brooklyn and, uh, it’s going to China because there’s brand, quality assurance that a lot of Chinese manufacturers can’t get,” Kessler said.

Those are the same reasons that Burnett believes Maker’s Row has seen some foreign businesses come online looking for U.S. manufacturing. “We’re looking to change the rule of thumb,” Burnett said. “We’re changing that mindset by showing people where they can produce and manufacture locally because this is a global shift right now.”

—By Andy Rothman.

Upstart: Makers Movement Panel Discusses “USA Made” Cost Myths

July 12, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

by Teresa Novellina for Upstart Business Journal

When Matthew Burnett, founder of Makers Row, launched his own watch line in 2007, he followed the advice he had always heard and went straight to Asia to get them manufactured, believing the costs would be less.

But because he was a new brand, and wasnít placing huge orders at once, he ran into problems that hurt his business.

“My largest order was the factory’s smallest order and I was always getting pushed to the back of the line,” Burnett recalled in a panel talk at Northside Festival Friday. That problem led to first a much-improved arrangement domestically (more expensive, but ultimately worth it), and eventually his New York City-based startup, Maker’s Row, an online network of U.S. factories that he launched in November 2012 and which connects designers with domestic factories.

His company tapped into a trend toward made-in-the USA brands, one that panelist Mitch Cahn of made in the USA manufacturer Unionwear says has little to do with patriotism but plenty to do with buying local, environmentalism, and a growing demand for better workers’ rights. His Newark, N.J.-based manufacturing firm, which supplies unions, government organizations and others with apparel and accessories, now has fashion designers calling.

“There are a few misconceptions about Made in the USA,” Cahn said. Among them: that the cost of raw materials is more expensive here. In fact, prices on imported textiles have been rising 25 percent a year for the past few years, and “we’re in the ballpark” on textile prices in the United States.

Meanwhile in China, labor costs are on the rise, and workers are demanding better conditions as well.

While labor costs remain higher here, one cost-saving strategy he has found that works is what he calls “lean manufacturing,” which he says makes sure that people involved in labor spend as much time as possible on activities that improve the quality of the final product, and represent an improvement “that your customer is willing to pay for.”

Jeff Sheldon, the founder of Ugmonk, is a graphic designer whose e-commerce company uses American suppliers. It’s pricier, but he saves in the long run. For instance, because the brand uses a screen printer domestically (for which they paid more), they’ve built a relationship that means when he has a rush order, Ugmonk gets pushed to the front of the line.

“I think itís really true that you get what you pay for,” Sheldon said. “I’ve learned that if you ask for cheap or the best quality you’re going to get one or the other.”

Source: http://upstart.bizjournals.com/entrepreneurs/great-mistake/2014/06/13/makers-movement-founders-talk-made-in-usa.html

Making Made in USA Easier: New Tools for Designers To Find Contractors

July 7, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

When they came face-to-face with an angry broker, whose business was threatened by their new website Maker’s Row, Matthew Burnett and Tanya Menendez knew they were on to something.

“He came to our office and threatened to shut down the site because that was his livelihood,” said Burnett in the Brooklyn, New York office of Maker’s Row, the site they believe is making easier and cheaper for entrepreneurs get their products made in the U.S.A

“It was a telling sign of the disruption that was going on in the industry,” adds Menendez. She recalled the incident had left her looking both ways, when leaving the office. “This is like a big guy, who comes in … huge presence. We felt really uncomfortable, but it was also really enlightening for us.”

Despite the decline in U.S. manufacturing, a “Made in the USA” label is still desirable in global markets.

It brings a certain assurance that products are made according to high production standards, using safe materials. Over the years, that label has also become synonymous with high labor costs. But the cost of foreign labor is on the rise, and it’s beginning to level the playing field for U.S. manufacturers.

Finding a domestic manufacturer, however, can be time consuming. Most brands don’t like to share manufacturing information because they don’t want to help their competition. “It was almost taboo to ask,” Burnett said.

Supporting local manufacturers

The timing is certainly good for Maker’s Row.

There’s a lot of confidence among U.S. manufacturers these days. A recent survey by the Boston Consulting Group revealed that 16 percent of the 252 U.S. manufacturers who responded are re-shoring jobs from China, a 20 percent jump from a year ago, and more than double the number that were doing so back in February 2012.

Back then, Burnett and Menendez were just beginning to wonder how they could find enough manufacturers to make Maker’s Row a success. It was a tough sell at first, but they began to list manufacturers on the site for free, which turned out to be a smart move because some of them saw almost immediate results.

“People started to see leads before Maker’s Row asked them to sign up for their service,” according to Mitch Cahn, who runs Unionwear, a maker of baseball caps and bags in Newark, New Jersey. With leads in hand, it became much easier for Burnett and Menendez to sign up other manufacturers.

“We get several inquiries a day from Maker’s Row,” says Cahn, who bought a former baseball cap factory in nearby Jersey City back in 1992, when he says there were about 400 baseball cap manufacturers in the United States. These days, he says there are only about four but he believes the playing field for domestic manufacturers has leveled because the cost of labor overseas is climbing dramatically, making “Made in USA” more of a reality, than a lofty ambition. “There had been interest before but it was really a lot of talk,” he says, “Now that the price differential is so much smaller people are saying, ‘Hmmm, I may spend another 20 percent to get a product ‘Made in the USA.’ Five years ago, it might have been another 100 percent.”

Local governments have gotten on board to help Maker’s Row, hoping to help their local manufacturers at the same time. They’ve had a large number of signups in Los Angeles and Chicago too. In about two years they’ve signed up approximately 5,000 manufacturers. A good thing, because there are also about 50,000 brands using the site to look for help. Subscriptions to Maker’s Row begin at $25 a month.

Shifting manufacturing

It’s a similar story at Genil Accessories in Brooklyn, where Gina Bihm and her staff make bow ties and neckties for the likes of Vineyard Vines and Marc Jacobs. Despite her big name clients, Bihm says she’ll also tries to help the little guy create samples, if they can find her, “I don’t turn away no one. No one,” she says.

Bihm said the recession which began in 2007 nearly put her out of business. At the time she was shipping out about 20,000 pieces per year. In 2008 and 2009 work was hard to come by. Her entire staff, once numbering about 20 full-timers, was cut to zero. She needed a loan to pay the rent on her work space. She still has only 11 full-time employees but she says business is better than ever. With bow ties back in vogue, they’re making about 4,000 units per week now.. and that was before she found Maker’s Row. They’re practically around the corner from each other but Bihm only signed onto Maker’s Row during the summer. “The phone calls doubled. I picked up about seven new customers and they all came from Maker’s Row,” Bihm said.

Those are the same reasons that Burnett believes Maker’s Row has seen some foreign businesses come on line looking for U.S. manufacturing. “we’re looking to change the rule of thumb,” Burnett said, “we’re changing that mindset by showing people where they can produce and manufacture locally because this is a global shift right now.”

MSNBC Gives Bag Designer “USA Made” Makeover at Unionwear

July 2, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

The MSNBC show Your Business helps Yadabags find domestic manufacturer Unionwear to produce their bags more cost effectively than China.

TRANSCRIPT

JJ Ramberg, Host: We first met Janet a year ago, at a conference for entrepreneurs in Nashville.

Janet Goodman: My business is YadaBags. YadaBags is a purse that’s designed to carry medical equipment for people with chronic disease, so people with diabetes can put all the paraphernalia in it and actually find it.

Host: She came to us to ask a question on camera about getting funding for her business. Once she felt she got the design right she hired someone to do a small but costly production run to see if people would actually buy the bag. After getting some sales, she was optimistic and ready to produce more. But when she looked into manufacturing in China which she thought would be cheap she found that she would have to make a thousand bags to get the right price. That put her in a chicken or egg situation.

Janet Goodman: I am not willing to risk retirement, if I didn’t get orders and I have to put money in to get product that I know is going to sell I would do that in a minute.

Host: With an order for a thousand bags unlikely at this point, we set out to find a solution for her chicken or egg problem by doing what she thought was impossible, finding a domestic small batch manufacturer that was cost effective. And we found just the people to help us out. Janet, I want to introduce to you Matthew and Tonya.

In front of Unionwear’s Newark Factory

Janet Goodman: Hi Matthew, hi Tonya.

Host: They are the founders of Maker’s Row.

Matthew: So Maker’s Row is an online market place and we connect businesses, small businesses and big businesses with American manufacturers to produce products here in the United States.

Host: Maker’s Row did a little homework for us, within introduction to Mitch Cahn the President of Unionwear. They helped us surprise Janet and Fred with the tour of the Newark, New Jersey based factory where the order minimum is 300 pieces. A much easier pill to swallow than a thousand units being made overseas. Mitch.

Mitch Cahn: Hi nice to meet you.

Janet Goodman: Hi nice to meet you also Mitch, this is quite a place you know.

Host: Let’s see your bag. Tell us how much it cost to make this one.

Janet Goodman: For putting it together was $60 and not including material. It was labor only.

Host: Okay.

Janet Goodman: Right, okay.

Host: That’s your bag.

Mitch Cahn: Okay here is our bag. (Produces redesigned bag)

Janet Goodman: Oh very nice.

Host: And the total cost to put it together?

Mitch Cahn: Around $47 and the material should cost no more than about $7 or $8.

Janet Goodman: Total?

Mitch Cahn: Yes.

Janet Goodman: Everything?

Mitch Cahn: Yes.

Janet Goodman: Oh I could love him.

Host: Would you like to give him a hug?

Janet Goodman: Totally.

Host: Mitch explained that the approach to manufacturing in China were labor inexpensive is less efficient than the way they tackle a bag like Janet’s here in America.

Mitch Cahn: We took almost about 60 steps in manufacturing the bag and that’s how we are able to lower the cost.

Host: With all of these resources at hand we gave Janet a challenge. Pull this all together to re-launch YadaBags by November. Just in time for American diabetes month.

Host: So this was a big day.

Janet Goodman: Oh wow, really big. I think it’s really moving in the direction that I envisioned.

Host: What did you learn?

Janet Goodman: Oh wow, I think the biggest piece for me if feeling like I have some support in developing that and somebody to think with as opposed to trying to figure all this up, all of this stuff out myself which I can’t do because I don’t know a lot of it.

Host: But by the way you have done an amazing job. With no manufacturing experience, no design experience and you created a bag.

Janet Goodman: I did, right I got there.

Host: You didn’t yet create a business.

Janet Goodman: Well, I should have got there, but didn’t get there.

Host: Right you got a bag business.

Janet Goodman: I got a bag.

TechTarget: How Tech Helps Domestic Textile Factory Compete Globally

July 1, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

American apparel manufacturer Unionwear is surviving the global marketplace thanks to its Rootstock cloud ERP system.

Apparel is increasingly an overseas business. Studies show that only about 5% of manufactured apparel is produced in the United States. Custom apparel and promotional product manufacturer Unionwear, based in Newark, New Jersey, is one such manufacturer that has sustained operations in the United States. While it employs approximately 120 unionized workers in a high-priced industrial corridor, Unionwear has been able to compete globally partly because it has embraced cloud ERP through its Rootstock software.

The company’s journey into the cloud has its roots in lean manufacturing. Mitch Cahn, Unionwear’s CEO, and his team knew that in order to succeed in a challenging environment, they needed to differentiate themselves from their competitors’ business practices. Lean manufacturing — the methodical approach to eliminating waste and reducing manufacturing costs — was the silver bullet the company needed.

As part of its continuous improvement, Unionwear was ready to adopt an ERP system designed for its manufacturing environment. After a search, the team found that Rootstock Corp.’s cloud ERP software was scalable enough to accommodate Unionwear’s operations and production needs, according to Cahn.

The cloud-based ERP approach afforded fast and easy implementations for the company, with no major IT infrastructure investment needed and a built-in ability to easily expand. This was the perfect fit for Unionwear’s long-term goals: increase customer satisfaction while maintaining a stable expenditure of resources for the manufacturing and production architecture.

A glimpse into the future reveals business apps in the cloud

While the Rootstock platform came with a wide variety of ready to use modules, Unionwear’s focus was on using its inventory management. The company’s primary raw material fabric and varied customer demands require that Unionwear use a multitude of colors and types of fabric, Cahn explained. It is not only critical to plan precisely the amount of material required for production, but to know exactly what is available for production at any given moment. The industry is, in general, a low-margin business. Any time spent looking for material or having extra material laying around that may never meet the needs of a future customer does not fulfill Unionwear’s mission of creating value.

Efficiency was also a critical component of Unionwear’s cloud strategy — specifically, efficiency in finished goods inventory. Unionwear only measures efficiency in the production of finished goods, meaning products that are ready to ship to — and bring value to — the customer. Any material and work in process does not equate to customer value, according to Cahn. With Rootstock, the company was able to calculate the efficiency of its manufacturing effort based on internally-developed standards that measure when the product is complete and ready to ship.

Unionwear’s future plans continue to explore the possibilities of cloud ERP and what it can do to make manufacturing leaner. For example, the company is considering using Rootstock’s reporting tools and utilities, as well as different cost accounting methods. The capability is there for the ERP system’s usefulness to grow as the company grows; as Cahn said, this is “a tremendous advantage and opportunity.” With its ERP in the cloud, Unionwear is poised to be a global competitor for years to
come.

Jim Romeo (www.JimRomeo.net) is a freelance writer based in Chesapeake, Virginia.

Follow SearchManufacturingERP on Twitter @ManufacturingTT

Source: http://searchmanufacturingerp.techtarget.com/feature/Unionwear-becomes-global-competitor-through-Rootstock-cloud-ERP

Upstart Journal: Makers Movement Panel Discusses “USA Made” Cost Myths

July 1, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

Upstart Journal
by Teresa Novellina

When Matthew Burnett, founder of Maker’s Row, launched his own watch line in 2007, he followed the advice he had always heard and went straight to Asia to get them manufactured, believing the costs would be less.

But because he was a new brand, and wasn’t placing huge orders at once, he ran into problems that hurt his business.

“My largest order was the factory’s smallest order and I was always getting pushed to the back of the line,” Burnett recalled in a panel talk at Northside Festival Friday. That problem led to first a much-improved arrangement domestically (more expensive, but ultimately worth it), and eventually his New York City-based startup, Maker’s Row, an online network of U.S. factories that he launched in November 2012 and which connects designers with domestic factories.

His company tapped into a trend toward made-in-the USA brands, one that panelist Mitch Cahn of made in the USA manufacturer Unionwear says has little to do with patriotism but plenty to do with buying local, environmentalism, and a growing demand for better workers’ rights. His Newark, N.J.-based manufacturing firm, which supplies unions, government organizations and others with apparel and accessories, now has fashion designers calling.

“There are a few misconceptions about Made in the USA,” Cahn said. Among them: that the cost of raw materials is more expensive here. In fact, prices on imported textiles have been rising 25 percent a year for the past few years, and “we’re in the ballpark” on textile prices in the United States.

Meanwhile in China, labor costs are on the rise, and workers are demanding better conditions as well.

While labor costs remain higher here, one cost-saving strategy he has found that works is what he calls “lean manufacturing,” which he says makes sure that people involved in labor spend as much time as possible on activities that improve the quality of the final product, and represent an improvement “that your customer is willing to pay for.”

Jeff Sheldon, the founder of Ugmonk, is a graphic designer whose e-commerce company uses American suppliers. It’s pricier, but he saves in the long run. For instance, because the brand uses a screen printer domestically (for which they paid more), they’ve built a relationship that means when he has a rush order, Ugmonk gets pushed to the front of the line.

“I think it’s really true that you get what you pay for,” Sheldon said. “I’ve learned that if you ask for cheap or the best quality you’re going to get one or the other.”

Source: http://upstart.bizjournals.com/entrepreneurs/great-mistake/2014/06/13/makers-movement-founders-talk-made-in-usa.html

Newark Mayor Baraka Launches Manufacturing Initiative

June 30, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

Hon. Mayor Ras J. Baraka:  We need economic growth and job creation.  We need a trained workforce to fill those jobs.  We believe that manufacturing and advanced manufacturing is a large component of that growth.  We are going to organize our resources to begin investing and expanding our manufacturing base and training our workforce to accept those jobs.  In the first week of May we are hosting a Manufacturing Conference partnering with Mitch Cahn of Unionwear,  NJIT and the NJ EDA to help identify best practices, develop a point person from City Hall and to help grow the manufacturing industry in our city.  We are also asking that every major anchor corporation, business and public entity begin to identify their partners that they do business with and begin with the help of economic incentives from this city to encourage manufacturers to relocate their shops to Newark as we have a stronger infrastructure than any other municipality in this region for manufacturing and advanced manufacturing.  We want them to come here, develop here, grow here and we will train our residents for these jobs.

CIO Magazine: Cloud Based ERP, MRP Give USA Lean Manufacturer a Boost

June 30, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

A couple of years ago, Unionwear, a clothing and accessories manufacturer-based in Newark, N.J., employed a patchwork of systems to run its business.

Headquarters used Sage Pro accounting software to manage the books, while individual plants used Microsoft Access and Excel spreadsheets to track manufacturing activities. Unionwear, a 120-employee company, lacked a unified, enterprise-wide system.

“We were running a number of different systems — and leaving a lot of gaps,” said Mitch Cahn, president of Unionwear.

Calculating Costs for Each Run

One such gap was the lack of a perpetual inventory system. Unionwear updated its inventory balance periodically rather than continuously. As a result, the company needed to conduct a cycle count every time it wanted to begin a production run, Cahn says.

In addition, the manufacturer didn’t maintain a database of costing information, so cost calculations had to be done over and over again.

Duplication of effort was one issue. Integration, or the lack of it, was another. The absence of enterprise automation meant that shop floor scheduling didn’t take manufacturing capacity into account. And there was no integration with Unionwear’s Salesforce.com CRM system.

Against this backdrop, Unionwear decided to deploy an ERP system. The company looked into an on-premises approach, but determined that such a move would require a significant hardware upgrade. Cloud-based ERP became the solution of choice. In addition to the upgrade cost avoidance, the idea of having a system that would be updated regularly instead of annually was another selling point, according to Cahn.

Unionwear’s experience with Salesforce — the company went live on the cloud-based CRM in 2013 — was another factor.

“One of the main things that sold us on cloud was the Salesforce Platform,” Cahn said.

The company’s next step was to look into ERP offerings built on that platform. Unionwear selected Rootstock Software’s manufacturing cloud ERP and went live on the software in January 2014.

Alan Pelz-Sharpe, research director, Social Business Applications, at 451 Research, said Salesforce, and CRM, in general, has become a common route companies take to broader automation. CRM contains the names, addresses and order details of a company’s customers, creating a foundation for additional applications.

“Building your application infrastructure around those records makes logical sense for a lot of people,” Pelz-Sharpe said.

Made in The USA

Unionwear manufactures and embroiders caps, backpacks, workwear and other items in the U.S., bucking the general trend of off-shore textile manufacturing. The company launched in 1992, when Cahn purchased the assets of London Cap Co., a Jersey City, N.J.-based baseball cap contractor. Unionwear has since brought on board the machinery and personnel of other failed garment manufacturers, most recently acquiring the assets of a backpack and bag manufacturer in 2007.

Nate Herman, vice president of international trade at the American Apparel & Footwear Association, said Unionwear isn’t alone in its domestic focus, noting that a few apparel companies now concentrate all their manufacturing operations in the U.S.

“There has been, in the last three years, a small resurgence in domestic manufacturing in apparel after many years of decline,” Herman said. “We see the trend continuing.”

Unionwear, for its part, has adopted a regimen of continuous improvement and lean manufacturing to make a go of domestic manufacturing, cultivating a niche in small-batch customization. The ERP system helps enable this strategy.

“The automation is critical,” Cahn said. “Every dollar of indirect labor that automation replaces is savings that goes right to the bottom line.”

Small-batch customization provides a favorable outlet for domestic manufacturers, since overseas manufacturers typically focus on churning out larger lots of items.

Herman said companies such as Unionwear that specialize in short-run production can be much more responsive to customers if they make their products in the U.S. as opposed to Asia or other offshore locations.

But cost efficiency in this line of business can be hard to achieve.

“Small-batch customization comes with a high level of overhead and that overhead is basically order processing and all the paperwork associated with an order,” Cahn said.

The amount of paperwork to process an order is the same, whether an order is for 12 units or 12,000 units, Cahn noted.  Automation, however, reduces the paperwork burden, increasing efficiency and making smaller orders economically feasible.

Cahn said the task of creating a bill of materials might take one hour of time for a $50-per-hour engineer to complete.  Automating the bill of materials creation process eliminates that cost. And while saving $50 is not a big deal on a $50,000 order, the impact is much greater on a $500 job.

“I probably wouldn’t touch the $500 order before the automation,” Cahn said.

Cahn said most of the Rootstock components it has rolled out thus far, along with some Unionwear-built features, have made small-batch customization more economical.

Inventory Impact

Specific areas of ERP impact include stock control. Rootstock has imposed a structure on the inventory management task, according to Cahn. The software’s inventory feature gives Unionwear a “really good grasp” of inventory levels and needs in real time at any point in time, according to Cahn.

As for financial impact, Rootstock has contributed to a $225,000 reduction in inventory in its first year of use, Cahn said. He said apparel manufacturers tend to order more material than then need to ensure that they don’t run out of fabric when filling an order. The danger, however, is that a manufacturer will order far too much material, which will turn up in the year-end inventory count. At Unionwear, the Rootstock inventory module helps the company keep a close watch on the materials it orders.

Improved inventory control effects other functions within Unionwear. For example, feedback from the inventory system helps Unionwear adjust its costing methodology.

“We have a much tighter control over all aspects of our business,” Cahn said.

ERP also provides a greater degree of flexibility. Raw material data in the Rootstock database lets Unionwear tap into existing resources rather than purchase new supplies. For instance, if a new order requires a certain color of thread that Unionwear lacks, it can search the database for a close match.

“In the past, if we didn’t have it we would order it,” Cahn said. “Now, we can look through raw materials and make substitutions.”

Unionwear continues to rollout Rootstock modules as well as its own Salesforce-built features. Cahn said the company is easing into Rootstock’s scheduling and capacity planning module. That capability will let the company look at new orders and, based on existing capacity, determine whether the orders can be produced on time. If the timeframe can’t be met, Rootstock’s “drag and drop” visual interface lets planners move capacity around from one production line to another or reschedule earlier orders to
meet the delivery target, Cahn said.

“I can keep moving orders around until we are confident we can produce everything we have sold on a timely basis,” he said.

Unionwear is also using a reporting feature it created using Salesforce’s reporting engine. The company’s production efficiency reporting capability pulls production and costing information from Rootstock and labor hours from Unionwear’s payroll system to gauge worker efficiency.

Also in the works: a mobile technology deployment for production floor workers. The plan is to let workers use any Wi-Fi enabled device to report production data including yield estimates and actual fabric usage. In addition, shop floor personnel will be able to view work instructions, scheduling, and other information on the mobile apps, Cahn said.

John Moore

John Moore has written on business and technology topics for more than 20 years. His areas of focus include mobile app development, health IT, cloud computing, government IT and distribution channels.

Source: http://www.cio.com/article/2892380/enterprise-software/how-cloud-erp-gave-a-manufacturing-operation-a-boost.html

USA Made Promotional Products: 3 Cheers for the Red, White and Blue

June 30, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

How to make the most of selling products made in the U.S.

By Brendan Menapace for Promo Marketing Magazine

There are plenty of products that were made in America that we should all be proud of—Bruce Springsteen, baseball, movies where Nicolas Cage navigates an elaborate scavenger hunt made up of national monuments to find a historic treasure. The list goes on, but what stands out the most are the many promotional products manufactured in the U.S., and the business opportunities they present. By providing products made domestically, distributors can create business with new clients. Here’s how.

OPEN NEW DOORS

Aside from providing jobs in the U.S., domestically-made products can give distributors the chance to work with clients that otherwise may not have been available. David Bronson, national accounts manager for Unionwear, Newark, N.J., said that many companies only will purchase products that are made in the U.S. He named nonprofit, government and military organizations as potential clients that [usually] purchase domestically. “More and more, large domestic manufacturers, food processors, tech companies, and other corporations that promote themselves as ‘Made in USA’ are requiring their logo gear to also be consistent with their domestic mission,” he advised. “Unions and political campaigns generally have domestic sourcing requirements, which will boom in the upcoming presidential primaries and general elections.”

Bronson, who has been a distributor for a decade, added that using items made in the U.S. makes sense from an economic standpoint. “Domestic manufacturing is beginning to make sense economically in a number of areas,” he noted. “In particular, small-batch customization allows buyers to save on overhead, such as sampling, tech packs, sourcing, prepayments and lead times, that can dwarf the unit costs of importing fewer than a thousand units.”

Tim Boyle, president of JournalBooks/Timeplanner Calendars, Charlotte, N.C., explained that buying domestic ensures the protection of U.S. labor and manufacturing laws. “The U.S. has much stricter laws and regulations regarding safety and compliance,” he said. “When distributors sell U.S.-made products, they do not have to worry as much about factories using child labor or unsafe materials.” He added that distributors should still evaluate a company’s code of conduct and compliance safety standards. “Compliance and safety are top concerns for end-users,” he said. “Although the standards for compliance are improving globally, it becomes much trickier for distributors once they go offshore.”

HANDLE INTERNATIONAL COMPETITION

Some distributors may be hesitant to choose domestic products over imports, as they say they can often get products from overseas at a cheaper price point. However, importing products can come with a high price tag that some distributors might not take into account. Factors such as duties, fees, shipping and port delays can throw a monkey wrench into the process and end up costing more than it than saves.

Bronson also explained that some clients would even be willing to pay more for domestic products. “Even when import pricing can still result in significant savings, there are many end-users who will still pay a premium to co-brand with the most powerful brand in the world—Made in USA,” he said.

Boyle he believes the global competition is a good thing for U.S. companies. “It’s hard to compete with importers on price, but not impossible,” he said. “We are constantly exploring new ways to increase manufacturing efficiency and decrease material costs, and we can often be competitive with import items, especially custom projects. Price is only one aspect of the equation.”

The best way to compete is to produce a better product. Bronson said that many imported items are made with cheaper materials and unnecessary labor, which creates an inferior product. “A common example is tote bags coming out of China that have a seam along the bottom,” he detailed. “This adds labor cost to the bag and also weakens the bag at its biggest stress point.” He explained that the sum is there because cutting large panels into smaller pieces provides a greater yield for the manufacturer.

“If a bag has $40 in materials in either China or the U.S., but it costs $4 to sew it in China vs. $8 in the U.S., the end difference will be $44 versus $48,” he continued. “And that $4 difference will be more than eaten up by shipping, fees and duties.” Bronson added that the gap between the price of imports and domestic products has decreased every year for the last six years, and he believes the trend will continue.

GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT

According to Consumer Reports, when given a choice between a U.S.-made product and an identical item sourced overseas, 78 percent of Americans prefer the American product. Boyle and Bronson are optimistic about the demand for domestic products.
Boyle said that he sees the demand for U.S.-made items himself. “My opinion is that the demand for U.S.-made products has never been stronger,” he said. JournalBooks, which has manufactured in Charlotte, N.C. since 1971, has taken steps to keep up with the increased demand. “We do whatever it takes to keep up with demand, whether it is adding the necessary equipment or adding members to our team. JournalBooks has a modern, 90,000-square-foot facility with plenty of extra capacity for additional growth.”
In Newark, N.J., Unionwear is having its best year to date. “The demand is higher than ever,” Bronson said. “It has been a challenge to continually increase capacity.”

He attributed much of the success to Unionwear’s ability to offer detailed customization. “Small batch customization is one area where improvements in order processing and set up times can have big payoffs,” he expressed. “We can make any of our bags in any color combination customers want at low quantities. This is what China does not offer the industry.”

Three Cheers for the Red, White and Blue

In Newark, NJIT, Rutgers Renew Focus on Edison’s Legacy: Manufacturing

June 30, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

BROOKINGS INSTITUTION Metropolitan Innovation Series

Last month, manufacturers gathered at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) in Newark for a roundtable with government officials, educators, and industry leaders. The event spotlighted Essex County manufacturing partnerships and incentive programs and featured testimonials by companies such as Unionwear, which produces hats and bags in Newark’s North Ward. Otis Rolley, chief executive officer of the Newark Community Economic Development Corporation, told attendees about the resources available to manufacturers seeking to grow within Newark’s borders.

Meanwhile, at Newark Liberty International Airport on the other side of the city, students and faculty from Rutgers Business School were running a kiosk that sells merchandise made by New Jersey artisans and small manufacturers. The kiosk project, called Jersey Bound, complements the work of the Newark Industrial Solutions Center, which is housed at the business school’s Center for Supply Chain Management.

The zeal for product development and manufacturing has deep roots in Newark. For over a century, the city was a pioneer in America’s adoption of new industrialized methods and a production-based economy. Numerous products of global importance were invented in the Newark area, including Thomas Edison’s light bulb and air conditioning. These transformative breakthroughs and favorable policy and regulatory conditions contributed to rising incomes and improved economic security for a growing, skilled middle class. Yet, in recent decades, this knack for scientific discovery and making things has not translated into a more competitive production base and workforce.

Today, the 24-square-mile city of Newark is home to 400 manufacturers employing roughly 10,000 workers, and the greater Newark area is a base for 800 manufacturers, a diverse mix of small and mid-sized businesses largely serving regional markets. Despite some bright spots, greater Newark manufacturing is underperforming on employment and output metrics, as well as on the assimilation of appropriately skilled workers and tools that support product and process innovation. The unfortunate result is that Newark is failing to leverage a host of advantages that could favor small-scale production by design and manufacturing start-ups or by retooled, existing businesses. These advantages include density, ample industrial building stock, proximity to markets and service providers, and enviable logistical assets, including a globally connected airport and the largest maritime complex on the East Coast, Port Newark-Elizabeth.

Encouragingly, the city’s higher education institutions show signs of a focused commitment and invigorated strategies behind next-generation design, research and development, and production, as well as support for manufacturing-career readiness in areas ranging from robotics and digital design to technical operations management and market analysis. There are few manufacturing naysayers in the classrooms or around the seminar tables of University Heights—home to the Rutgers Business School as well as NJIT— or at nearby Essex County College or Newark Tech High School, but rather a growing focus on hands-on learning and industry-centered partnerships. Perhaps the boldest example of this activity is the launch last year of NJIT’s New Jersey Innovation Institute, which strives to align industry, educational, and economic development goals through partnerships and strategic clusters.

The challenge (and opportunity) that University Heights now faces is ensuring that the fruits of its initiatives and collaborations reach the area’s neighborhoods and residents, including through the reactivation of older industrial sites and locally embedded training options. Another key will be stemming the brain drain of qualified students out of the area. These goals are becoming increasingly critical in light of sweeping demographic shifts, including an aging industrial workforce and a youth unemployment crisis, as well as the need for infrastructure upgrades and strategies to manage transformation associated with the ongoing expansion of Port Newark-Elizabeth.

Through inclusive and sustained coordination as well as smart investment, a robust industrial commons is within Newark’s reach—an industrial commons that would make hometown hero Thomas Edison proud.

Nisha Mistry is director of the Urban Law Center at Fordham Law School in New York City. Previously, she served as a visiting fellow at Rutgers Business School and manufacturing advisor with the Department of Economic & Housing Development in Newark, N.J. under the administration of Mayor Cory A. Booker. From 2012 to 2014, Mistry served as a mayor’s office fellow (Office of Mayor Cory A. Booker) and nonresident fellow with the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program, where she authored a report on manufacturing in Newark.

SOURCE:  http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/the-avenue/posts/2015/06/24-newark-higher-ed-manufacturing-mistry#.VYv-FCUXbWI.twitter

7 Reasons Why People Really Buy American Made Goods

June 30, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

Manufacturing is booming in Newark and other American cities after decades of decline. Newark has over 400 active factories that employ over 10,000 people. Cities like Newark are reaping the benefits because there is already an infrastructure in place from the 70s. With concentrated labor, the center of transit hubs, and proximity to ⅓ of the population, the City is a great place to manufacture goods.

American Manufacturing Is More Competitive

After 20 years, Maker’s Row preferred manufacturing partner Unionwear is finally competitive with imports again. Unionwear sold primarily to entities like the government and military because they required that products be “Made in the USA” and, at the time, there were really no other markets willing to pay a huge premium for goods.

The price of imported textiles has been growing at 25% per year for the last four years while the prices for domestic goods have remained flat. As the premium paid for Made in USA shrinks, more markets implement and enforce labor and sourcing standards, and the benefits of Made in USA increase in value. A lot more people will buy Made in USA when it is 25% more expensive than when it was 200% more expensive.

The 7 Reasons Why People Buy Made in USA:

Support American economy
Fair Labor & Product Quality Standards
Economics—small batch manufacturing
Buy Union
Buy Eco Friendly— consumers don’t want to be part of the problem
Locality
Convenience

Manufacturers have learned to localize supply chains from the food movement. The underlying motivations are different and more related to worker rights. The closer production is to consumption, the less acceptable worker exploitation becomes and the more likely goods are produced using labor and environmental standards that the consumer benefits from.

The international worker rights movement is an issue in manufacturing; Bangladeshi factory collapses, inadequate minimum wages, and deep-seated inequalities. Consumers want to know that they are not contributing to the problem–that the products they buy are made at factories that comply with America’s core labor standards. This is important for domestic manufacturing because what actually causes buyers to connect with “USA Made” are deep convictions about issues that support of domestic manufacturing can cure.

Along with localism and worker rights, environmentalism and the maker movement are also affecting the American manufacturing landscape. All four of these factors are much deeper convictions than patriotism. That sentiment is rooted in business-to-business markets since companies are sensitive to being judged on their commitment to everything, from helping rebuild our economy to the working conditions at their vendors’ factories. Putting a Made in USA label on your product enables a small business to co-brand with the most powerful ‘brand’ in the world—America!

The most exciting aspect of American manufacturing right now is the confluence of pricing being competitive, deep seated convictions driving sales, and cloud computing and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) making small batch manufacturing a reality.

A special thanks to Unionwear’s Mitch Cahn. This post was inspired by Cahn’s TED talk and various other discussions on American manufacturing trends.

Source: https://makersrow.com/blog/2015/04/7-reasons-why-people-really-buy-american-made-goods/

Unionwear’s Featured TedX Talk: Made Right Here

June 29, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

Unionwear President Mitch Cahn’s 15 Minute Ted Talk–Made Right Here: How the international worker rights and buy local movements are creating a surge in U.S. urban manufacturing opportunities.  The talk discusses why the premium for domestic goods are shrinking, and the five types of business to business to market segments with strong convictions about buying USA Made.

TRANSCRIPT

Manufacturing is booming in Newark and other American cities after decades of decline.

Newark, NJ has over 400 active factories within the city limits that employ over 10,000 people.  Four years ago nobody knew this, now a growing number of people know this.  How did this happen in the middle of a recession?  Well, as a manufacturer, I can’t say it was anything that our industry did.  I am pretty sure it wasn’t anything that our government did.  And I don’t think it was a wave of made in USA consumerism that pushed us over the edge.

What happened was over the last 20 years, goods have been made overseas in the third world very, very cheaply on the backs of exploitation of labor and exploitation of the environment.  The growth in manufacturing now is because both “overseas” and “exploitation” have become a lot more expensive and a lot less attractive.

Activists did this–labor activists did this, unions, worker rights coalitions and environmental and buy local activists made this happen.  They raised awareness, they localized supply chains and they helped to impose regulations creatively.  And as a result we’ve seen what’s going on in Newark right now.  “Made in USA” has relatively become a bargain.  Cities like Newark are reaping the benefits because we have an infrastructure in place still from the 70’s and before that, we have a lot of concentrated labor and we are in the center of a transit hub.  We have the ability to move people and goods around very quickly.  We are within a day’s drive for something like a third of the population.

What I want to do now is talk about my experiences running Unionwear, which is a manufacturer of baseball hats, bags like backpacks and garment bags, safety vessel scrubs.  We manufacture everything from scratch right here in North Newark.  We have about a 110 union workers, we are 11 miles from Midtown Manhattan.  We have been in business for 21 years.  In almost every product category of ours, we might be the most expensive place to make that product in the entire world.  So how is that over the last four or five years we’ve grown by about 25% per year after about a decade of being flat.

Well we’ve narrowed it down to five areas.  One is market forces, specifically understanding the market forces that are going on and being able to educate our clients about it.  How is Obama care going to affect domestic manufacturing?  How is immigration policy going to affect in manufacturing.  What if China decides to float their currency against the United States?  Is that going to make United States manufactured goods less expensive?  And more appealing to the rest of the world?  Yes.

We stay on top of these things and we make sure clients know about them because changes in the economy happen right under people’s noses and they don’t even see it.

Market selection is a big one.  There are markets that want to buy local.  There are markets that want to buy made in USA.  It’s more expensive to buy those things but they are willing to pay a premium.  Who are those people and how do we reach them?

Product selection is an area that goes along with market selection.  Now someone might not be in a market that wants to buy made in USA but they might want to be a product that might be less expensive to manufacture in United States, so what are those products?

Re-engineering is important because it’s very different to manufacture a product where there is no regulation and people are paid ten cents an hour versus where it is manufactured in an area where there is a lot of regulation and people make 10 to 15 dollars an hour.  You can bridge that gap through smart re-engineering.

Finally we take advantage of our geographic advantages.  We play up how close we are to New York City and Newark airport and port Newark and millions of skilled laborers.

So I am declaring right now the era of cheap imports is over. It’s dead.

So what’s happened as the price of imports increases is the premium paid for made in USA product shrinks.  As that premium shrinks it becomes less expensive for people to have sourcing standards or enforce standards that they already had.  So what happens and why the market is grown is there are a lot more people who are willing to pay 25% more for a product that’s made green, made in USA, made union, then they were in 2008 when it might have been 200% or 300% more expensive for that same thing.  And it is that a big of a difference.

So one reason for this is labor supply and demand.  China has had decades of a one child policy, and as a result there are a lot fewer people entering their workforce now and the people who are entering the workforce, they don’t want to make the iPhone, they want to work for Apple.  So there are not enough people working in these factories–when that happens you have to pay people more to get them to work in manufacturing.

As a result of people being paid more there is now a consumer class in China and in India and in Pakistan.  That’s driving up the costs of goods, its driving up the costs of gasoline, petroleum which is making goods more expensive to ship to United States.

I put a slide up of the iPhone factory because that’s an example of what has happened because of worker rights activists.  When all of the working violations at the Foxconn factory where over a million people are employed were discovered, labor activists came in and negotiated a 40% wage increase and they lowered the amount of hours they can work from a 100 hours a week to 60 hours a week.  They came in a year later and negotiated another 40% increase.  You imagine what it does when a million people make that much more money.  And have to work that fewer hours.  They have to scramble the find workers.  That’s why prices have been of imports have been going up so much.

And as a result of social media, the rest of the world’s workers are finding out what’s going on and realizing they don’t have to work this way.  So you are seeing the same sort of riots, protests, strikes in Bangladesh and Pakistan.  This has led to wage inflation of 25% to 30% a year.  The response overseas has been to cut corners– poison in pet food, poison in dog food, exploding tires, broken plane parts, that’s led to more regulation which has put more expense on products that come in from overseas.

Companies have moved their manufacturing to places that they thought were cheaper than China like Bangladesh.  But they didn’t have the infrastructure and ended up being more expensive.  You ended up with month after month, factory fires and factory collapses which led to more regulation and more expense.

So who is buying made in USA, now that their premium has shrunk?

There are five different ways that people can say “buy local” and these are the markets that we try to appeal to.  Buy American, people buy American for economic reasons, or if they have standards like the US government.  Or if they want consistent messaging, like General Motors who makes goods domestically and they want to buy American-made goods because they are selling made American.

People want to buy union and support their fellow union workers.

People want to buy fair labor, they don’t want to buy goods that were made in a sweatshop.

People want to buy eco-friendly and people want to buy local.

So one of the of the areas that wants to buy American is the US government which makes up about a quarter of our GDP.  This is something that is relatively new, this enforcement of the government buying American made goods.

Another area is trade justice and if you say the labels fair trade and sweat free and living wage on goods, those are all ways of saying that these goods were made by workers who are not exploited.

An example of someone who used to not buy products with these labels in is now is NPR.  They would give away tote bags for memberships at the same time they were doing stories about sweatshops in China but the tote bags were made in those sweatshops because they get them for 25 cents a piece.  Now it’s costing them $2.50 a piece to import.  They are going to spring for $3 a piece and buy something that is made in USA and it basically cost less for them to put their money where their mouth is.

The link between fair labor and local and eco-friendly is this:  The closer production is to consumption the less acceptable worker exploitation becomes.  You don’t want to buy a shirt from someone around the corner who you know as working for below minimum wage and maybe working a 100 hours a week, but its okay if it is around the world.

Also the more likely that goods are produced using your labor and environmental standards.  The factories are operating under the same laws that you benefit from.

Another area is product selection.  So two examples of products that are less expensive to make domestically would be products that are big and bulky to ship and don’t have a lot of labor like this gigantic case right here that we make.  That didn’t need to be made in USA but it is.

Or bags using expensive materials– this bag has $40 in leather in it but only maybe $8 in labor.  In China maybe you can get it made for $4, so at the end of the day its $48 verses $44.  By the time you ship it here and have the duties on it, its less expensive to make it in the United States.  That’s why you see a lot of goods with expensive materials made in countries that are more expensive than United States like Italy.

So another area is small batch customization.  There is a big overhead to making products overseas, you have to translate, you have to make tech packs.  It is expensive to ship sampling back and forth, there are time zone considerations, so as result nobody wants to make 500 or a 1000 of something in China or Bangladesh.  It’s a lot less expensive to make it here.

And finally re-engineering is the area where we are able to close the gap through product design.  When we get goods a lot of times now people are reshoring goods–they send goods to us and it was a bag that they had made in China, they want to get it made in United States and I’ll say if you want it made exactly this way, its going to cost you $80 because there is no thought given to engineering the products because labor was practically free over there.  We can redesign it so your clients won’t notice the difference that will be just as nice and we can do it for $15.

The other area is Lean Manufacturing and that is the concept where you can take people in a high wage environment and train them to use all of their time to just add value to the product and not waste time doing things that are not that the client doesn’t pay for, like looking for a pair of scissors or waiting for manager or walking from machine to machine.

So finally, Newark is a place that is perfect for manufacturing for a number of different reasons.  We’ve got a high concentration of skilled labor, we’ve got a well developed infrastructure of manufacturing.  There are lot of other manufactures here which means that there is a market for mechanics and trucks and things where that might not exist in an economy where there is not a lot of manufacturers.  We are close to the port, we got Newark airport here and we’ve got access to everything.  We have access to New York City we have access to capital, marketing, and technological expertise right here in the city of Newark through our academic communities.

There are other cities where this is happening.  There are not a lot of rural areas where this is happening.  So this is the time to take advantage of this once in a generation opportunity where people are coming to Newark to get things manufactured.  Thank you very much.

How To Find Any Cut and Sew Contractor in Minutes

June 8, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

American Success Stories

The All New Chrysler 200

Filmed in Newark, NJ at Unionwear

Chrysler is proud to celebrate the individuals who embody the new spirit of success.

Matthew Burnett:  My name is Matthew Burnett and I am the Co-Founder of Maker’s Row.

Tanya Menendez:  I am Tanya Menendez, Co-Founder of Maker’s Row. Maker’s Row is an online market place that helps businesses and brands, find American manufacturers.

Matthew Burnett:  My background is an industrial design and I used to design watches and I decided to start my own line.  I was manufacturing watches overseas for about 3 years and during that time I found that you are really are rolling the dice as a small business owner.  I don’t have the time to spend the month oversee the product quality control, but I would just crossing my fingers every time I was ordering something; one time I okayed a sample, 3 months later I get a mass order; it looks nothing like the sample that I approach; so that’s about $40,000 down the drain.  Small businesses can take that type of hit.

Tanya Menendez:  We’re able to produce smaller batches.  We’re able to oversee the production, and they are able to respond to market trends in season.  They’re able to produce that in a few weeks and have it to market.

Matthew Burnett:  We wanted to create a resource in which be able to find the closest factory with the right pricing or right minimum quantity that you would be able to work with in under a week.  It’s almost like a dating site, because there are so many different personality traits that you are looking for to find that perfect match.  I think the American dream can evolve to something we’re now people are following their fashion.  There are tons of designers, that used to work for large brands and now they are starting their own product-based businesses; because now they have a resource to find these manufactures.

Great background shots in there:

1. Unionwear embroidering hats. We embroider hats on the panels before the panels are sewn, for better quality, larger decoration area, and lower cost.
2. Our Thread library of over 2000 colors, organized by color, counted for 20 head machines, sorted by number, and kept clean in airtight bags.
3. Attaching a visor to a baseball cap.
4. Stuffing a visor.
5. Sewing the topstitch rows on a visor.
6. Attaching a size strip along the perimeter of a baseball cap.
7. Closing a tote bag.
8. Sewing up the T-bottom on a tote bag.
9. Laying up bag fabric to cut 1000 totes.
10. Great outside shots of the Unionwear factory.

How Cloud ERP Helps Union Manufacturer Compete

June 3, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

Transcript:

Why Lean Manufacturing Needs Cloud ERP:

It’s about 10 years since we had our first lean implementation here. It wasn’t until last year that we were able to put the pieces together because we needed to wait for the software to hit the clouds.  Legacy systems are really too expensive and too clunky  for a company of this size to be able to implement a robust ERP and we wanted something with which we would be able to grow to four times our size.

We also want something that we can add on to if we want to do things like track production, raw material, and efficiency on the factory floor; not all of our production employees use computers but all of them use smartphones and with a cloud based system like Rootstock we can have apps put on to smart phones that our production employees can use to track production, to track receiving, track cutting, track efficiency and things of that nature in real time.  We can use that real time data for sales.  We can also use, we can also integrate our website with rootstock and populate our product line using materials and processes that we already have costed, have that information flow to the factory using API’s and other new technologies and have our MRP system purchase goods, have work travelers and work tickets and production planning done without having to use any indirect labor or admin staff.

How Cloud ERP Reduces costs:

One of the things we have been able to use Rootstock to do to save cost is to really get a handle on our raw material inventory.  We are able to make substitutions of raw materials in bills of material; so that if we are out of this swivel hook we can substitute a different swivel ,  take a look at what kind of inventory we have, recommends certain kinds of materials to our clients based on availability.

If sales people make recommendations of materials based on availability and cost and it will reduce waste and sting on operations tremendously.

In the future with ERP and the internet of things, we will be able to take orders online and use ecommerce and do many stages of our manufacturing using robotics, picking components and materials, using robotics to put them into bins, using apps to give workers instructions what to do with those bins and tracking production of them.

HillaryClinton.com Opens Union Made Merch Shop

June 2, 2015 | Posted by unionwear

Hillary Clinton became the first political candidate to open a web store selling union made in USA campaign merchandise, including Unionwear branded hats and bags. Visit the shop at https://shop.hillaryclinton.com/collections/accessories.