Unionwear’s Mitch Cahn wrote an article in NJCPA magazine about hustling during the pandemic. The article starts on Page 12.

Unionwear has been a Made in USA manufacturer for over 25 years in one of the most expensive labor markets in the United States — Newark, NJ, just outside of New York City. 

How did Unionwear do it?

The key to domestic manufacturing success isn’t cutting corners or hiring the cheapest labor. Rather, Unionwear embraced a lean manufacturing mindset. A lot goes into it, but the first thing lean manufacturers must do is constantly free up bottlenecks. Every system has a bottleneck since a production line can only produce as many widgets as its slowest operation. Speeding up the slowest operation automatically makes the next-slowest operation the newest bottleneck. Even if the production line is automated and perfectly balanced — unless the sales team is selling and the administrative staff is processing orders at the same exact rate — there will be backlogs and shortages, overproduction and underproduction. Your job, as a domestic manufacturer, is to constantly free up these bottlenecks.

There’s a lot more to unpack. But the biggest lesson the team learned is that pivoting into a new market or line of business is always possible, even when times are not desperate. We have become much more open to suggestions for building new production lines for a single client or for a finite time period. We also are far more focused on results and less on facetime for our managers and salespeople. Finally, our success in predicting and responding to shortages has us constantly on the lookout for black swans and random events that can lead to opportunities for growth.

Read the entire article HERE