Overseas Manufacturing

I received one of those form letters that your senator
sends you to update you on all the wonderful things they are fighting for...

Senator Levin was letting me know that he is continuing
his fight for fair trade terms and I felt compelled to answer
his shiny letter with a bit of reality from a small business
owner trying to build a business involving manufacturing.

My reply follows:

Dear Mr. Levin,
Thanks for the update however you are overlooking some major issues as to why American manufacturing cannot compete globally. While the things you mentioned are important, the simple fact that the corrupt health care system in this country makes the overhead too high for the US manufacturer to truly compete. All large companies must offer health care and that is either going to come out of worker's wages or get bumped to the consumer mark-up margin, making the product far more expensive than the competition. Or other cuts will be made by the manufacturer in the quality control or supply quality to offset the expense. That produces a sub-standard product.

A couple other important things I experienced while looking to do my own manufacturing in the US is the fact that there seems to be no such thing as an efficient all-in-one facility in the US. We are not a "factory based" country and that drives up manufacturing costs when you have to outsource every step of the supply chain. The staff you need to hire to baby sit all those suppliers to just to get the simplest item made, adds tremendous cost. Prohibitive costs.

I am in the apparel business which has a much simpler supply chain than the automotive industry and I was driven to an overseas contractor in order to offer a reasonable wholesale to keep the product affordable to the end customer. Fair trade subsidies were not the issue. I struggled for months trying to make my products here, experiencing rude customer service, indifference to my company and lack of desire to produce my product due to the smaller qty requested because I'm a start up. Those experiences versus a warm reception from China wanting to work with me and help grow my company and product (for which they will benefit greatly when my volume increases as I establish distribution channels). That coupled with the fact that I have one contact to deal with in China and she takes care of every aspect of the supply chain to get my product from concept the export. She is not a third party "coordinator." She is employed by the facility that makes the product. Because it is good business. They are efficient, polite, eager for our business, never mind the competitive price. I toured the facility in mainland China and it is not some third world sweatshop full of underpaid child workers. It is a state of the art facility full of happily employed adults. None of which appeared to be sick or dying from lack of adequate health care.

So while fair trade is important, so is the fact that the US is broken on the inside, and virtually impossible to work with (from a small business standpoint) due to what seems to me to be unorganized elitist status.

You most likely have not bothered to read this far, but if you have, you might now have a little insight into why one Michigan small business felt they had no choice but to take their manufacturing needs overseas. Without my relationship with China, I would not have a product, thus not have a growing company. I am not proud to manufacture overseas, it's simply a matter of survival.