The Rise of Manufacturing Hipsters

Of course, there are exceptions to the decline. High-end fashion, for example, is less sensitive to labor costs than other manufacturing sectors and depends more on where designers and skilled tailors may be. Moreover, there is a clear resurgence in the appeal of local artisanal goods. Everything that is locally produced, from food to clothes, bicycles to furniture, is fashionable these days. From New York and Providence to Portland and Minneapolis, an increasing number of artisanal workshops have appeared and are selling goods in trendy local boutiques.

The neighborhood where the San Francisco Levi’s factory used to be is now crowded with dozens of workshops offering handcrafted products—outfits like Cut Loose, which makes a line of hip clothing that is sewn and dyed to order in San Francisco. Literally across the street from the Levi’s factory, a boutique called The Common specializes in “purveying, producing and designing durable and timeless staples crafted using traditional manufacturing techniques.” Their funky ready-to-wear shirts are designed, cut, and sewn in California. A few blocks down the street, what used to be an auto body shop has recently become a full-fledged chocolate factory. Housed in a beautiful red brick building, Dandelion Chocolate sells $9 chocolate bars handmade on the premises by two intense-looking clean-shaven hipsters with a passion for uncovering the best organically grown Madagascar beans. A couple of miles to the east, DODOcase has taken over an old, almost bankrupt bookbindery to handcraft iPad cases complete with a personalized monogram and eco-friendly bamboo parts. In Brooklyn, local food production is booming. “It seems as if every 28-year-old guy in the borough has a line of artisanal pickles,” reports Metropolis magazine. At the Brooklyn Navy Yard, the workshops of dozens of small manufacturers are bustling with activity. Space is in short supply as more and more local producers want in. The contrast with the hundreds of abandoned factories in Detroit and Flint could not be starker.

 A century ago Brooklyn was one of the capitals of urban manufacturing in America. At its peak during World War II, its Navy Yard employed 70,000 people who worked in three separate shifts, twenty-four hours a day. Judging from all the activity today, one might be tempted to conclude that urban manufacturing is back, in the form of small-scale high-tech production that employs college-educated young people and targets local markets. Ferra Designs, which rents a 10,000-square-foot space in the Navy Yard, is a metal shop specializing in architectural fabrication. Partner Jeff Kahn recently told Metropolis that most of his fifteen employees are industrial designers with a college degree from the nearby Pratt Institute. “Most of them are under thirty. They’re into craftsmanship; they want to know how to build things. It’s a renaissance.” He thinks the Navy Yard’s success signals the potential for a revival of urban manufacturing in America. “The cost of doing business is going up in China,” he argues. “This country has an opportunity to regain some of its manufacturing base, using cutting-edge technology and a new generation of interested youth.”

It is a mantra that is becoming widespread in many urban areas across the United States, and it is being embraced by thousands of young people interested in working with their hands. When I visited the latest high-end handcrafted cloth maker to open near the Levi’s factory, the irony of the situation was inescapable: in the same place where only twenty years ago undereducated Hispanic women used to cut and sew Levi’s garments, there are now dozens of overeducated young white people cutting and sewing similar products.

 These initiatives are culturally interesting, which is why they are the subject of a growing number of feature articles in local papers, and are worth supporting. Local production helps capture some of the wealth that might otherwise have gone overseas, and in many cases it has a significantly smaller ecological footprint. But it is clear that these initiatives cannot be the answer to the lack of jobs in America. First, they are destined to remain niche phenomena. The number of jobs created is simply too small to make a dent. More fundamentally, these jobs can’t be the driver of job growth for a community. They will always be the result of wealth created in some other sector. This is an important but often misunderstood point. In traditional manufacturing, products tend to be sold everywhere in the world. But consumption of locally produced goods depends by definition on the existing wealth of an area. After all, someone in the local economy has to pay for these $40 handmade T-shirts and $9 artisanal chocolate bars. In the case of cities like New York and San Francisco, financial and high-tech industries are the sectors generating the wealth that supports these local artisanal efforts.

Additionally, an important part of the appeal of local manufacturing is that we perceive it as something special and different. This makes this sector inherently difficult to scale up past the narrow limits of what consumers identify as “unique.” Take American Apparel, for example, which operates the largest remaining North American garment factory. The facility employs five thousand workers and is located in a multistory building in downtown Los Angeles, just a few blocks from the high-rises of the financial center. The company’s marketing focuses on the fact that it pays workers decent wages—$12 an hour for sewing operators—and offers health insurance. Its T-shirts have become immensely popular among many young, educated, hip, urban consumers. What is remarkable is that there is nothing special about these T-shirts besides where they are made. It is a sign of the times that production of clothes in the United States has become such a rarity that the mere fact of being manufactured in downtown L.A. distinguishes the product, making American Apparel clothing attractive to hipsters in Williamsburg, Austin, and D.C. It is not a bad business model. People perceive the brand as cool, so the company can sell its products at a premium and therefore cover its relatively high production costs. Unfortunately for other textile workers in the United States, however, this model cannot be replicated widely. By definition, the American Apparel model rests on the premise that its products are unique. If everyone were producing in U.S. urban areas, the company would lose its only competitive advantage.