Will furniture make the move back to domestic production?
We visited Lincolnton Furniture last week and met Bruce Cochrane, president of the new furniture manufacturer that has deep roots in North Carolina. He told us of several reasons that he believes more furniture manufacturing will return to the United States. One is that labor rates have risen sharply in China. There are far fewer applicants for jobs in furniture factories than there were seven or eight years ago. Another is that the Chinese government is emphasizing domestic consumers rather than export markets. And then there is manufacturing technology, which has reduced the impact of labor on the overall manufacturing cost.
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Comment by Will Sampson on March 22, 2012 at 2:13pm -
Dugan's book also shows how the industry was too busy looking for cheap competitive advantages while fighting with each other and their own organizations, to capitalize on new technology themselves. Or they were leading legal challenges to Chinese imports while setting up their own offshore factories in China and Vietnam. Yes, to a large extent, the pain the industry feels was self-inflicted.
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Comment by Bob Mathews on March 22, 2012 at 12:25pm -
Hey Karl; some manufacturers will come back, or at least some parts of some manufacturers will come back. If you haven’t check out Michael Dugan’s book Furniture Wars, How America lost a $50B Industry. He states that over 1 million people lost their jobs when residential furniture moved away. We’ll never see that many jobs come back (my opinion). There no reason a lean well laid out shop can’t run <10% labor, and had the industry taken that tact it wouldn’t have left to start with.
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