What Kind of Production Is Best Suited to U.S. Manufacturing? (The Z Axis first episode!)
From carbon dreams to machining reality. Getting real about reshoring with Allied Cycle Works.
Allied Cycle Works was founded on the vision of making hand-laid carbon-fiber-composite bicycle frames in the U.S. But the company discovered that an entirely different form of production, previously unseen—CNC machining—made far more sense for domestic production and vertical insourcing.
Success is actually what did in the original vision. Demand for Allied’s bikes surged during covid. But scaling in response to that demand faced tremendous friction.
As we lay out in the video above, Allied experienced the way scaling is difficult and costly if a manufacturing process is poorly located in terms of infrastructure, labor availability, and supplier proximity. It is easy to cheer for more US manufacturing, but manufacturing decision-makers have to face these realities.
Watch my conversation with Sam Pickman of Allied Cycle Works in the video above. The company never retreated from U.S. manufacturing, but it learned how to get real about it, and how to make local production a sustaining commitment.
This conversation is the first episode of The Z Axis, my new video series produced by Edge Factor in which we will thoughtfully explore one issue after another, large and small, confronting manufacturing leaders today. How to succeed with U.S. production is going to be a recurring theme. If you are a subscriber to this newsletter, you will receive the show, because I will share each episode here. But if YouTube is the platform where you would rather have video content find you, subscribe to my YouTube channel as well.