Everyone keeps saying reshoring is stalling out. The data backs them up. And they are still missing the point.
This spring, a widely cited industry survey found that 64% of manufacturers have no plans to move production back to the United States, even with tariffs reshaping the cost of importing. The analysts read that as reshoring losing steam. I read it differently. Of course most manufacturers will not reshore. Not if reshoring means rebuilding the exact factory that left in the first place.
What the data actually says
Look past the headline number and the reports are more specific than “reshoring is not happening.” The recurring finding is that bringing production home pencils out only with advanced automation and redesigned production models. That is the part worth sitting with. The experts are not saying domestic manufacturing cannot compete. They are saying it cannot compete the old way.
And they are right. If you take a labor-heavy, tooling-heavy production line built around cheap overseas hours and try to stand it back up in Utah at American wages, the spreadsheet kills it before you pour the foundation. US labor runs $25 to $30 an hour against roughly $6 overseas. You do not close a gap like that with grit and a flag decal. You close it by not needing the hours in the first place.
The investment headlines tell the same story from the other end. Chipmakers and pharma giants are announcing billions in new US capacity — the strategic, high-value, heavily automated end of manufacturing. What is not coming back on its own is the broad middle: the everyday functional parts that built the trade deficit one container at a time. That middle is exactly where a redesigned production model changes the answer.
Why the old model dies on contact
The 1985 model of manufacturing was built on three assumptions: cut expensive tooling, run enormous batches to amortize it, and stockpile the output in a warehouse until someone buys it. Every one of those assumptions fights against reshoring.
Tooling is a six-figure bet placed months before the first sale. Big batches mean you are guessing demand and freezing cash in inventory. The warehouse is rent you pay on parts nobody has ordered yet. Move that whole apparatus onshore without changing it, and all you have done is take a high-cost system and bolt high-cost labor onto it. No wonder 64% said no thanks.
What a redesigned model looks like
Here is the version that competes. No tooling, because you print the part — nothing to cut, nothing to amortize. No minimum order quantity forcing you to buy 5,000 to get the 500 you need. No overseas warehouse, because the design lives as a file and you print to the order. Design to production in weeks, not the months tooling demands. When demand moves, you move with it the same day.
That is not a patch on the old model. It is a different machine. Strip out tooling and inventory and the labor math stops being the whole story, because you have removed the costs that made cheap labor matter so much to begin with. This is what the analysts mean by “redesigned production models.” At Merit3D it is just how we run: additive manufacturing built for production volumes, in Price, Utah, on parts that used to come off a boat.
Speed turns into a competitive weapon when production works this way. A customer changes a dimension on Monday and runs the new version on Friday — no mold modification, no re-tooling charge, no waiting on a shop halfway around the world. When a part needs to scale from hundreds to hundreds of thousands, you add machines and build plates, not a new tool and a new lead time. Flexibility stops being a nice-to-have and becomes the reason the work stays here.
I see this every week. The parts crossing our floor — gun grips in production quantity, knobs with molded-in threads, brackets and housings by the thousand — are parts that used to mean a tooling quote and a container ship. Now they mean a file and a print queue. Same part, same performance, made in weeks instead of quarters, and made here. That is not a story about beating overseas labor rates. It is a story about not playing that game at all.
Reshoring as a different equation
Unit price was never the real cost of an overseas part anyway. Put the whole equation on the table — freight, tariffs that now hit most imported goods, the months of lead time, the inventory carrying cost, the intellectual-property risk of handing your design to a factory you do not control — and domestic production wins a lot more often than a unit-price comparison suggests. Tariffs did not create that math. They just made everyone finally read the second page of the invoice.
So I do not buy that reshoring is failing. The first wave tried to reshore a 1985 factory and bounced off the cost wall, exactly like the spreadsheet said it would. The companies that win this build the factory that could not have existed in 1985: no tooling, no warehouse, demand-driven, made here. That is the real work — not waving a flag over the old cost structure, but engineering a new one. Solve it that way and the math comes home with the work.
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