Heather Smith of the website Grist is skeptical of the hype about a manufacturing resurgence of products in Detroit.
She writes that the idea of manufacturing in Detroit at this point appears to be more fantasy than reality.
She writes this after taking a tour of of small-scale manufacturing and design center in Midtown Detroit at the A. Alfred Taubman Center for Design Education, which houses the Center for Creative Studies and Shinola.
She writes that the tour is a "a bait-and-switch in progress, in that myself and 30 other people curious about the future of Detroit are actually just wandering up and down the 12 floors of one building — a hybrid dormitory/conference center/design school/business incubator. It does have a very nice industrial paint facility. But as we move around I am beginning to get the feeling that this building, and the idea of manufacturing in Detroit, have more to do with our fantasies about Detroit than with the actual business of making stuff."
She notes that CCS has rented out the fifth floor of the Taubman building to Shinola, which is owned by Tom Kartsotis, founder of Fossil watches.
The story that we are told on the tour is that Shinola makes bicycles, watches, and key fobs in Detroit, but the story that I remember from working on an earlier article is that Kartsotis moved the business here because the term “Made in Detroit” isn’t subject to the same legal constraints as a term like “Made in America.” Most of what Shinola sells is assembled in Detroit out of components made in other countries.
Indeed, while there is an entire glassed-in showroom of a manufacturing space on the fifth floor, there are only a few men in hair nets and white lab coats wandering through it desultorily. “Maybe it’s a slow day,” I think, and wonder what the factories where the components are actually built look like. This is not a new story — a lot of things that claim to be made in Detroit don’t really hold up to scrutiny.
She said all reminds her of her dad giving away his work clothes after the tool and die shops were no longer calling for work.
When I was a teenager, my dad gave me a stack of his old work shirts. “I noticed you kids are wearing these,” he said. “I certainly don’t need them any more.” He was right. The tool and die shops had stopped calling with offers for work, and closets were being cleaned out across the metro area. Right then every vintage shop was full of the old uniforms of middle-class factory life, from the practical, easy-to-launder cotton/poly blend work shirt with oval-shaped name tag to the fantastically more elaborate creations that signified membership in one of Metro Detroit’s many competitive bowling leagues.
She concludes:
Detroit was once a convenient place for designing and making things because it was the place where the raw materials for manufacturing — trees and metal from the forests and mines up north — met the coal and steel from the southeast. This particular kind of industry was hard — hard on land and hard on people. Its economic successes were, in many ways, due to not calculating the environmental cost that came with it. Right now, the idea of Detroit’s manufacturing resurgence reminds me of the dilemma of my father’s shirts: It feels like putting on someone else’s clothes without acknowledging the story behind them.
