Sharpie Found a Way To Make Pens More Cheaply - By Manufacturing Them in the US
- Reference: 0179682358
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/10/06/1744203/sharpie-found-a-way-to-make-pens-more-cheaply---by-manufacturing-them-in-the-us
- Source link:
> Tucked in the foothills of Tennessee's Smoky Mountains is a factory that has figured out a way to manufacture in America that's cheaper, quicker and better. It's the home of a famous American writing implement: the Sharpie marker. Pen barrels whirl along automated assembly lines that rapidly fill them with ink. At least half a billion Sharpie markers are churned out here every year, each one made of six parts. Only the felt tip is imported, from Japan.
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> It didn't used to be this way. Back in 2018, many Sharpies were made abroad. That's when Chris Peterson, who was the CFO of Sharpie maker Newell Brands challenged his team to answer a question: How could they keep Newell from becoming obsolete compared with factories in Asia? "I felt like we had an opportunity to dramatically improve our U.S. manufacturing," he said. Peterson is now the CEO. And these days, most Sharpies -- in all 93 colors -- are made at this 37-year-old factory. Newell did it without reducing the employee count, and without raising prices. But to get to this place took close to $2 billion in investments across the company, thousands of hours of training and a total overhaul of the production process. The result is a playbook for making low-cost, high-volume products domestically, albeit one that requires long-term planning and a lot of investment.
[1] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/sharpie-found-a-way-to-make-pens-more-cheaply-by-manufacturing-them-in-the-u-s/ar-AA1NTbkZ
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Make money.
Don't make money.
Those are the options.
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Just from the summary it sounds like their production was scattered all over the world. It's difficult and expensive to keep good tabs on what's actually going on, particularly if much of that manufacturing is outsourced and it's someone else's factory producing parts to-spec but without direct firsthand oversight.
If they didn't downsize their American workforce it's probably because consolidating their production from overseas factories to one factory that is subject to close scrutiny meant that the job-l
It’s the colors man. (Score:2)
> Yay we are saving two cents per unit and all it took was a $2BLN investment. We'll recoup the cost of domesticating production in only 100 billion pens.
Given the demand for Glocks colored in pearlized persimmon pinkadelic and nuclear zombie-green, I’d say them expanding the Sharpie color palette well beyond the color black sold an absolute metric fuckton of pens.
Like, an amount well worth a $2B investment and American manufacturing.
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Having your weapon a highly visible color has several advantages. In court it's proven if someone saw the gun: just ask "what color was it?" It's easier to find in the dark. It's easier for an adversary to see that you're armed. It has a slight tendency to combat a certain kind of person's irrational general fear of guns, in the courtroom and if you, God forbid, have to pull it out. You have a gun that's less escalatory and harder to lie about. In combat (and yes, guns are for stopping tyranny) it's a probl
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[1]NRA Accidentally Forgets To Rise Up Against Tyrannical Government [theshovel.com.au].
[1] https://theshovel.com.au/2020/06/04/nra-accidentally-forgets-to-rise-up-against-tyrannical-government/
Re: It’s the colors man. (Score:2)
Statistically nobody is buying guns in specific colors for legally beneficial reasons, or in fact any reason but cosmetic, unless they are black guns which they want to be harder to see at night, or camo guns, similar. I bet there's more people buying them in neon colors in the hopes that they will be confused with toys than anyone buying them in bright colors so that they can be seen. Your best bet in court is that everyone is confused about what happened, and your lawyer can convince the court or jury tha
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You can pay someone in another country to manually fill the ink in each pen, and still make a huge profit.
But, it turns out, you can make them even cheaper in the USA, if you just use a machine, have less humans employed, and ship right to the distributor from a factory automatically pumping them out from the USA.
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I think you missed this part of the summary:
> Newell did it without reducing the employee count, and without raising prices
You can argue that fewer people in another country are employed by this company now, but is that really the concern? It was a "lowest bidder" type of job. Those can disappear at any moment.
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I assumed that Newell just had to shuffle those 550 employees around in Tennessee from their old job to a new job.
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I thought about this a bit. So in 2018 his sharpies were all made abroad. He brought them back to a US factor without reducing the number of people who were working for him.
This implies he didn't hire factory workers to replace all those abroad. So....automation?
That's the gambling market (Score:2)
The gamblers only want jackpot wins, so they don't inflate the price of stocks that have a solid long-term plan. You see the same thing happen with VC. They don't pump money into sure bets because those sorts of companies don't tend to experience exponential returns.
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Hmm, they are paying a 5% dividend.
Tax wizardry (Score:2)
Wouldn't it be nice to live in a country where taxes were not the primary deciding factor in the success/failure of an enterprise? If we wanted to wait for some sort of royal blessing to conduct business, we would have stuck with King George III.
News for Nerds? (Score:1)
I guess Sharpies are nerd-adjacent so I'll give it a pass.
Re:News for Nerds? (Score:4, Insightful)
A Sharpie is a nerds most important accessory, right next to his slide rule
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> I guess Sharpies are nerd-adjacent so I'll give it a pass.
Wasn't the Sharpie the preferred writing instrument for NASA astronauts? Pencils were a problem because the lead could break off and become a sharp floating bit that could get in an astronaut's eye or nose to cause damage, or get stuck in something electric and short it out. Pens were a problem as they needed gravity to operate, or to be specially designed for log-gee. Sharpies are used in space, there's your news for nerds connection.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
[2]https://spaceref.com/space-sta... [spaceref.com]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_in_space
[2] https://spaceref.com/space-stations/sharpie-pens-in-space/
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> Wasn't the Sharpie the preferred writing instrument for NASA astronauts?
Dunno, but it's certainly the preferred writing instrument for redirecting hurricanes.
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No, they used the space pen [1]https://www.spacepen.com/shop-... [spacepen.com] It has a presurrized cartridge thing (We had one when I was a kid)
[1] https://www.spacepen.com/shop-space-pens/professions/nasa-space/ag7-original-astronaut-space-pen
Four major things that make this possible (Score:5, Insightful)
(a) Treating human labor/capital as investment opportunity: One of the very first things talked about is reducing labor turnover, and being willing to re-train and invest in degree attainment by the existing staff - the story reports about a box-packer who got an MBA, very reminiscent of how AT&T and other larger vertically integrated companies in the post-WWII period would commit to an employee. Possibly this is a sign of a sea change in staff-management relations.
(b) Treating Supply-chain logistics as a core company competency (not something you can outsource for a quarterly report stock bump). This right here is one of the single largest roadblocks in my experience for manufacturers, if you don't understand the 2nd and 3rd hops in your supply chain, you are doomed. You dont need to own the supplier, but you darned well better understand their inputs and outputs since without their output going smoothly, your very expenive automated just-in-time factory will sit idle. Either pay for supply chain security (as Newell seems to do here), or get intrusive into your suppliers business (see Toyota, GM, etc.). Personally I think the first strategy (consider higher supplier costs to be an investement!).
(c) Ignoring the short term appearance of 'gain' from one time events like offshoring - classical accounting and bookkeeping can't tell the difference between a one-time gain for moving your factory to China, and the repeatable income for a sustainable business, they are both inflows of cash. It takes a longer time horizon, and prediction of future income in the face of realistic market activity to discriminate.
(d) Pride in your work. Right in the article they talk about the pens selling for $1 each, after $2 BILLION in investment in a 26 year old factory in Tennessee. They could easily have doubled the unit price and kept all the production in China, the CEO would have had a very nice new Gulfstream and yacht, instead he pushed for investment for long term sustainability, and considered customer retention through price and quality to be more important than personal immediate income. Shockingly effective...
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In summary, thinking things through instead of being impulsive and taking the path of least resistance... Who would have thought... oh...
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Unfortunately it also requires the backers having similar views. Backers looking for a quick bump by playing the stock price quarter by quarter regardless of all other performance metrics hurt businesses because they compel short-term thinking.
For what it's worth I don't look upon the proposed end of quarterly reports by businesses as a cure either, I look at those sorts of reports as a way of assessing what could be going wrong with an eye on trying to correct it. I just don't think it's wise to use thos
Re:Four major things that make this possible (Score:5, Insightful)
In response to point (a) -- Positive investments into the labor force are good for business (both in political and economic terms). The fundamentality is that your target consumer is derived from your workforce itself; if they're not employed, then they're without income upon which to spend on your consumer good.
In response to points (b) and (c) -- 100% agreed. Knee-jerk businesspeople are not insightful (no matter how eloquent their sales pitches may be) due to their ignorance to the actual factors and interconnected gears driving supplier costs. Sometimes the supplier simply demands higher prices due to the buyers not committing to longer-term buying contracts (see OpenAI + Nvidia/AMD for recent examples of mutual support).
In response to point (d) -- Their decisions were spurred during an insightful period in the 1990s' globalization expansion about nurturing the domestic economies before boosting foreign economies; for these guys and the domestic nature of their customers (it's rare for commodities to have global marketplace dominance), it against points back to my response to point (a) above: if your neighborhood is unemployed and cannot afford your product, then what makes you think other equally-unemployed neighborhoods could afford your product?!
Everything used to be domestically manufactured (with few exceptions) whilst limiting immediate corporate greed. But as with any wayward management tier bulked up with internal layers each pining for unearned payouts, many businesses chose offshoring. It's nice to see a case study illustrating how offshoring is not required; unfortunately it's a story that's falling on evermore deaf ears.
Good for the USA (Score:2)
I speak as a proud American of Indian origin (25years in the Good Ole USA, ex GeorgiaTech, ex MIT startups)... ... who has watched the US sell its soul to cheaper, shoddily produced Chinese goods.
So basically... (Score:1)
All the low tech stuff can be done where ever. But the high tech part, that's Japan only.
Still.
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Uh.... not even close. There might be a particular reason the felt tip is still made in Japan, but I can gauran-damn-tee that it isn't because Japan is the only one who make quality items at scale.
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Japan has a very cool pen culture. Just walk into any stationary store there and there's an absolutely overwhelming supply of well designed writing instruments. My guess is that because of this they have the tip mechanics and production completely settled.
Putzes Across America (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm sure there's enough asterisks on this particular case to render it completely useless for demonstrating any larger economic trends.
That said, I've never found it easy to believe that it's cheaper to have workers in the Eastern Hemisphere mold your noxious plastic gewgaws, load them into a shipping container, truck them to the depot, load them onto a train, chugga-chugga-chugga them to the port, crane them on a floating steel island, diesel them across ninety degrees of latitude, past pirates, through toll gates owned by rent-seeking oligarchs, past another container ship jammed in the canal sideways, and then do it all in reverse on the other end, than it is to pay some American putz $7.50 an hour. But I guess it must be?
Re:Putzes Across America (Score:4, Interesting)
You've got the elements of the answer right in your comment. Workers in Asia mold plastic with machines at the rates of thousands of pieces an hour. Your hypothetical American putz is making widgets by hand.
Manufacturing costs are no longer primarily driven by labor. They're driven by level of automation, where America has fallen far behind.
We can argue until the cows come home as to the effectiveness of an isolationist stance for bringing manufacturing back to the US. The only thing that will drive on-shoring for certain is a sea change in the way US corporations are managed, by de-incentivising short-term gains. There may be some good ideas in that realm, but I haven't heard them yet.
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I'd mod this up if I could. The extra middle men all have to be fed as well.
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> pay some American putz $7.50 an hour.
I generally agree with your premise, but good luck finding anyone in America willing to work for $7.50/hour.
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> I've never found it easy to believe that it's cheaper to have workers in the Eastern Hemisphere mold your noxious plastic gewgaws, load them into a shipping container, truck them to the depot, load them onto a train, chugga-chugga-chugga them to the port, crane them on a floating steel island, diesel them across ninety degrees of latitude, past pirates, through toll gates owned by rent-seeking oligarchs, past another container ship jammed in the canal sideways, and then do it all in reverse on the other end, than it is to pay some American putz $7.50 an hour. But I guess it must be?
I think you're close to an insight here.
These Sharpies have six components. A plastic cap, a plastic barrel, a plastic plug at the bottom, ink, the metal tip-holder, and the functional part that actually does something - and is imported from Japan.
It's not a stretch of the imagination to envision a factory that makes three plastic chunks, some ink, and one metal part. Your supply-chain is basically: injection plastic, dyes, and some tin. For Sharpie, it's trivial.
Now imagine making a cell phone. S
Our children deserve this (Score:3)
It's great to know that American kids are able to decorate bathroom stall doors, make temporary tattoos, and get high on the school bus using markers that were made right here in the USA.
Congratulations Sharpie (Score:3)
Maybe more manufacturing will come back to the USA using the same ideas as Sharpie, make the product simple and inexpensive to produce so it is a profitable enterprise, I would like to see more shoes & boots made in USA I want a good pair of desert chukkas top grain leather uppers and rubber souls
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You know I love you, but do you ever see the upside to anything?
I know that pessimists are never disappointed, but they're never happy either.
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You literally just conflated a story on Sharpies being made in the US to Armageddon.
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> There's no upside to that. Things have gotten consistently worse every year of my life for as long as I can remember which is quite a ways back in spite of what my detractors might say.
Really? Because I can remember decades without instant information about anything. Waiting hours just to get some photos, having to deal with paper maps, life before microwave ovens and gaming systems. Now I have a super-fast and reliable electric car I can charge at home, and cars are tremendously safer at the same t
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'when'...
rsilvergun is already a bot. It doesn't have to be aware of that to function according to the programming.
More cheaply? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or more inexpensively? 'Cause they're not (necessarily) the same thing.
big enough to pull it off (Score:3)
They were lucky enough to have the resources to 're-invent' their manufacturing proccesses.
For most, this is out of reach.
This is where I feel our government should be focusing. Not in trying to build barriers to trade to allow uncompetative US companies to survive, but to revitilize manufacturing in the US much like Sharpied did. If Sharpie can build their product in the US at a better price, it means they can export those products as well.
The company that survives through protectionism alone has no foreign markets and doesn't help us with balanced trade.
Glad to read they didn't cheapen their product (Score:2)
While they managed to save money moving it domestically it sounds like they did it without cheapening up the overall product quality which is good to hear. Plenty of made-in-America products have been cheapened out over the years.
Re:Thanks Uncle Joe (Score:5, Insightful)
Reading can be hard. You have to look when the process began:
> Back in 2018, many Sharpies were made abroad. That's when Chris Peterson, who was the CFO of Sharpie maker Newell Brands challenged his team to answer a question: How could they keep Newell from becoming obsolete compared with factories in Asia?
Did you think that maybe it doesn't have so much to do with who is in political power and maybe has more to do with the culture of a company? A major point in the summary is that this took a lot of planning and required a direct effort to make this possible.
Re:Thanks Uncle Joe (Score:5, Interesting)
Similar to the famous Jim Sinegal of Costco quote when the company was thinking of raising the hot dog price ‘If you raise (the price of the) effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.’ . So they created their own hot dog factory. Now they also own like 2 or 3 giant chicken ranches as well.
There are numerous stories about the efforts Arizona has gone through to keep the cans at 0.99c over the years which was expanding capacity and I want to say they even built their own container manufacturing plant.
"I grew up in Brooklyn, and I worked for $1 an hour. I respect the value of $1. And I’d say, 'if I can help people who do that and give them a refreshing beverage for an affordable price, why not?' And since I can afford to do it, why not continue to do it?"
You are spot on these are culture issues.
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costco has the worst quality eggs I have ever seen
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[1]So one of those egg council creeps got to you too huh? [youtu.be]
[1] https://youtu.be/AHAFMFFQlkI?t=26
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No, I used to buy them and when I tried making omelettes they would just turn to froth and fall apart. Never had this problem with any other eggs.
Re: Thanks Uncle Joe (Score:2)
What I notice about Costco eggs is that the shells are fragile but the membranes are strong, so they are virtually impossible to open one-handed. In fact, they are damned hard to crack properly at all, and even if they seem to have cracked right, they still often crumble into a big mess when you try to open them.
Anyone out there know enough about chickens to know why this is happening? Are the membranes the same as ever but they're just not giving them enough calcium?
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> Did you think that maybe it doesn't have so much to do with who is in political power and maybe has more to do with the culture of a company?
My personal theory is that politicians cannot create jobs.
At best they can not hinder jobs and at worst they destroy them. This of course disregarding ignoring government work like road construction and bureaucracy. But straightforward jobs? No. Normal jobs happen naturally as a result of demand and the prosperity to spend on that demand. Every politician claims they will create jobs. And lower crime. And cure cancer. And make your dick harder. None of them actually know how to.
My voting theref