Why athletic shoes are a challenge for automation
A former executive at a technology provider that worked with Nike on bringing footwear manufacturing back to North America has said reshoring shoe production will be expensive, slow and difficult for companies.
In the wake of the high tariffs now applying to imports from Asian countries, the Wall Street Journal asked Tom Fletcher, a former senior vice-president at Flex, about previous projects to move manufacturing back across the Pacific.
Flex, a Texas-based supplier of automated production technology, began working with Nike in 2015. This followed Flex’s success in helping Apple set up production of some of its products in the US.
Nike’s ambition was to set up a shoe production facility in Mexico with high levels of automation and for it to be making tens of millions of pairs of athletic footwear per year by 2023. There was also hope that the Mexico factory could be a model for setting up similar facilities in the US. But by early 2019, the two partners had wound the project up.
One of the biggest problems they encountered centred on automation requiring production processes to be simple and easy to repeat millions of times. By contrast, the shape, materials and colours in sports shoes change very frequently. The softness of many of the materials in a sports shoe represents another challenge.
Tom Fletcher explained that it had taken the Flex team eight months to work out a way of putting the Nike swoosh on a shoe using automation. After eight months, Nike had already moved on to a new model, for which Flex’s automated swoosh idea no longer worked.
Speaking now, Mr Fletcher told the WSJ that he still thinks highly automated, high-scale production of sports shoes on US soil is possible. But he said Flex’s experience of trying to set this up with Nike had been “humbling, for sure”.
If new attempts to do this are to be successful now, Mr Fletcher said the companies involved will need to have “deep pockets and patience because it’s not going to happen fast”.
