Wonder if they even tried to find a manufacturer in the USA. Small volume, and technically very simple. No language, time zone, import, or travel barriers.
I don't think as a country we will ever make up or compete with what China is doing currently. Although I can tell you you can hire people here at equally low prices. When you talk of manufacturing. The first sort is machine made the other ones are hiring human beings.
The latter sort of is what is most tricky. You need people who are ready to do a repetitive job, that can add nothing to their knowledge on the longer and are ready to work for long hours for cheap wages. Most of that work is generally precision work that you can't do with machines. With machines, its a different story. You begin to see how you can recover your investment over time. But with people, you have to start to look at scalability issues.
I don't know about America. But I think its worthwhile to ask a few questions.
a. Is it possible to hire such large volume of people at such low prices in America.
b. Will those people, be ready to work for long hours on repetitive mechanical oriented jobs. Which gives no value on a persons career on a longer run.
c. Since these jobs are low paying, the retirement long term financial benefits won't be exciting. The health care benefits won't be much.
d. Since industries have to be all at one place, for inventory co ordination, infrastructure issues et al. People will be forced to live in low rent houses. Often of sharing and accommodation basis. Is this lifestyle ok with those mass quantity of people.
The way I see American lifestyle is more driven by spending, and expenses are really high for an ordinary American. Both in terms of daily expenditure and other issues like sending kids to college and medical benefits.
The larger question is will the mass American crowd adopt to the lifestyle I describe?
If the answer is yes, I see no reason why this can't be done in the USA. In fact if it can be done, then it must be encouraged. The government must make it easy and facilitate them. Why should the average American suffer because of me in India or some one in China. If any thing that can be done here(India/China) it can be done there(America) if the conditions are suitable.(both in terms of economic and other factors).
How much? Serious question, just curious.
I recently wanted to replace the brakes on my commuting bike. I narrowed it down to two possible makes; Paul or Avid. Paul is a tiny company based in California, Avid is a brand of SRAM (one of the "big three" bicycle components manufacturers). Paul's brakes cost $110 per wheel (for the polished aluminum). Avid's cost $88 per wheel (on Amazon, but list for $110) and aren't polished.
(I am not 100% sure that SRAM outsources to China, but I'm sure they move many many more units than Paul.)
Another example is Shimano freewheels vs. White Industries freewheels. Shimano makes fine equipment, but the White Industries freewheels are much better built and have proven to be much more durable. The price difference is something like $20 for the made-in-southeast-asia Shimano part, and $80 for the made-in-the-USA White Industries part. So, people will pay for quality, and there's only going to be a big price difference if you make billions of widgets per year.
If nobody even competes with you and you aren't making enough units to justify buying your own CNC milling setup, I can't imagine why you would deal with the hassle of China.
(Once I get tired of programming I think I am going to make bike parts, so I always read these manufacturing articles with interest.)
Cycling is a fascinating industry. I've done quite a lot of research into it (mostly on the framebuilding side).
These days the vast majority of non-custom (and especially carbon fibre) frames are made in China & Taiwan.
Many smaller manufactures actually collaborate with a factory on a frame design, and the factory usually ends up owning the design.
In a few cases larger manufactures screw up the process as well. For example, Bianchi famously got a Chinese factory to manufacture one of their high-end framesets but neglected to manage the IP properly and ended up in a situation where the Chinese factory owned the frame moulds and the rights to use them after 1 year (or 2 years?). Now you can buy fake Bianchi frames on ebay, but ironically they are actually legally produced (although branding them as Bianchis isn't legal).
http://forums.roadbikereview.com/bikes-frames-forks/chinese-... and http://cheapcarbonframes.com/ seem to have the most information.
I've heard a few bad stories about Chinese titanium frames though (but titanium is always going to be more variable than carbon fibre because it is hand welded).
I'd wager they did their research and could not find any in-country manufacturers that would custom produce a design (along with creating any custom tooling required), in such small quantity, at economically viable pricing.
In the past, I've tried to get relatively "ordinary" products (e.g. luggage & cosmetic packaging) made within North America (had to expand local to regional) to almost no avail. I found many "manufacturers" here import their products from China. Only a handful businesses actually make stuff here and their minimum requirements often do not make sense for small/new businesses. And the differences in pricing between local & overseas producers far exceeded the examples discussed here.
That said, as that kickstarter post showed, nominal pricing is only part of the cost of overseas production (they underestimated foreign logistic issues, refinement costs, etc) and final cost may make it not worth making the leap. Many products are simply too expensive for small businesses to produce at home OR abroad. They would have stopped their experiment earlier but they do have 11,280% of requested capital to play with in this case.
My guess is that they looked mainly at larger outfits that couldn't take on a small job, or they just didn't look very hard. Not blaming them: if you don't know where to get something made, it can be hard to figure out where to start looking.