Why It's So Difficult for Robots to Make Your Nike Sneakers

The robots struggled to handle the soft, squishy and stretchy parts that are integral to shoemaking

- Jon Emont

President Trump is betting that the threat of stiff tariffs on low-cost countries in Asia and elsewhere will pressure American companies to bring manufacturing—and jobs—back to the U.S. But high U.S. labor costs mean companies would have to find ways to replace human workers with machines. For some industries, that has proved surprisingly difficult.

Indeed, a yearslong effort by Nike to shift part of its manufacturing from China, Indonesia, and Vietnam to North America illustrates how tough it is for U.S. brands to wean themselves off the flexible, low-cost contract manufacturers that use armies of laborers to churn out an array of products for American consumers.

Starting in 2015, Nike poured millions into an ambitious effort to partly automate what has always been a highly labor-intensive industry. At the time, rising labor costs in China and advances in manufacturing techniques such as 3-D printing opened the possibility of finding a new way to make shoes that would rely on fewer workers.

The shoe giant turned to Flex, an American manufacturer that had helped Apple set up a complex factory in Texas to make Mac Pros. The goal: Make tens of millions of Nike sneakers at a new high-tech manufacturing site in Guadalajara, Mexico, by 2023.

The plant would still include thousands of workers, but far fewer than are needed in Asia to make the same number of sneakers. If successful, the project could be a model for production in the U.S., according to some involved in the effort.

Nike's competitors also sensed an opportunity to rethink a manufacturing model built around massive Asian factories where armies of cheap, skilled laborers stitch fabrics and glue soles to shoes by hand.