Made in America? What Apple and laundry detergent reveal about shoring decisions  

Jiri Pluhar, Director in Newton’s US consumer goods and retail practice, explores the questions to consider when evaluating whether moving manufacturing could bring stability, increase resilience and boost customer satisfaction.  

For years, manufacturing leaders have questioned offshoring. They talk of the potential retreat of globalization and of the long-term sustainability of hundreds of millions of containers being shipped around the globe each year (1). Conversations spiked around Covid with memories still looming of empty shelves followed by overflowing stock rooms when course correcting. Some companies started to adapt, bringing manufacturing closer to home. But at the time, the disruption caused by the pandemic seemed like a one-off, an outlier event. The impetus was not there; momentum stalled. Global OECD data shows that between 2023-2024 there was a slower pace of deglobalization and reshoring than in 2020-2022 (2).

Now we know that the pandemic was the start of shocks and volatility that are going nowhere, are reshoring and nearshoring rising as resilience-building strategies? 

Does this result in businesses moving away from offshoring? Apple is a much-discussed example, shifting production for US-bound products from China to India and Vietnam (5), encouraging suppliers to friendshore (6) and expanding factory operations in the US (7). The tech giant is far from alone in revealing such a drive, with Walmart pledging to spend hundreds of billions of dollars over a decade on supplies produced, grown or assembled in the US8 and Nike moving some manufacturing away from China (9). 

While there are high profile examples of shifts in shoring strategy due to the cost impact of tariffs and for marketing differentiation, leaders are asking themselves whether it is time to move manufacturing. However, so far, the data does not confirm a broad reshoring boom. In fact, import dependence rose in 2025 (10) and manufacturing employment in the US remains consistent month-on-month (11).  

Admittedly, it will take time for the data to show a change: adapting supply changes rarely happens overnight. It may well be that data over the next few years starts to show something of a shift away from offshoring but it is unlikely to be a dramatic inflow at the macro level. The reason for this is that there is no industry-wide easy-adoption answer to making these complex decisions. As the brand examples above suggest, the best strategies are bespoke at category, product and SKU level, combining offshoring, nearshoring and reshoring to suit consumers and markets.

Cost 

• What is the true cost across every element of the supply chain?  
• How do those costs interact?  

Agility and resilience 

• How sensitive are they to disruption? 
• What would be the impact of manufacturing in neighboring and friendly countries?  
• How visible is it in the market when there is a supply problem?  
• How damaging is it?  
• How quickly does the company need to innovate/turn the product around? 

Customer 

• Will consumers prefer/pay more for Made in the USA products?  
• How much stock does the business need to hold?  
• Are limited editions released every few months, or is this a category that doesn’t change?  
• Does demand rise and fall due to seasonality? 

Take laundry detergent, for example. The liquid in it is mostly water which is heavy and cheap for the space it fills, so it is made close to home. Concentrate it into a sheet and the math flips: it becomes light enough to cross an ocean without a freight penalty, which is why some sheets are made in Asia. Similar product, two different answers based on the product’s dynamics. There is no single shoring answer, only an individual one.  

Ask what it really costs once it’s landed. Ask whether your customer would pay more for where it’s made. Ask whether you could build it somewhere else, at the speed and skill you would need. Find all of those answers, and the location decides itself. But as noted earlier, the diagnosis only gets you halfway. Making a long-term, multi-shoring strategy an operational reality is where the real work starts. How companies execute will determine if there is wider industry adoption or the leaders of the pack break further away.  

Contact Jiri to find out about Newton’s systematic, data-led approach to shoring decisions and implementation.