By: Robert Caputo
American manufacturers have spent four years trying to bring production home, and the numbers have not cooperated. According to Kearney’s 2026 Reshoring Index, US manufacturing investment roughly tripled over that period while capacity grew only 1.5%, and manufacturing imports reached a four-year high despite record investment and tariffs. Much of the production did not come home at all. Direct imports from mainland China fell by $135 billion, while other low-cost Asian countries and regions gained $193 billion. The work moved, and largely stayed overseas.
Robert Caputo’s experience points to a narrower question than the national debate usually asks. He has built US-based low-volume manufacturing more than once, and his position is that whether to build in America comes down to the product and the volume a company will actually sell, not to tariffs or slogans alone. For the right product at the right volume, with freight, tariffs, and overseas support counted, Caputo has brought domestic production within roughly 10% of offshore cost.
What a Reshoring Quote Leaves Out
Most reshoring debates start with a quoted unit price from an overseas factory and a higher one from a domestic shop. Caputo’s starting point is everything the quote leaves out: the freight to move product across an ocean, the tariffs that land on it, and the cost of supporting a manufacturing partner several time zones away.
His background in logistics, including coordinating freight across roughly 35 West Coast sites, shapes how he reads a cost comparison: as a full picture of what it takes to put a finished product in a customer’s hands, not a line on a supplier’s quote.
“The question isn’t really whether to build in America,” says Caputo, Managing Director of Fulcrum-cpg Inc. “It’s what this product is, how many you’ll realistically sell, and what it costs to get each one to a customer. Answer those honestly, and the location mostly picks itself.”
Where Volume Changes the Math
For Caputo, volume is the other half of the equation. He matches the manufacturing path to the product and to the volume a company will actually sell, rather than making a blanket case for either side. The 10% figure comes with that condition attached: it describes the right product at the right volume, not every product at any volume.
The general logic is familiar to anyone who has priced manufacturing. Large contract manufacturers are built around scale, and a product that ships in modest numbers does not always capture that benefit. That is the space where a domestic low-volume operation can compete, and where Caputo has built one more than once.
“The hardest number to get right is the volume,” Caputo admits. “Teams plan the operation around the forecast they want. If what you actually sell is a fraction of that, you’ve built the wrong operation, and it doesn’t matter which country it’s in.”
Splitting the Work Instead of Picking a Side
At an engineering-heavy AR/VR startup that needed to show investors it could build what it had proven, Caputo was the first operations hire. Rather than treating location as a single choice, he split the work. He negotiated the manufacturing agreement with Jabil, moved the specialty manufacturing to the US, and built a US operations team of eight working alongside 15 people in China. The company had the product in production within a year.
For a startup trying to prove to investors that it could manufacture, that structure answered the question without forcing an all-or-nothing bet on either country.
What Speed Is Worth
At a wearable tactile audio system client, Caputo built US-based low-volume manufacturing again, and the results showed up in more than the unit price. Product cost fell 30%, cost of goods sold fell 18%, and time to market for new products dropped 31%.
That last figure rarely appears in a reshoring spreadsheet, but for a hardware company launching new products, it can matter as much as cost. A production line close to the design team shortens the loop between a change on paper and a unit off the line.
Counting Before Committing
Caputo’s experience spans both sides of the market. At startups, he has built operations from the ground up and taken products from prototype to production, and inside established companies, he has run multi-site supply chains and stood up manufacturing. Across both, the reshoring question he brings is the same: what does this product cost to build and deliver, fully counted, at the volume it will really sell?
None of this guarantees that a domestic factory will beat an offshore one, and Caputo does not claim it will. His point is narrower: the decision should rest on the full cost and an honest volume, not on the quoted unit price or the headlines. With imports still climbing after four years of record investment, that is a practical place to start. Count everything, pressure-test the volume, and let the product make the call.
