Annie Minoff
speaker
239 appearances
11 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard Jun 2025
Annie Minoff’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That's my colleague, John Emont.
That's the way most modern shoemaking is done. Shoes are crafted in factories in Asia by tens of thousands of laborers making relatively low wages. And those shoes are then shipped and sold all over the world. But President Trump would like to change that.
Though some of Trump's tariffs have been paused, shoe companies are still facing pressure to move production back home. but actually making shoes in North America would be incredibly tough to pull off. And shoemakers know that from experience.
Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Annie Minoff. It's Thursday, May 8th. Coming up on the show, what happened when Nike tried to make shoes closer to home? My colleague John is not what you would call a sneakerhead.
You're a my wife found a sale guy. Nice. But ever since John moved to Singapore, he's been learning more about the business side of the sneaker game.
Why is that?
That's because shoes are complicated. A single shoe can incorporate a range of materials, from squishy foams to flexible plastics.
For years, shoemakers thrived in Asia. But about a decade ago, several sneaker companies, Adidas, Under Armour, and Nike, all tried to make shoes in a new place and in a new way. all three shoe companies decided to bring some production to North America.
One reason to try something different, wages were rising in Asia.
For a long time, setting up factories in North America was cost prohibitive.
Of all the shoe companies, Nike's automation effort was the biggest. In 2015, the company set up a factory, not in the United States, but close by, in Guadalajara, Mexico. Wages in Mexico are higher than in most of Southeast Asia, but they're lower than in the U.S. Plus, it would be faster to ship shoes from Mexico to Nike's American customers. And what was Nike's goal?
Like, how much manufacturing did they want to shift back to North America?
That's ambitious.
According to John's reporting, some within Nike hoped that the Mexican factory would serve as a stepping stone.
To help them set up that Guadalajara factory, Nike partnered with a company called Flex.
One of the people who worked on that Apple project was Tom Fletcher.
Tom would go on to work on the Nike factory. So you'd built complicated stuff in North America before?
And so going into this project of trying to build shoes in North America, how are you feeling? Did it seem doable?
Tough but possible?
Tom's main challenge was to figure out how to replace humans with robots. His goal was to have fewer than 3,000 workers. To start, he flew to China, Indonesia, and Vietnam to tour Nike's factories there. And he saw firsthand the scale of the human labor that Nike was used to.
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