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Sharpie found a way to make pens more cheaply by manufacturing them in the U.S.

• impish9208 1y ago
  Gift link: https://www.wsj.com/business/sharpie-us-production-cost-cutting-d9ba2abd?st=ZGgTBQ https://www.wsj.com/business/sharpie-us-production-cost-cutt...
• eqvinox 1y ago
  Great, now the few insular successes of manufacturing in the U.S. will be trotted out as support for deranged economic policies :(.
  • bediger4000 1y ago
    I can't decide if that's the same, or different from, trotting out the very few tariff-boosting economists in support of deranged economic policies.
  • mensetmanusman 1y ago
    Tariffs are an inefficient tax on consumption. If the parties keep failing to agree to figure out how to increase revenue, this is the best stop gap we could hope for. Especially if it generates over $1T. https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/19/economy/us-tariff-rebate-checks-bessent https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/19/economy/us-tariff-rebate-chec...
    • lovich 1y ago
      Why are you implying that the goal is to increase revenue? This admin also pushed for tax cuts simultaneously and the budget they passed added to the deficit again.
      • mensetmanusman 1y ago
        Tariffs at their current rate canceled the deficit added by the tax cuts according to experts.
        • lovich 1y ago
          What experts that are not part of this administration? He fired people who gave him numbers he didn’t like already like the head of BLS so I don’t trust any numbers self reported by them. And oh, is this also with that made up math they used to say that continuing the existing tax cuts past their expiration date didn’t count as increasing the deficit?
        • schainks 1y ago
          You're joking, right? Show me the money.
        • timerol 1y ago
          https://www.bestmoney.com/tax-relief/learn-more/how-trump-tax-plans-can-affect-you https://www.bestmoney.com/tax-relief/learn-more/how-trump-ta... is more of a personal finance website, but it reports (from the Tax Foundation), over a 10 year timeframe, a $3.8T total deficit increase over previous law. (CBO estimates are less favorable on deficit increases.) The same article estimates $2.1T in tariff revenue based on policy in early September. Seems closer to plugging half the gap than "cancelled"
        • actionfromafar 1y ago
          Yes, Trump got 17 trillion dollars. pinkie
        • johnnyanmac 1y ago
          Even if true (it's not) why are we giving tax breaks to billionaires to cancel out revenue instead of paying off our 29T deficit?
  • themafia 1y ago
    The economy that you and I experience? Or just the economy that Wall Street experiences?
• nialse 1y ago
  It is hard to discern if this is an uplifting story, or a rather depressing story about regaining lost basic manufacturing process skills. Any and all countries should be able to make basic and essential things.
  • mensetmanusman 1y ago
    Anytime humans create systems that allow a group of individuals to orchestrate a higher energy output of productive activity, it’s an uplifting story because it’s literally how wealth is generated for society.
    • walls 1y ago
      Unless all of that new wealth is captured and horded by a handful of people.
      • mensetmanusman 1y ago
        This rarely happens 100%, as you see in the article the employees make more when they enable higher energy efficiency.
        • themafia 1y ago
          The corollary is that it rarely happens that 100% of the earned gains goes to those who actually earned them. If there was actual competition for their labor then that would change.
      • Nifty3929 1y ago
        Don't confuse wealth with money - they are opposites, or maybe two sides of a coin. Wealth is the stuff - in this case pens. Money is what you get in exchange. Society gets more pens with less human effort required - that's a win, and has nothing to do with money. Money (increased profits, share price, etc) is what happens when you create the more stuff with less effort that society gets. Money is how we keep track of how much net wealth (stuff) someone or some company has created for society.
• bgwalter 1y ago
  Newell Brands stock price fell sharply during the first Trump administration from $53 and is now at $5.40. Marketing this as a success story of U.S. manufacturing is insane. If the WSJ honestly thinks the outlook is better now, it should at least provide the history and say why (and who provided the investments for automation given that Trump is a sharpie user).
  • shoo 1y ago
    You make a good point, I did a little digging and it looks like the historical share price drop around 2018 is superficially explained by a big decrease in revenue and a big drop in EBIT, and those two changes are explained by Newell restructuring and divesting a bunch of non core brands, and also by accounting fraud.
• mananaysiempre 1y ago
  I’m having trouble figuring out from the body of the article what the way mentioned in its title actually was. There’s a list of nice business steps the company took (and I can’t imagine starting work on the problem in 2018 hurt either), but I don’t expect they were the only ones to take any specific one, so why did Sharpie in particular succeed? What’s the recipe? Automate the crap out of your assembly line and promote (a lucky few among) your former assembly-line workers (who you definitely did not fire when you got high on automation) to technicians? I can’t imagine that’s a rare thought; yet this seems to be a rare success story.
  • washadjeffmad 1y ago
    It's a brand with household name recognition. It's also a bit of a plug piece (NWL has had a rough decade). The most newsworthy detail here is probably the WSJ publishing an article that could be construed as somewhat pro-labor.
• leobg 1y ago
  Beautiful. Sounds like they’re doing with pens in Maryville what Tesla did with the Model S in Fremont. > Peterson […] found that the factory could use robots to do an increasing share of the packing. But he decided to keep the employees who knew the company and convert their jobs to roles such as automation engineering. In that case, an employee would fix a robot instead of packing a box. Peterson estimates the average wage at its Maryville facility, which employs 550 staff, has gone up some 50% over the past five years—without a change in head count.
  • lotsofpulp 1y ago
    So a business used automation to decrease COGS? Doesn’t sound noteworthy.
    • lazide 1y ago
      The US has (near as I can tell) forgotten even the basics. Like a coder writing code (by hand!) to make things more efficient somewhere, also seems noteworthy now.
      • lotsofpulp 1y ago
        I don’t know what forgotten the basics means, but US manufacturing output in terms of USD is quite high relative to its population: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing 17%+ with 4% of the world’s population means there must be some kind of automation expertise.
        • lazide 1y ago
          The US has steadily gone ‘up market’, and automated heavily in most industries. Skills like manual machining, and manual welding have gotten much harder to find and a smaller portion of the economy. As to if that matters? What Sharpie did in the US is super simple table stakes for manufacturing anywhere, it’s only notable because it can be used in a larger political story.
        • 1y ago
• awful 1y ago
  I suspect there is quite profit margin in Sharpies compared to other similar markers from the global market. Exactly what a tariff would do by insulating them from a global market pricing, allowing flexibility in rearranging their costs. *even considering quality issues.
  • satonakamoto 1y ago
    https://imgur.com/a/pUCliyo https://imgur.com/a/pUCliyo
• conductr 1y ago
  > Newcomb joined the company 20 years ago as a packer of chair mats, which the facility made at the time. He took on new roles as years went by. When he reached a point where he wanted a leadership position, Newell’s human-resources department said the company would give him the job, but he would need an undergraduate degree, the cost of which the company would cover. > Mike Newcomb now leads the molding department. Newcomb obtained a business degree from a local college and now leads the molding department, overseeing production of the 4.3 billion pen barrels and caps the facility makes each year. My question is always, why? Why was the degree required for this? He has 20 years of experience. Send him to a 4 week management training course or something. I went to business school for undergrad and it prepared me very little to run a molding department. I think this guys experience was already his biggest asset and this investment could have been significantly less expensive.
  • magicalhippo 1y ago
    I wouldn't be surprised if the degree is one of those hard requirements they just have for such positions. That said, as someone who doesn't have a business degree, shouldn't it ideally prepare him better for working with the rest of the organization? Dealing with budgets, strategic plans from upper management, marketing etc?
    • conductr 1y ago
      Most of those are politics and that’s not part of the education. You’ll learn what a textbook definition of strategic planning is, the concept behind it but every company has its own strategic planning process and it’s always evolving. Management training would cover all this in a few weeks. He got a full undergrad degree, meaning half his courses were just core like history and English and all that stuff. It could have been much more focused is my point.
  • AndrewKemendo 1y ago
    Because - and I hate the fact that it’s this way - they need to ensure there is a salary gate for other positions at a similar level. Part of the challenge of organizational management is making decisions structurally bound to prevent negotiations for every single possible response. “Well Mike didn’t have a degree, so why not me?” Would become the next big thing The “Simple” answer is, don’t have dumb gates for hiring and have your managers actually behave like leaders who have a personal stake in the success of their business and hires. Other than rare, personality driven cases, this approach isn’t even available as a concept for people who get into business for money or power - primarily because “the market” doesn’t reward training people, because the last century has shown that people with money don’t want to take the risk
• 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  Sharpie is special and can make one thing essentially forever.
  • fraserharris 1y ago
    It was a surprise learning how applicable your statement is when I was selling technology products into consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies. Consumer preference is very hard to change once it is established, and leading CPG companies spend an enormous amount establishing that preference.
    • Symbiote 1y ago
      I was surprised how bad Sharpie markers were, when I first came across them here in Europe a few years ago. I had started hearing the word, where we used to say "permanent marker". But the smell! Yuerk. I don't know what it is, but I find it awful. The smell is the only problem, but as far as I'm concerned it's enough that I'll never buy another. The similar-quality European or Japanese permanent markers don't smell anywhere near as bad, but have surely lost market share here due to Sharpie's effective marketing.
• asdefghyk 1y ago
  Amazing that made in USA with competive price to if made in China Manufacturing in China is at wxpwnxw of worker conditions and more lax OHS lays and more lax environmental and worker rights, working longer hours and more days.
  • dredmorbius 1y ago
    "wxpwnxw"?
    • dfc 1y ago
      It has to be a super strange autocorrect for "expense", but I don't know why anyone is typing wxpwnxw a lot ...
      • fluoridation 1y ago
        It's probably just a typo on a normal keyboard. All the missed keys are on the left hand side.
      • dredmorbius 1y ago
        Thanks, that fits, along with the mis-typed keys all being left-handed as fluoridation noted.
• bityard 1y ago
  It is insanely hard to build basic things in the US anymore, even if there is a market, even if the market will pay your prices, even if you have the capital to start, and even if you can hire reliable workers. And those are all HUGE ifs. The biggest problem is that the base underlying our manufacturing capability has almost completely evaporated. You need tool and die companies to build parts for your manufacturing machines, but almost none are left. There are only a few plastic injection manufacturing companies left, and they are either fully booked or on the path to shutting down. (No, you can't 3D print products for the mass market, it's way too slow and expensive.) Young people think of trades and manufacturing jobs as fall-backs that only drop-outs who couldn't hack college get into. You will make many times more money as a salescritter convincing people to buy things they don't need than using decades of engineering experience to build the things they do. It's a popular misconception that China's manufacturing advantage is cheaper labor. This was _maybe_ true for a while, their advantage right now is that they have all the things mentioned above: they have the tool and die shops, they have the supply chains, and they have workforce. They can go from product idea to shipping in a week. I do not celebrate the Chinese government for much, but making sure they had a robust manufacturing base from top to bottom was the biggest and most important thing they have ever done. The US government let ours wither and die. Which has made our economy remarkably fragile and essentially decimated the whole idea of a blue-collar middle class. Destin from Smarter Every Day encountered all of this when he tried to make a better grill brush using only a handful of parts and _still_ did not manage to make the whole thing using only US-originated parts. It's a fascinating window into how hard it is to make anything at all here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZTGwcHQfLY
  • DetroitThrow 1y ago
    Yes, for example, it's shocking how much harder it became for a random market entrant to get into the business of making auto parts since the 2008 shutdown, which consolidated and shuttered much of the supply chain. It's industrial capacity that will take decades to "grow" back, if ever.
  • bsder 1y ago
    > You will make many times more money as a salescritter convincing people to buy things they don't need than using decades of engineering experience to build the things they do. That's the fundamental problem. The pay for industrial roles is garbage compared to the skill required. Anyone talented enough to do those roles can obviously see that and opts to do something else.
• s1mon 1y ago
  It makes sense that this is possible. It's a very high volume item, with limited parts. The raw materials are not unique to any one location. If you have the capital to invest in a highly automated production line (which I'm sure cost many million USD), you will eventually get the ROI and the costs will be similar in many locations around the world. Labor costs are a small portion of the COGS (cost of goods sold). If most of the market is in the US, then shipping cost savings probably outweigh the higher labor and real estate costs. Energy costs and raw materials are likely similar enough to be a wash. Contrast this with consumer electronics, especially new products. Those have huge benefits from the concentration of the supply chain and the agility of the supply chain in Southern China. That doesn't exist in the US.
• shoo 1y ago
  A few people are discussing Newell Brands Inc (NWL)'s poor stock performance over the last decade, and how that makes it hard to sell as a success story. As bgwalter points out, there was a large drop of NWL's share price, particularly between june 2017 ($53.35 / share) and june 2019 ($15.36 USD). Looking at historical financial metrics [1] over this period provides some insight about the stock price drop: 2016 2017 2018 2019 Revenue ($b) 13 15 9 10 Op Margin(%) 9 10 7 8 EBIT Margin(%) 9 13 -91 -6 Their revenue had been growing, then in 2018 their revenue dropped by around 40%, breaking the trend of "increasing revenue" and "increasing EBIT margin". So that explains why we might expect a large decrease in share price, if investor narratives changed from a "growth company" story to a "declining company" story. Reported earnings were negative for 2018, 2019 and 2020. A Forbes article from 2019 [2] provides some context that may explain large revenue drop: > Over the last year or so, the company has offloaded many non-core businesses (such as sporting goods maker Rawlings, packaging manufacturer Waddington, and Pure Fishing – a maker of fishing equipment) to trim its portfolio and cut costs. Moreover, the asset sales have helped the company prune down its debt, which stood at about $6.7 billion at the end of June, down from close to $11 billion two years ago. Aha: searching for "Newell restated financials" dug up this interesting gem [3]. In 2023 the SEC charged Newell and the former CEO Michael Polk with misleading investors: > The SEC’s order finds that, in 2016 and 2017, Newell and Polk took actions that increased the company’s publicly disclosed core sales growth in ways that were out of step with Newell’s actual but undisclosed sales trends, allowing the company to announce “strong” or “solid” results in quarters it internally described as disappointing due to shortfalls in sales. According to the order, Newell pulled sales forward into earlier quarters without adequate disclosure and engaged in accounting practices that were inconsistent with GAAP, while overriding its internal accounting controls. Collectively, these measures gave the misleading appearance that Newell had achieved core sales growth in line with its targets and deprived investors of information relevant to an accurate and complete understanding of Newell’s actual sales trends. So former CEO Polk engaged in financial shenanigans during 2016 and 2017 to cook the books and make sales growth appear better to investors than they actually were, shaping NWL as a growth story. They weren't able to maintain the charade in 2018. [1] https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xnas/nwl/key-metrics https://www.morningstar.com/stocks/xnas/nwl/key-metrics [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/10/24/how-newell-brands-recent-divestitures-and-deleveraging-are-paying-off/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2019/10/24/ho... [3] https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-210 https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2023-210
• jonahss 1y ago
  One thing that China has, that the US does not is a marketplace like Alibaba. It's simply incredible how you can place an order for any component with a quantity slider that goes from "three" to "three full train-cars a day". When starting a hardware product, it's so easy to buy small quantities at commercial prices, no questions asked. In the US, it seems all sales is relationship-based. I need to fill out forms on bad websites, wait for emails from sales reps, who sniff out immediately that I only want a small order. The overhead for processing an order isn't deemed worth the time, and any US-based small-time project ends there.
• satonakamoto 1y ago
  In fact, if you search on Amazon, the cheapest option is $0.75 per count. Similarly, on Alibaba, it costs <$0.08 per unit, and on Chinese websites, it is $0.03 per unit (with free shipping within China mainland). This means the price at retail terminals is at least 10 times higher. https://imgur.com/a/pUCliyo https://imgur.com/a/pUCliyo
• ricudis 1y ago
  At last, they found something that is cheaper to manufacture in US. It's a good start.
• deleted 1y ago
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