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The economics of building a factory in Brooklyn to be near the cool kids
- _delirium 12y agoThe final decision turned on a simple calculation: MakerBot wanted its production line close to its engineers, and its engineers wanted to live in Brooklyn. Working out bugs in a factory halfway around the world would be cumbersome, MakerBot executives decided. I can definitely see that from a risk-management perspective, especially for a small startup, and one that doesn't have its production process nailed down solid yet. A ton of Kickstartered physical-product projects end up sinking by trying to manufacture in China. Admittedly some just don't have the first clue of what they're doing, but some also get done in by the large latencies, and the remoteness/opaqueness of the manufacturing side to the engineering team (which then leads to difficulty in debugging or iterating).