On June 26, GE Appliances, a Haier Company, announced a $490 million investment to reshore production of washers and washer/dryers from China, creating 800 new full-time jobs in 2027. The Reshoring Initiative offered to highlight this announcement because of GE Appliance’s historic role launching, documenting and making credible U.S. reshoring.

The Reshoring initiative was founded in 2010. In 2012, despite my best efforts, reshoring was still a trickle that no one had heard of.  Then I, and I believe hundreds of thousands of others, read Charles Fishman’s article “The Insourcing Boom” in the December 2012 issue of The Atlantic. In great detail, Charles described how GE Appliances reshored appliance production from China to Appliance Park, which employed “a tenth of the people in its heyday.” The article reviewed a broad range of benefits GE Appliances achieved by reshoring. Most memorable to me was the benefit of having manufacturing near engineering. The assembly team and engineering cooperated to simplify appliance design to reduce component cost and assembly time to make U.S. assembly competitive. Even though the Chinese manufacturing cost was still substantially lower, the U.S. total cost was lower due to inventory costs and delivery issues. For years, I quoted the article in my presentations.