The American Sports Shoes Factory Will Return To The United States And Be Built By Robots.

The world's newest shoe has been the United States.

The pride of workers, but these manufacturing jobs were pferred to Asia long ago.

But now the United States

The factory will return to the United States and be built by robots.

Reebok said the company plans to launch a high-tech laboratory in Rhode Island (Rhodes Island) and build sports shoes through injection molding technology.

"Our idea is that since the innovative idea of shoes comes from the United States, the product is also made in the United States," the company said.

In 1970s, cheap labor in Asia allowed sports shoe manufacturers to move factories to the region. But as China's middle class population increased, production costs rose, and technological innovations made labour intensive manual processing automated, the American shoe factories gradually resumed.

Matt Powell, sporting goods analyst at NPD group, a market research firm, said: "the United States

I want to move the factory to the United States so that product marketing can be carried out as soon as possible.

At present, the shoes made in Asia need more than a month's shipping to reach the United States. "

The German sporting goods brand Adidas will open its first factory in George Asia in the United States next year, and will set up a factory in Germany.

The American factory is likely to be in Cherokee (Cherokee County) in Atlanta. Almost all of its work will be automated, but at least 150 workers will be employed.

Under Armour, headquartered in Baltimore, will launch a new design and manufacturing center this year to develop sports shoes and clothing series, and even Nike, a sports product giant in Oregon, said recently it began to talk about building more manufacturing plants in North America.

But there are also some brands that have never left the United States, such as New Balance in Boston, which is manufactured in Massachusetts and Maine (Maine). Powell says smaller businesses have been making products in the new England shoe center since then.

McInnis said that 100% of Reebok's products are made in Asia, such as mainland China, Vietnam and Taiwan, China, but once the company's experiment on Rhodes island is successful, the situation may change.

He said the factory on Rhodes Island, Burrillville, is a small factory that will produce thousands of pairs of shoes, compared with hundreds of thousands of pairs in Asian factories.

The company's most important goal is to speed up the shoe shaping process, which is laborious and labor-intensive, and costs more.

McInnis said the factory will complete the injection molding process through the industrial robot.

The plant is scheduled to open early next year to cooperate with AF Group, a plastics shoe maker.

AF Group is headquartered near Lincoln (Lincoln) and has 150 employees.

Keith Lonergan, President of AF Group, said: "this robot device can be programmed, so the design process can be changed to other by fast writing program.

The production process may be regionalized, for example, if products are sold in new England, the products will also be manufactured locally.

Matt Priest, President of the footwear dealers and Retailers Association (FDRA), said Reebok experiments show that some companies are using the technology to produce shoe materials such as soles and shoes.