This section of the text deepens the concept of rightshoring by showing that it is not a nostalgic return to past industrial models, but a restructuring of production around proximity, technology, and control. The author contrasts two fundamentally different implementations: Maria Cornejo’s restrained, design-led local manufacturing in New York, and Reformation’s attempt to scale a fast-fashion-like model within a domestic, technologically upgraded supply chain.
Both operate close to the consumer, but they answer a different question. Cornejo asks whether local production can be done well. Reformation asks whether it can be done at scale.
Maria Cornejo: Proximity as Competitive Advantage
Cornejo’s trajectory—from a garage on Mott Street to a vertically organized building on Bleecker Street—illustrates a lightweight form of vertical integration. Design, sampling, production coordination, logistics, and management remain physically close, even if not all upstream processes are internalized.
The real asset here is not cost efficiency but speed of correction.
When suppliers are concentrated in the Garment District, problems are solved by walking up Sixth Avenue, not by email chains across time zones. This creates fast feedback loops, low transaction costs, and tight quality control.
Growth, in Cornejo’s view, is deliberately constrained.
She refuses product proliferation and brand dilution, arguing that growth does not necessarily mean becoming bigger, but doing things correctly and sustaining the right working environment. In the author’s argument, Cornejo functions as proof that small-to-mid-scale rightshoring is economically viable, ethically coherent, and creatively stable—though clearly capped in size.
The Garment District Debate: Cluster vs. Relocation
The proposed relocation of New York’s Garment District to Sunset Park exposes a deeper conflict between existing industrial density and planned modernization.
Opponents argue that the Garment District already functions as an organic incubator. Its value lies in immediacy: emergency repairs, rapid sourcing, and tacit knowledge embedded in proximity. Moving the industry, in their eyes, risks breaking the invisible infrastructure that keeps production responsive.
Andrew Rosen rejects this defensive logic.
He frames the debate not in terms of preservation, but of future relevance. His argument is that a modern fashion ecosystem—technologically advanced, spatially coherent, and attractive to younger workers—must be intentionally built, even if that means abandoning historically central locations.
What matters, in Rosen’s framing, is not geography itself but the ecosystem logic: co-location of design, prototyping, limited production, and retail intelligence.
Theory’s Hybrid Model: Local Intelligence, Global Production
Rosen’s own company, Theory, embodies a hybrid compromise.
Only a quarter of production remains in New York, but all critical design, sampling, testing, and validation occur locally in a highly advanced Design Center.
This structure preserves creative control and technical precision while outsourcing volume production globally. It is not rightshoring in a strict sense, but it is more localized than competitors that externalize everything, including sampling.
The implication is subtle: full domestic production is not required for strategic advantage. What matters is retaining control over the most information-dense stages of the value chain.
Reformation: Scaling Rightshoring Through Speed
Reformation represents the most provocative case in the section.
It attempts to reconcile three usually incompatible elements: fast fashion speed, domestic production, and sustainability narratives.
The company operates on weekly cycles, produces 15–20 new styles per week, replenishes successful items in two weeks, and keeps inventories intentionally small. Environmental claims are structurally tied to business logic: fewer unsold goods, fewer markdowns, less waste.
“Made in the USA” is not framed as a moral stance but as a logistical advantage.
Local production enables faster selling, faster replenishment, and higher turnover. Sustainability, in this model, aligns with profitability rather than opposing it.
Transparency—open factories, visitor access, visible labor conditions—also functions as a branding and trust-building mechanism, not merely an ethical gesture.
Sustainability as Efficiency, Not Restraint
Aflalo explicitly rejects the idea that sustainability means producing less.
Her position aligns with an efficiency-and-offset model rather than degrowth: cleaner production, renewable energy, and compensation mechanisms replace calls for reduced consumption.
The author does not resolve this tension but leaves it exposed.
Reformation demonstrates that growth and cleaner production can coexist, but it also raises the uncomfortable question of whether “better fast fashion” is sufficient to address structural overproduction.
What This Section Ultimately Argues
Taken together, these cases suggest that rightshoring is not a single model but a spectrum.
At one end lies small-scale, tightly controlled, value-consistent production.
At the other lies data-driven, high-speed, locally anchored manufacturing that borrows heavily from fast fashion logic.
Technology enables both.
The unresolved issue is not feasibility, but direction:
whether the future of ethical production lies in limits, or in cleaner acceleration.
Leave a comment