Meet 8 of the last home goods manufacturers in America
Forty-one years ago, when Sara Irvani’s grandfather launched a footwear company in Buford, Georgia, half the nation’s shoes were made in America.
Today, the figure is down to 1%.
“From the late 1890s through the 1970s or so, there had actually been shoe manufacturing in Buford,” Irvani said.
Now, the Oka Brands factory stands alone.
President Donald Trump’s controversial tariff campaign has stirred conversation, debate, hope and despair about the state of American manufacturing.
Trump says he is raising import taxes partly in the hope of sparking a manufacturing revival and inspiring consumers to buy American.
Buy American is a concept as old as the nation. Right now, though, the Buy American movement faces stiff headwinds. Inflation has raised prices dramatically over the past five years, making cheap imports look all the more appealing.
Most Americans say they prefer American-made products, when they can find them, according to an October survey by Morning Consult for the Alliance for American Manufacturing.
But they may not be looking very hard: Gallup polling suggests only about 40% of Americans consistently know where their toasters and T-shirts are made.
American manufacturers want attitudes to change.
“Made in America means communities and jobs and supporting neighbors,” said Amity Messett, sales and marketing director at Liberty Tabletop, a company that bills itself as the last American manufacturer of stainless-steel flatware.
USA TODAY spoke to some of the last manufacturers of household goods in America to learn why they kept their businesses stateside, what they offer that their overseas competitors don't, and how Trump's tariffs impact what they do.
Manufacturing jobs plunge
The number of U.S. manufacturing workers has plummeted from a peak of 19.6 million in 1979 to 12.7 million in September 2025. As a share of all nonfarm jobs, manufacturing has slid from 29% in 1960 to 8% today.
It hasn't all been downhill. A modest revival has boosted the manufacturing workforce from a low of about 11.4 million in 2010 to current levels, buoyed by a resurgent Buy American spirit.
"There is a very passionate but small consumer base that will buy American," said Scott Paul, president of the Alliance for American Manufacturing. "And the reason that it's passionate and small is that it's hard to do."
The decline of American manufacturing has played out over decades. No one president, political party, or foreign power bears all of the blame.
America embraced imports with the North American Free Trade Agreement, a 1994 treaty that lowered trade barriers between the United States and its neighbors, Canada and Mexico.
The founding of the World Trade Organization, or WTO, in 1995 heralded an era of globalization. China’s entry to the WTO in 2001 flooded America with low-cost imports.
Some American companies moved factories and jobs overseas, leveraging lower wages, cheaper materials, lax labor laws and scant environmental regulations. Others closed, driven out of business by imported products that sometimes sold for less than it cost to make them.
At some pivotal moment, each of the eight manufacturers profiled in this report chose to remain in business, to keep their factories in America and to compete against a rising tide of imports.
Today, most of them don’t even try to compete on price.
“I just don’t talk about price, ever, because there’s no point,” said Matt Bigelow, CEO of USA Brands, a manufacturer of flannel shirts, blue jeans and teddy bears.
“Something like 90% or 95% of all the world’s toys and teddy bears and plush are made in China,” he said. If you go on Amazon and you look for a cheap teddy bear, you’re not going to find us.”
Instead, they compete on quality.
Nordic Ware baking sheets, pressed at a factory in Minnesota, have been Wirecutter’s pick as best in class for more than 10 years.
American Giant, based in San Francisco, sells a sweatshirt that Slate Magazine has termed “the Greatest Hoodie Ever Made.”
A writer at CNET tried a pair of Oka Recovery slides and declared, “My Feet Can’t Stop Thanking Me.”
“Today, when we talk about 'Made in America,' we talk about things being done right and being accountable for what you do,” said Gat Caperton, owner of Gat Creek, one of a shrinking number of American furniture manufacturers.
Quality, price and patriotism
That’s not to say American manufacturers never compete on price. American Giant supplies Walmart with a made-in-America, all-cotton T-shirt that retails for $12.98.
“That’s a testament to what can happen when you partner with a brand like Walmart that can commit to volume over a long period of time,” said Bayard Winthrop, founder of American Giant.
American Giant's Walmart T-shirts typically feature some variant of “Made in America” or “American Made,” sometimes flanked by an American flag.
Patriotism suffuses the Made in America movement. The exhortation to “Buy American” is as old as the Boston Tea Party, a precursor to the Revolutionary War. A Depression-era Congress passed the Buy American Act of 1933, favoring American-made products in government purchases. Older Americans will remember Lee Iacocca’s defiant car commercials of the 1980s, when American automakers pushed back against imports.
Today, the movement’s most familiar emblem is the Made in USA logo, regulated by the Federal Trade Commission, which calls for a product to be “all or virtually all” made in the United States.
American manufacturers want customers to know that their purchase supports jobs: Not just in their own factories, but in the factories that supply the stainless steel in Liberty Tabletop’s flatware or the cotton in American Blossom Linens, a brand that started as a retail store in Philadelphia.
“By buying one of our shoes,” said Irvani of Oka Brands, “you’re helping to shape the American economy and the structure of our society. Manufacturing jobs ‒ I think it’s important to have them in our society.”
Lately, though, the Made-in-America movement has become entangled in politics.
Trump's tariffs and the Buy American movement have been swept up in a broader fight over the polarizing policies of a divisive president. Chinese memes mock his crusade to reindustrialize America. Democrats widely deride tariffs, though the party used to support them. Much of the public opposes import taxes, which many Americans, and most economists, equate with rising prices.
A giant American flag on a website might resonate with Republican Trump supporters, who are more likely to support his tariffs and to fly a flag outside their homes, according to a recent YouGov/Economist poll.
A subtler American-made message might appeal to Democrats, who have more conflicted feelings about tariffs and the flag itself.
Naturally, American manufacturers want to reach both sides.
“This is like buying local, in effect, but buying local all over our nation,” said Todd Lipscomb, founder of the site MadeInUSAForever, a retail showcase for American manufacturing.
"This is not a Red State or a Blue State issue," Lipscomb said. "This is red, white and blue."
In any case, manufacturers have learned that “Made in America,” however resonant, is not enough to reach American consumers.
“Patriotism and saving jobs doesn’t get you that far,” said Caperton of Gat Creek.
Standing apart from the competition
Bigelow, of USA Brands, believes American-made products “have got to have at least two or three ‘uniques,’” virtues that set them apart from imports. American provenance counts as only one.
For Bigelow’s Vermont Flannel brand, the Green Mountain State address is a selling point. Another is the quality of his company’s flannel, which regularly draws acclaim on “Best Flannel” lists.
Many of America’s remaining household goods manufacturers trade on colorful origin stories, which typically involve immigrants, shoestring operations and the quest for the American dream.
Dave and Dorothy Dalquist started Nordic Ware in 1946 in Minneapolis. She knew Scandinavian cuisine. He knew metallurgy. They began crafting kitchen items “that are tough to pronounce if you’re not Scandinavian,” said Jennifer Dalquist, their granddaughter and executive vice president of Nordic Ware.
The Dalquists created the Bundt pan, which took off in the 1960s after a Bundt cake won a prize in the high-stakes Pillsbury Bake-Off.
Oka Brands took shape when the Irvani family fled Iran after the 1979 revolution, which cost them their shoe business. They started a new company in rural Georgia.
As other American manufacturers went bankrupt and the competition moved overseas, both the Dalquists and the Irvanis resisted pressure to move their factories offshore.
“My father and grandfather were being told by so many people in the industry, ‘You’ve got to move overseas, or you’re going to go out of business,’” Dalquist said.
“Environmental laws and human rights law over there are just nonexistent,” she said. “So that didn’t sit right with our family.”
The remaining American manufacturers see a bitter irony in the evolution of American policy. On the one hand, federal regulators enforced a minimum wage, child labor laws and strict standards for occupational safety and health in American industries.
At the same time, loosening trade rules were “allowing our biggest corporations to ignore all of them and go make things overseas,” said Winthrop of American Giant.
Images of child laborers and sweatshops undoubtedly compel some consumers to buy American.
U.S. manufacturers can also market their products as dependably safe: When every component comes from an American factory, the manufacturer can vouch for its contents.
“You’ve got full knowledge and transparency about what goes into it, and how people are treated,” said Irvani of Oka Brands.
COVID-19 allowed 'American Made' to shine
For U.S. manufacturers, the COVID-19 pandemic was a moment to shine. The global supply chain froze, trapping shipping containers in ports. Consumers languished in their homes, reduced to shopping entirely online.
All of that worked to the advantage of American manufacturers, who mostly didn’t use shipping containers and who relied more on their own websites for sales.
“Our web business went up by over 200%,” said Matt Roberts, CEO of Liberty Tabletop.
American Blossom Linens went live in 2019 with a retail website after decades of selling linens to hospitals, hotels and government agencies. The timing was perfect.
“We were like in the right place at the right time,” said Janet Wischnia, who runs the brand for the Thomaston Mills company. “Everybody was staying home, and there were all the problems with the cargo ships, and it just exploded.”
To some extent, embracing made-in-America housewares and garments means rejecting disposable consumer culture, making the global shipping industry another selling point for American-made products.
To environmentalist critics, the impossibly low price and one-click convenience of many imported consumer goods belie the patent absurdity of shipping a plastic toy around the Earth.
“I’m very into being green,” said Bigelow of USA Brands. “And I thought, what’s better than cutting down on all these shipping containers moving cheaply made products that are going to end up in landfills?”
American manufacturers would like to change the pervasive view of consumer products as ephemera, cheaply made, thoughtlessly discarded and easily replaced.
“I think there are people who are sick of disposable-quality goods that wear out after five uses, 10 uses,” said Dalquist of Nordic Ware. “They end up in our waste stream.”
Oka Brands takes that sensibility a step further: The company encourages customers to return their shoes when they wear out. Return the shoes, and Oka will recycle them into new ones and send you a discount code to buy another pair. By recycling shoes and factory scraps, the company estimates it has saved more than 100 tons from landfills.
Terravive, founded in 2015, manufactures compostable food-service products with headquarters in Richmond, Virginia. Julianna Keeling, the CEO, launched the company in her garage.
“You don’t have to worry about shipping it halfway around the world, and you don’t have to worry about the environmental footprint,” said Joe Swider, vice president of Terravive.
You may, however, have to worry about price.
That “greatest hoodie ever made,” from American Giant, can cost you $168. A pair of those super-comfortable Oka Recovery Slides might set you back $49.95. A modest 20-piece flatware set from Liberty Tabletop recently listed for $136.95.
If any of those companies were competing for your business on Amazon, they would probably lose. A recent Amazon search found a hot-selling flatware set for $19.98.
“We’re not really competing with flannel shirts from Costco,” said Bigelow of USA Brands, whose own flannel shirts typically sell for around $89.
Winthrop, of American Giant, says he is competing with “the high end of the mall.” Compare his hoodies with other high-end hoodies and the price doesn’t look so high.
American manufacturers also talk a lot about cost per use: The price of an item divided by the number of times you use it.
A consumer might easily wear a pair of Okabashi sandals or an American Giant hoodie hundreds of times. When you divide the item’s price by 100, or 300, or 500, the per-use cost becomes vanishingly small.
“The old saying was, ‘Nobody can afford cheap shoes. You have to keep buying them,’ ” said Caperton of Gat Creek.
Tariffs are a mixed bag, manufacturers say
Caperton’s furniture business, founded in 1996 in Berkeley Springs, West Virginia, has benefited from new import taxes, especially the ones on furniture.
For most manufacturers profiled here, however, tariffs are a mixed bag.
Caperton pays more now for the tiny percentage of components he buys abroad: door glides from Germany, decorative knobs from China.
USA Brands pays more for the premium-quality flannel it imports from Portugal.
Liberty Tabletop sources all of its steel from the United States. But the company pays more for steel now, because tariffs have raised the price of steel everywhere.
Retailers have been delaying purchases for the holidays, uncertain where tariffs might settle. That trend, too, has hurt American manufacturers.
“Uncertainty is terrible for small businesses,” said Bigelow of USA Brands.
One thing American manufacturers do like about Trump’s tariff policy is the attendant buzz about American-made products. In the October poll by Morning Consult, half of American consumers said they are more likely to buy American-made products now than in 2024.
“American-made is in the conversation, much more fundamentally now than it was even three or four years ago,” said Winthrop of American Giant.
And no matter your politics, Winthrop said, the impulse to Buy American "is one of the last nonpartisan patriotic things that are out there."