What It Takes to Bring Manufacturing Back | Wayne Cochran

There's a lot of talk of bringing manufacturing back to the U.S. And with tariffs and certain policies the federal government is trying hard. But is it really doable? Because behind the manufacturing there is an infrastructure that is needed for a lot of manufacturers. Today we sit down with Wayne Cochran. Right now he's working with RM2 International and bringing manufacturing back from Mexico to U.S. And if you look when those tariffs rolled out, immediately in that week it was 54% on material from China. And then it was 25% coming from Mexico and the United States. Most of our materials were coming from China. And then we have this 25% tariff on top of that. Even if we decided yes, going to the United States is the right solution, we couldn't go with the product that we had. It wasn't feasible. So we had to not only say we're going to go to the United States to eliminate the tariff, but we're going to have to completely redesign the pallet. I went to the team and I said, you know, guys, we can't do this. We're dead. If we don't get a solution within four to six months, we're going to die. I'm Siamak. Welcome to Marketing Insider. Wade, it's great to have you on. Welcome. Thank you for having me. There's a big topic right now. A lot of people think we can get the manufacturing back and some people think we cannot get the manufacturing back. Wade, you saw this outsourcing business. You saw it from when it started. You've worked for really big companies. Tell us about that. What did you see? What went to other countries? Yeah, well, it started in the very late 80s with some, at that time I was with Motorola and we moved semiconductor manufacturing to South Korea. That was the first of it that I saw. Because of cost? Because of cost and proximity to where things were going to be further processed in terms of automobiles, et cetera. So it was a combination of logistics, supply chain, support plus lower cost at that time. Now remember, everybody goes South Korea, Wayne, let's go back to late 80s. There was a difference at that time. And then as I moved from Motorola to Intel and we were moving products, motherboards, server boards for everything, Wi-Fi cards. Again, setting up large lines, taking up mega factories, costs, proximity to supply chain became very, very important to be in those areas and set those up. So I spent decades doing that. And then the last one was with Jabil, who is a massive electronic manufacturing supplier throughout the world, heavily invested in Asia, Europe, South America, basically everywhere. And even now looking at Africa. But what everybody now has seen because of, well, actually it started with COVID, right? We saw this disruption to the supply chain. We saw where we were susceptible to things breaking down. And it really became a question, how important is it to have it here or close or alternative solutions, right? Especially in pharmaceuticals, those types of things. And China put a ban on the mask exports at the time during the pandemic. Yes, right. And in fact, yes, Jabil scrambled to, how do we build masks? And remember, and it was also all of the things that were required because there was so much lung damage, et cetera, right? So all of the things that we needed in terms of medical equipment, we didn't have the capability for. So it started there. And then we've seen multiple disruptions, whether it be the financial crisis in 2008 or a lot now of the tariff activity, cost of oil, a lessening of the arbitrage in labor that you had historically. So China, labor has gone way up. And as these countries come up, there's not as much advantage there. So when you look at the supply chain disruption, you look at the opportunity for labor automation, the United States is something that again, people are looking at, let's come back. If we can, let's come back. Now, today, as we look at coming back and we think about what companies would be able to come back and not come back, it's those that don't require as much labor. So anything brought back will have to use a significant amount of automation. Now, those can be great jobs within the United States then. I mean, you're not just putting a screw into a whole type of job. And so they are going to be predominantly what I call solid manufacturing jobs as far as the income that you can provide, et cetera. But we can never have, for instance, the mobile phone market move back here. When you look at all of the steps that's required, those factories literally have thousands or tens of thousands of people that are engaged in that. Those can never come back. So it's all a function of the economics, the supply chain, and then how much labor because that's the differentiation. Is there a way to change their processes? Is there a lot of manual work for something like even mobile production? Well, everybody's automating everything. But again, if you look at the process steps that's required in those activities, there's just too many people. Secondarily, and I don't want to minimize it, is that supply chain. China is blessed with a lot of raw material and access to a lot of raw material. And their labor historically has been very cheap. Now over the past 15 years, they've really moved heavily to bring that labor rate up. And that's where a lot of people are moving to India, moving to Vietnam, because the labor arbitrage is just not there. But they still have the supply chain. You know, when you go and you pull coal out and you turn it into the coke, and then you take the coke into making it into iron with the iron pellets and the limestone, and then you take that iron and you're making it into steel, they have that whole thing. And that investment is huge. I mean, those kinds of investments are massive. And it almost takes a country focusing on that to be able to establish the kind of power that they have. Did we decide to let that go? Did we have that infrastructure here? At one time, you know, if again, you look at post-World War II, you had much of that within the United States. We can take a look at automobiles. We can take a look at electronics. All those things, the tool makers, guys, the tool and dye, engineers, et cetera, they were here. Steel was here, you know, rubber was here. And now it's been taken to the areas that where they can produce it the most efficiently, right? So it's total cost of what you're going to do. And then it was parsing all of that out. And China, to their credit, did a very good job strategically of saying, not only are we going to learn how to do this, but we're also going to establish the backbone, the supply chain. So it makes it very sticky, very hard for you to move away from that. And what about countries like Mexico? How much of that infrastructure do they have for manufacturing? Their infrastructure actually is not that great. They have a wonderful infrastructure in terms of talent. In other words, they have great pools of engineers and they have a huge labor force. But as far as, if you take a look at tool designers, et cetera, in China versus Mexico, you know, it's not that great. Where Mexico is wonderful, they have a tremendous advantage is they have, like I said, this great pipeline in Monterrey and Chihuahua and Guadalajara for the engineers that are coming in, a large labor pool that they can pull up and manufacture. And if you look at today, between the United States and Mexico, it used to be about five or six X more expensive in the U.S. to Mexico. Now it's probably four to five because President Scheinbaum has moved to bring Mexico up much like China has, but there's still a four to five X labor differential. And their proximity to the United States, United States is a massive market, right? And so their ability to go to us or into Canada or down into South America, they're in a wonderful position. So freight, which we know is, we can talk more about, it's getting more and more critical. They're in a super spot to be able to meet the needs of at least the Americas. And does that move the needle, like being close in terms of the cost? Oh, certainly, absolutely. You know, if you think about, again, there's two elements of that. If we take something like our product, which is a pallet, 48 inches by 40 inches by five inches high, there's a lot of volume. And so when you're moving that much volume, whether it's truck or whether it's ship, there's a lot of money that you have to think about. Secondarily, if you're putting it on a ship in China, of course, the timeline. So the amount of planning that you have to do in your supply chain to minimize any disruptions, et cetera, is much greater. It's much more complicated. So you have that ability to be more just in time and to do it much, much cheaper. You know, in fact, when I flew in, I was looking at diesel prices. We know the diesel prices are up everywhere. And here, I think it's like- It's like $8. $8.40 a gallon, right? And so- In California, it's like- That's a huge impact. And in Florida, where I'm at, it was $6.50. Huge impact when you think about. So that proximity is very, very important. You have looked at all these options, right? You were manufacturing in Mexico and you decided to move to US. Can you tell us about that? How did you make the decision? What were the factors? We were manufacturing in Juarez, Mexico. And then in April- Which is close to El Paso. Exactly. Again, right across the border. So if, in fact, El Paso and Juarez are so interconnected- They're kind of like one city. It's like one city. And so when you work on the logistics and you've got it established to be able to come across the border, it's minimal, right? So again, for us to come into the middle of the country, because we have distribution throughout the United States, it makes a lot of sense for us. April of 2025, what happens? Liberation Day. The tariffs, yeah. Tariffs. And if you look when those tariffs rolled out, immediately in that week, it was 54% on things from China, material from China. And then it was 25% coming from Mexico and the United States. Now everybody says, Wayne, what about UMCA, right? The United States, Mexico. Well, this superseded that because there were some elements that they wanted to include. So we sat there and looked at 50%. Most of our materials were coming from China. We were using a glass-pultruded fiberglass resin to build our pallets. And then we have this 25% tariff on top of that. So I mean, let's just do the simple CEO math on that, right? $80 for a bill of material. Now you're taking it 50%. You're up to $120. Now you've taken that before transformation cost on top of it, and you're at $150. So that was the first step. I went to the team and I said, you know, guys, we can't do this. We're dead. We've been mortally wounded. If we don't get a solution within four to six months, we're gonna die. And the reason I said four to six months is, you know, for the investors in the company to turn it on its head and say, I'm going to move it completely out of the country and we're going to change a bunch of things. That's pretty high risk. So you have to have a solid solution. We just talked about the tariffs. And what I think everybody understands about tariffs in terms of, you know, just the adders, but tariffs are insidious. What do we mean by that? There is volatility in the tariff and there's complexity. So if you looked on liberation day and you track the next 52 weeks, there were 53 different tariff codes changed. Additionally, remember when I was talking about the supply chain and where everything, I use steel as an example. You now have to show your tier two and tier three, not just that I have steel in my product, but I need to show where did the Coke come from? Where was it made from iron to steel? And so this complexity in tracking is adding costs to any company. So going back to your example, you're buying things from Mexico, you're making things in Mexico and the tariff is 25%, but then you still have to pay tariff on what they are buying from Mexico, from China. Right. And that will take us to the next, the next phase of the decision-making. All right. Exactly. You say, okay, well, I can go to the United States and the United States is great for RM2 because our market is predominantly North America, Canada and the United States. But as exactly as you said, you've gotten rid of the 25%, but you still have the 53% on the material. Because you're still buying things from China, even if you make them here. Exactly. If I were to take that same pallet, I have to pay 53% on that material being imported. But even when you're getting it from Mexico, you still have to pay the 50% because they will. Because it's, yes, it's coming into Mexico, coming into the United States. So you've got this 53% on your base material. And remember, we just talked about the labor. Now, if I go back in the United States, if I build that same pallet, I have four to five percent, four to five X on labor rates. Four or five times more you have to pay on labor. A hundred percent. I know that my floor space is two to three times more expensive. The rent and the factory and all that. Factory space, everything. Now, utilities is interesting. It's pretty much a toss up. Mexico is, the electricity is very expensive. But the floor space and everything else that goes with it is two to three times more expensive. So even if we decided, yes, going to the United States is the right solution. We couldn't go with the product that we had. It wasn't feasible. It would be, again, cost prohibitive. So we had to not only say, we're going to go to the United States to eliminate the tariff, but we're going to have to completely redesign the pallet. You're bringing everything here from Mexico and you're looking at it and saying, you're going to save 25% tariff, but then your labor cost is going to be significantly higher. But now you have to change everything. How would you go about it from there? What was fortunate is in the previous year, we'd been looking hard at the pallet and we looked at it from two perspectives. One was we were getting customer feedback. One of the things that's important on a pallet is that you don't want things sliding off the top deck. So if you can increase the coefficient of friction on the top deck, that's something that's good. It will become more sticky. It's sticky, right? It doesn't fly off. There's forklift tines, right? The forklift comes in and lifts it up. If you can create friction underneath to stop that from sliding off of those fork tines, which we call the angry bird scenario, you know, the angry birds, you know, the little bird that flies out. So if you have a forklift driver that fancies himself a NASCAR driver and he's in a warehouse that's cold and has some ice, that pallet can just slide right off if he hits the brakes, right? So if you can increase that friction, you've created something that's really good for them. So those kinds of things we looked at with the customer. Then we were looking at macro trends. The first one was automation. If you look throughout the supply chain, massive automation investment, massive automation investment. Everything from automated forklifts, you know, to take the pallet off of the trucks, put it onto a conveyor, goes into an automated storage and retrieval system. Like today, where predominantly things are wood, okay, it won't work in an automated system. Why? Because wood, it takes in moisture, it swells. So the sensors, you know, the visual... For robotics, they're visual sensors. Right, right. All of the things that they're going to do... Things might change if the wood shape changes, right? Exactly. Or the sensors, you know, the height on the sensors, it swells, right? And wood, if you have things that chip or fall off, and break off like wood is going to do, it's going to get into the cables, it's going to get into the gears that moves everything. So to develop a product for automation, you need to be very tight dimensioned. You need to make sure that you have something that's not going to flake, not going to break up, and is, you know, very, very sturdy. That's the first one. That's a major one. Second one was higher energy costs. Now, you just know, historically, energy costs are going to be higher, right? And so what can we do to make that something that for our customers, for ourselves, going forward is better? Okay, if we are five inches high on our pallet versus six inches high, like our competitor, that means that every backhaul, when you've delivered the pallets and you're coming back with a truck full of empty pallets, 17% more pallets, you can bring back on the same truck, right? What if a pallet is all about how strong is it versus what does it weigh? If I'm as strong as my competitor and I'm 10 pounds lighter in a truck, I can put 20% more product into that truck, pay the same thing, right? So energy, energy focus in our design and how to optimize for the whole supply chain was second. The third one was really around a market that's expanding in food and pharma. In food and pharma, a pallet has to deal with temperatures that exceed normal things, much colder, right? Very cold. In food and pharma, you have to be able to clean or sometimes sanitize a pallet. We know we designed so that you can clean, you can even sanitize it so there's no microbials. We do something called an ATP test, which is endosine triphosphate. Endosine triphosphate is a molecule that says, I am a biologic. If I'm here, that means bacteria could grow. So we can sanitize for that. So that market we knew was growing and we wanted to be a part of it. And the last thing was being a smart pallet. And a smart pallet provides you the capability to do parametric data. For instance, you can look at shock and you can look at temperature real time on the pallet. You can look at real time geotracking through GPS, cellular GPS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth. And with the advent of AI, we can use AI on the edge in our electronics in the pallet and in the cloud to give you that parametric data real time to somebody. We can also use it for things like battery management. Batteries have been a challenge. To be able to have a battery that lasts eight to 10 years to transmit in a pallet. Now we can do that by having this battery management. So we focused on all those things. We said, what does the customer need? What are these macro trends? Let's design a pallet with this feature set. But we've talked about before, all right, still has to be, labor has to take out. So we have to automate everything that we can, right? We have to be able to shrink our floor space, et cetera. And so with that feature... Shrink your floor space so you can save money. Is that... Exactly, exactly. I mean, and let me, I'll give you what we have in terms of results. And to be absolutely transparent, we're not done yet. There's some things that we need to do in terms of the incoming materials and the automation for the receipt of that materials. We have an ultrasonic welding process that's still being fine-tuned. And then we have where it goes from work in process to finish goods before it goes out. If you compare, Mexico is set up to do 30,000 pallets a month. That's just 400,000 pallets a year. We are going to be able to do that in, from a floor, from floor space, between eight and 10% of the floor space. In other words, we've reduced 90% the floor space. We're going to do it with six to 8% of the people that we had. Okay. And so, and again, it's not done, but I will tell you that I tend to under-commit and over-deliver. Don't tell my board that, but that's what usually happens. So I'm very confident we can hit those things. And that's what's required. You know, you have to be able to do that to bring it back in. And we're positioned to be able to do that. What about the cost of the equipment and the machinery? So you're cutting the labor because you're using the machinery to do the work, right? Is it robotics? Is it automation? And how does that cost pencil in this process? Yeah. No, it's a great question because you say, all right, you saved a lot on labor. How much did you spend on equipment, right? We have a composite pallet. So it's made up of multiple materials. The most of the materials we use is a high-density polyethylene. So to make the pallet, we use a low-pressure foam molding process, which gives us tremendous strength versus what it weighs. Then it comes off of that and it goes through a series of robots manipulating it through a series of welds for the top plate, the things that we talked about, the skids for the friction, et cetera. All of those are done robotically. Welding's done robotically. Everything's done robotically, including going and putting it on whatever it is that we're going to take it into the warehouse that we talked about. Costs of robots have gone down so much and the cost of managing the software to control those robots has come down so much that the investment is much less than what you'd think. And again, you can amortize that. You can have a 10-year life on that equipment, right? And depreciate it over a seven to 10-year period. So with all of this, does it pencil out better financials compared to doing it in Mexico? Absolutely. It absolutely makes for a significantly better solution. I mean, it's the only way it could be done. Do you still buy this raw material from China or is there other alternatives for you to buy? Absolutely not. Absolutely not. That's a great question because when we looked at this, remember, again, we're talking about having to do it in the United States. So we see all of this turmoil in terms of the volatility and tariffs. And where's it going to go? You know, as an engineer, I want to take variation out of anything in the manufacturing process in the same way in the business process. So we said, what can we do to make everything US-based in our supply chain, okay? And that's why we hit on high-density polyethylene. It's made out of natural gas or oil, of which the United States now... So you even went to your raw material. What can I do that's made here? Absolutely. And therefore, you're avoiding the 50% tariff and then you're avoiding 25% from Mexico. And in fact, again, we're a composite pallet. So I will tell you a lot of the materials that we use, fire retardancy is very important in a pallet. A lot of those materials historically have come from China, many of them from Europe. But we have found suppliers. We've been working with suppliers on developing things that are here in the United States. So almost everything we do, 98% of the material is sourced from the United States. So essentially the tariffs help you guys make this, right? What we saw and what we were so excited about is if we step back, we had a pallet that now was better in terms of its performance of where we were getting ready to go. What our customers wanted and what the, again, the macro environment, you know, to be positioned five years from now, 10 years from now. We sourced heavily everything coming out of the United States, right? We pushed to get the automation in place, the design, so we could take the labor out. And so we were there. And then in February, 2026, what happens? Operation Epic Fury. The cost of raw material went up, huh? Here we go. If you look, if you look at January, 2026, high density polyethylene was 45 cents a pound. February into February, we engaged with Iran. By May of 26, just three months later, it had moved from 45 cents to a dollar five. Okay. So here we thought we'd hit it out of the park. You know, everything was good. Boom. We've got to pivot again. It's a composite pallet. There are different things that we can tweak to alter cost versus strength versus fire retardancy, et cetera. So we did as much as we could to bring that down. But that's still, that's still a huge challenge, right? The one thing we have going for us, it's not just a RM2 challenge. Everybody's facing that same challenge, right? The whole globe is facing. The globe is facing, yeah. So it's not something that's, oh, unique to us, but it is impactful in terms of the two fronts. One, it's driving our cost of materials up. So our product is inherently more expensive, but we also have, again, remember we are a pallet pooling company. And so the cost of getting those pallets out trucks, moving with diesel is getting higher and higher and higher, right? And pallets are not a high margin. This is not Louis Vuitton or Dolce & Gabbana bags or Dior. Our customers and the market is very elastic and very price sensitive. Do your customers look at you and say, you're producing US, I want to buy from you, or do they not care? They say, it doesn't matter you produce here or not. We look at your quality and your price. Well, the answer is yes and yes and yes, right? Because does it matter? No, I mean, if the price differential was so great, they don't want to talk to you. But if you can show that that product is designed in the US, made in the US and sourced in the US, there's certainly our biggest customers, Walmart. And I think they appreciate that greatly. So I believe it's a differentiator for us. Because it removes the risk, right? It removes the risk, but it's also, I mean, it's about backing America, right? And that's what, I mean, Walmart has said that. I think they talk about making lives better for people, because our costs, our products are cheaper for you. So you can live a better life, right? And so we're adding to that. Now, for you, what's this experience like? You were involved in the offshoring of a lot of different manufacturing processes and products. What is it like to bring things back? Well, it feels great to bring it back. For me personally, and I think that's the question, right? You said personally. I was always challenged with kind of the, what does the end game look like here? Because I was involved in massive moving of supply chains, technologies. Like I said, tool and die makers. I haven't made a tool in the United States in 30 years. It was all done in China. But some of that is coming back now, and we're getting that. So at the time, it was, for me, difficult on a macro view, but it was also, I understood it was important for those companies to exist and to make that happen. If they wouldn't have, they wouldn't be around. Because some went to China and then everybody else had to go. If you didn't follow, you wouldn't make it. You won't make it. Again, even if you decided somehow to work the labor issue through automation or whatever it might be, you'll never be able to manage the supply chain benefits. And so it was hard in that regard. But also, you know, we created the other thing, though, I saw because I was able to go to Mexico, to China, to Vietnam. We brought great jobs to people and we offered people a better way of life. I mean, I could see that happening. You know, when I first started in Mexico, no one was driving cars. Now, I don't know if you would say that's a good thing or a bad thing, Wayne, but you know, no one had cars. And when I left, everybody had a car, right? Everybody was driving vehicles. So you could see that wealth was being created and there were elements of quality of life that were being created. And so if it was in the United States or it was in Vietnam, you become part of that family and it feels good to you. But it feels great to come back to the United States and build good jobs here in the United States for people. So we're excited about that. Now, the jobs you have right now, are they different from the time you were outsourcing? Like, is this a different kind of job? When people talk about manufacturing jobs, what does it look like now? Is it engineering? Is it manufacturing? So manufacturing, within manufacturing, there are engineering jobs. So if you take a look, how do you cut 90% of the labor out? Well, it's because you don't have people doing, putting A into B, B into C and doing it repetitive, repetitive, repetitive. The pallet that we were building in Mexico had 52 individual pieces and went through 50 processes. Okay. This does not do that. It goes through about five processes with four or five pieces and it's all done by robots. So no one is doing any, I lift it up, I put things together, I drive a screw. Everything, they are software developers for the robotics, maintenance for the robotics, managing logistics and depot for optimizing the algorithms for how we move our freight. So they are higher skilled jobs within manufacturing. So these are six-figure type jobs. They can absolutely be six-figure jobs. And not the forklift guy that maybe is in the last bit, but yes, for the most part. So you're not seeing as much number of jobs coming back, but what comes back could be higher end. Exactly. We could never, again, with that, when you have four to, let's say four to five or not six, when you have that level of, you know, $10 here, $40, $50 here, can't be done. You can't do it the same way. We cannot bring that many jobs back. What we can do is bring a higher level job back, hopefully create more RM2 type scenarios where there's more of this smaller niche manufacturing and, you know, build the workforce back up. For the supply chain to come back, what does it take? Well, that's a big question. And it depends, you know, supply chains are different. Again, our supply chain, when we looked at it, we went from a glass, matte, resins, some steels from China and said, that's not going to work. We pivoted to something that we thought would be US, natural gas, oil, to be able to make high-density polyethylene. So what people can do is look for, where are these supply chains? If we see more foundries being done, if we see more steel being made in the US, you know, you can follow those things. Again, electronics, I just can't imagine in my lifetime ever bringing that back. When you look at what fabs cost and the investment that it takes, right? Intel, I think, just announced one. And there's lots of words, but I haven't seen anything definitive from TSMC, if they are going to do something. But these are massive, massive investments. I don't know if we can do it. And you mentioned the raw materials. You were saying that China has a lot of resources. We do too. Is it because we don't want to, environmentally, we don't want to do what they're doing? Or is it other factors? Some of it is just the geology of, you know, the way the earth was formed in forever. So when we talk about some of these rare earths that China has that we use for magnetics and the other things that we've been hearing about, right? They have them, we don't. Or we haven't looked for them, we need to find them. So there's some of those things. And some of those would go into our fire retardancy. I do believe that some of it could be how we view the environmental balance versus what we do in terms of utilizing the materials that we need. That's not the case for us. We don't see that. I'm talking about just in general. In general. Right. So in terms of manufacturing here, what do you see the benefits? The supply chain is one thing, like being right there. What other values do you see? Because some people argue that we don't need the manufacturing jobs. We'll just do the design. And this was the thought. That was the thinking, right. Yeah, the thinking. This really will get to be an interesting run. We'll become the knowledge workers, right. And we will allow these guys to be all of the things that assemble. And we will have so much value in being a brand and understanding the design, et cetera, that we don't need that. Well, what's happening today with artificial intelligence and what's happened after we've taught China. China now has extraordinary engineers. Taiwan has extraordinary engineers, right. So they are building up their acumen on the design side. With the use of artificial intelligence, you start to have this big leveling on typically what is the knowledge worker. So where is it that you really need to have some of this? Because a lot of that now can be done almost anywhere. So I think some changes, this gets into a lot bigger question in terms of the economics and what's happening. But I think we're going to have to rethink. What does an economy look like within the United States that keeps us going? It just can't be all services. There's not going to be enough income for the service providers to be able to take care of this, you know, the 1%, whatever. Wait, when people are looking at a lot of people that are outsourcing, now they're sitting and looking at the cost. What you did different than what it looks like. So for example, you might have at the time looked at all the numbers. Was there any surprises for you after you implemented? Yes, there absolutely were. The biggest one, it's a bit abstruse, but I think it is applicable. And I think it would be applicable for many people to think hard about. When we design the pallet, you design it in a CAD system. And so once it's designed in your CAD system, you model that product with different sets of tools. And one is called a finite element analysis. And basically what it does is it takes that design and it loads different weights on it. And you look at how it performs with these different weights. Now, we finished the design and we started doing our modeling on it. And because I worked with Andy Grove and only the paranoid survive from the Intel days, we not had just one, not two, but we use three different models on the design. And those models differed a little, but not enough that it warranted anything to be concerned about. So we went forward, we developed the tool, the mold tool, the welding, everything put in place. We got our first pallets, we built them, shot them, started to go to tests and realized they performed nothing like what our models said they would. And it was really a slap in the face. It was a shock. And so we had to step back and say, why? You know, and very long story short, it was that the modeling tools truly were not adequate for the complexity of the design that we had. And until we found those tools and we worked with some material scientists to help us understand that we were off base. So what did that do? That caused us to have to go back, modify the tools. So our design timeline, the development- Right. And a lot of people go, Wayne, why don't you do a soft tool? And so get a soft tool. Sometimes you'll do something in aluminum, you do it very fast, but this process doesn't allow for that. And by the way, our tools are aluminum. That's one of the advantage to go. We don't have to go to steel where it'd be millions of dollars for a tool. We can build for hundreds of thousands, you know, a 10X multiplier. But when you're wrong, you have to go back and fix it. So those costs that we had modeled and what we experienced in that development, design and development process were exceeded. And that was the greatest one that we saw a spreadsheet to reality. So in a sense, from what you guys learn is manufacturing could come back, but you have to think in a different way. You have to think from scratch. You have to start from scratch and redesign your product based on what's available here in terms of the supply chain. And then what you can do with robotics, if you can use robotics to cut the cost down, then it's possible to make it here. You might run into some surprises and some difficulties, but- It can be done. At the end of the day, it's worth it. Absolutely can be done. And it is worth it. And we're very pleased that we're here. We think that this is going to be successful for us because our market is North America. There's no doubt we've made the right decision, so. Wayne, it's great to have you. Thank you for coming and sharing with us your experience and come back and tell us how it goes. I'd love to come back. Thank you. Tell us what you think about this conversation with Wayne. Do you think we should make more products here at higher quality, higher cost? Or do you prefer the way it is right now where we're making cheaper products across the globe? Make sure to tell us in the comments. I'm Siamak Korami. This is Market Insider. We'll see you next time.