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Cheaper American-made products: For years, manufacturing companies have shifted production to countries outside developed industrial regions on the grounds of lower labor costs; China has benefited from this trend. With the surge in population and land prices, China’s once most active clothing manufacturing industry has also begun to shift to Southeast Asia. However, this *normally taken migratory route for birds is now seeing a reverse trend. As early as 2017, the Chinese clothing manufacturer Suzhou Tianyuan Garments invested in building a factory in Little Rock, Arkansas, the hometown of Clinton. The company produces 10 million pieces of clothing per year for various brands, 90% of which are intended for high-end fashion and sports goods brands, including Adidas. This time, it invested $20 million to purchase a factory and is set to start producing T-shirts. As planned, this factory is set to begin production in the near future. To shorten the supply chain, bring products closer to consumers, and avoid China’s rising labor costs, these are some of the reasons why clothing and sports shoe brands choose to leave China. However, this time there is a surprising reason: in American factories, it’s for lower costs! Tianyuan’s factory in the United States is a “highly automated” facility that utilizes automated sewing technology. The high labor costs in the United States are no longer included in the cost formula. Humans seem to have been removed from this equation; Tianyuan Company has \"hired\" around 330 automatic sewing robots that can carry out every step of the manufacturing process automatically, from cutting the fabric to sewing and final quality inspection. For decades, although robots have seemingly also been used in the mass production of ready-to-wear clothing, they have mainly been involved in very simple tasks such as laser-cutting fabrics or operating automatic sewing machines. Despite improved manufacturing efficiency for clothing, apparel production remains labor-intensive. In fact, it is not easy to introduce robots into the garment industry. Handling soft fabrics is a very tricky task. It is asymmetrical, folded, and usually very irregular ； Furthermore, various components of the fabric must be aligned for joining, such as the precise alignment of buttons and holes. This is a major reason why the apparel industry has always been labor-intensive. And now, with automatic sewing robots, this industry has suddenly seen the emergence of entirely new variables. Sewing clothes has alerted America’s most secretive agency; this supplier of automatic sewing robots is called Softwear. It’s easy to mistake it for “software”. It doesn’t matter if you make a mistake in viewing it; it’s also closely related to the software’s algorithms. Its rise depends entirely on the support of the U.S. Department of Defense. For many years, the United States has been concerned about the sewing and production of military uniforms. Although American soldiers’ uniforms certainly don’t need to be stylish, they are produced in large quantities. The Pentagon spends about $4 billion each year on uniforms. The U.S. Department of Defense wants its soldiers to wear uniforms made in the United States, but cost has always been a major issue. To this end, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of the U.S. Department of Defense awarded a $1.75 million contract in 2012 to the fledgling Softwear company to develop automated clothing sewing facilities. This idea of entrusting a task with the goal that \"no direct labor is required\" is clearly the hallmark of typical American DARPA idealists (it’s worth noting that many of DARPA’s such ideals have eventually become reality). In other words, the mysterious DARPA, which has always prided itself on its high technology, needs clothing and robot factories that can sew military uniforms from start to finish without any human intervention. http://si1.go2yd.com/get-image/0Vhr9pwk5iq Figure 1: Softwear automatic sewing robot. It now seems that Softwear is approaching its goal: at least in certain areas of clothing manufacturing. Softwear uses robotic arms and vacuum suction, along with a machine vision system, to lift, place, and maintain the position of the fabric. Considering fabric folding, thread end defects, and irregular edges, the robot must have sophisticated algorithms. Moreover, the imaging system must be very fast. Since an operating female worker can complete 5,000 stitches in one minute, there is really too little time left for the camera. To solve this problem, the Softwear system uses a dedicated camera that can capture over 1,000 frames per second, along with image processing algorithms to detect the position of the needle, achieving a precision within half a millimeter. In this way, a high-speed camera is used to capture the state of the fabric, while a sewing robot is used to guide the sewing needle. The innovation of this automatic sewing robot is that it moves the needle to the fabric, rather than moving the fabric to the needle. This innovation solves the most difficult problem in garment sewing, namely tension balance. Through the robot’s vision and real-time analysis, SoftWear can observe fabrics with greater precision than the human eye, and track the position of the sewing needle with an accuracy of up to half a millimeter. http://si1.go2yd.com/get-image/0Vhr9uuapns Figure 2: Early papers presented at international conferences. This automatic sewing company based in Atlanta was founded in 2007 by engineers from Georgia Tech. With the help of DARPA and the Walmart Foundation (which provided an additional 2 million dollars), the first product was brought to market. To date, the company has raised over 10 million dollars in funding, and it uses this automatic sewing technology to produce home textiles, including clothing, footwear, as well as car seats and pillow covers. The United States and Vietnam are competing for existing manufacturing capabilities. The American Apparel and Footwear Association states that 97% of American clothing is imported. Americans have been asking: Can this situation be changed? Technology company SoftWear is making such efforts to boost the U.S. apparel and footwear industries. The local area **isn’t idle either. Complementing automated sewing technology are the efforts of Arkansas in the United States. Arkansas engaged in a year-long negotiation with Suzhou Tianyuan Company, offering incentives of around $3.2 million for the establishment there, including infrastructure support and funding for training; meanwhile, the property tax on the facility was reduced by 65%, resulting in annual savings of up to $1.6 million. The U.S. state believes that once it is fully operational, the factory will create 400 jobs, with an average wage of $14 per hour. 400 jobs is a very, very important matter for an American governor. In China, the apparel industry is often seen as a representative of \"outdated\" industries. It seems that it doesn’t matter much if such old driving forces are eliminated or transferred to Southeast Asia. The most concerning implication of the old and new drivers of growth is that it creates an indescribable \"industry hierarchy of disdain,\" along which capable individuals can climb upward. Needless to say, the banks that grant loans are often the source of this hierarchy of contempt. However, looking at the practice in the United States, where is there any distinction between old and new drivers of growth? The so-called old kinetic energy industries all contain engines of innovation, ready to burst forth. The industries driven by new momentum can certainly boast of their exponentially growing wealth, but traditional industries can also shine brightly. Where is intelligent manufacturing? Right within the spontaneous and automatic self-redemption of traditional industries! Don’t think that Vietnam or Indonesia are the ones “taking over” China’s traditional industrial sectors. In Southeast Asia, cheap, low-skilled labor will soon face a brand-new occupational threat: automatic sewing robots. It will reshape the global division of labor in manufacturing. Little Rock is exactly such a microcosm. This factory of Tianyuan Clothing has 21 automated assembly lines, which are expected to reduce labor costs by 50% to 70% compared to traditional manual production, while increasing productivity by over 70%. When the production line is operating at full capacity, one T-shirt is manufactured every 22 seconds, resulting in approximately 23 million shirts produced per year. ”The person in charge of Tianyuan Clothing once said, “Around the world, even the cheapest labor markets cannot compete with us.” Thanks to this automation technology, it takes the factory about 4 minutes to produce each Adidas T-shirt, from cutting the fabric to sewing it into a finished product, with production costs amounting to only 2 yuan. Moreover, this technology is still developing at a rapid pace. In 2017, after receiving a $4.5 million investment from investor CTW, SoftWear accelerated the development of its fully automated production lines. One and a half years later, the original 4 minutes have been reduced to 22 seconds, and one operator can now replace the original 11. http://si1.go2yd.com/get-image/0Vhr9tXMEDY Figure 3: The entirely new autonomous production line – powerful enough to defeat anyone. Vietnam, of course, is no problem either. For decades, automation in manufacturing has been a focus for most industries, but due to the unique characteristics of clothing production, progress in this area has been limited. Steps such as cutting materials or sewing buttons have been successfully automated, but sewing the materials together is very difficult. Therefore, compared to automobile and electronics manufacturers, the pace of automation development in the apparel industry is much slower. However, traditional industries have their own path to breaking through the ice. With the success of such automatic sewing technologies, it will have an impact around the world, including in production in Central Asia and Southeast Asia**. Automated sewing is an emerging technology that is increasingly impossible to ignore. According to Accenture’s 2018 Global Outsourcing Report, in the differentiated outsourcing models of apparel manufacturing, automation in cutting and sewing leads all other technologies in terms of investment volume. Because it’s simply too tempting. http://si1.go2yd.com/get-image/0Vhr9vMih96 Figure 4: Outsourcing Trends Report (Accenture) Brand clothing manufacturers also need to change as well. As the retail industry has faced unprecedented challenges from e-commerce, **Li & Fung Group, which is controlled by the Fung family, has not been doing well in recent years. To turn things around and look to the future, the most important transformation initiative for Li & Fung Group is its digital strategy. In May 2018, Li & Fung announced a strategic partnership agreement with Softwear. It will utilize Softwear’s SEWBOT robotics technology, enabling a speed twice that of manual sewing, thereby **enhancing Li & Fung’s core competitive advantages: strengthening its supply chain advantages and accelerating the automation of production processes. The price of automated sewing remains an obstacle to its adoption. The price of equipment, which runs into hundreds of thousands of dollars, puts many clothing manufacturers off. To this end, Softwear also launched a rental service for \"robots as a service\" in 2018; a robot could be rented for 5,000 dollars, in order to promote the use of this technology on a wider scale. Various ice-melting efforts are driving automated sewing forward with determination. http://si1.go2yd.com/get-image/0Vhr9sZEAL2 Figure 5: The sewing industry. Although automatic sewing is currently only possible for T-shirts and shorts, the potential of the garment manufacturing industry is clearly promising for the future. Softwear believes that within the next five years, its machines will be able to produce a dress shirt with chest pockets, a process that usually requires 78 separate steps. The automated production of jeans and dresses is also on the agenda. In fact, even for T-shirts, there is a huge market worth 11.5 billion dollars per year worldwide, and the United States and Europe rely almost entirely on imported products – the potential for local production is enormous. And the mission of this automatic sewing company is “SewLocal”: sew locally! Perhaps the military uniforms of the Department of Defense will also be produced on manufacturing lines in the United States. Softwear is not a lone pioneer. At a startup in Seattle called Sewbo Robotics, there is also a keen desire to bring the clothing manufacturing industry back to the United States. It employs a different approach, using a non-toxic polymer to temporarily harden the fabric, so that existing industrial robots can use this \"hard fabric\" to manufacture clothing, just as they would with metal sheets. Blue Water Defense, a company that specializes in producing uniforms for the U.S. Department of Defense, is able to manufacture 8,000 combat pants per day; it is currently working with Sewbo to explore the use of its robotic manufacturing processes. http://si1.go2yd.com/get-image/0Vhr9tSozyq Figure 6: The Sewbo sewing robot helps create local, rather than global, supply chains in the apparel industry. This is excellent news for the United States and Europe, which are urgently seeking jobs and manufacturing opportunities. Therefore, Softwear is also active in Europe; it went to the Dutch town of Waalwijk to give a speech on \"the future of shoes,\" advocating for a return to automatic sewing in the shoe industry. This town has over 400 companies related to the shoe industry, including a tannery; it was once one of the world’s centers for shoe production, but now most of the manufacturing activities have disappeared, with almost everything that remains being in the retail sector. Can the shoe manufacturing industry return here to resume production? Through its digital upper production line, Soft wear aims to help the Netherlands regain its lost manufacturing position by enabling the fully automated sewing of shoe uppers. For the global garment manufacturing landscape that has been stable for many years, this will be a devastating shock – garment manufacturing is no longer a labor-intensive industry. The automatic sewing machine will become a milestone. After that, the apparel manufacturing industry might indeed return to Europe and the United States.** A brief note: The textile industry is making a comeback. The United States has created niche markets and competitive advantages in the manufacturing of high-tech materials. From 2009 to 2015, capital investment in yarns, fabrics, and non-apparel textile products increased from $960 million to $1.7 billion: a 75% increase. The market known as “smart textiles” is developing rapidly. Smart textiles are fabrics developed using new technologies, which bring a whole new level of added value to textiles. From 2004 to 2014, the annual growth rate of the global smart textiles industry was 18%, while the annual growth rate in the United States for smart textiles exceeded 27%. As an important strategic initiative for the United States’ \"reindustrialization,\" the \"Advanced Textiles Institute\" within the U.S. Manufacturing Innovation Network (Manufacturing USA) is investing nearly 200 million dollars in the development of a new generation of smart textiles. Among the 14 options for the industry of the future, one of them was actually reserved for the textile industry by U.S. policymakers! It is on par with industries such as flexible electronics, composite materials, and robotics. What a strategic perspective this is. This is the choice made by America’s \"advanced manufacturing\" sector. The larger market is that the United States imports $100 billion worth of clothing each year. If this industry can be automated and moved back to the United States, the global textile industry landscape will change significantly. McKinsey prepared a dedicated report in October 2018 to assess this issue, asking whether the clothing manufacturing industry could \"return home\" in order to achieve onshore manufacturing http://si1.go2yd.com/get-image/0Vhr9soVeOe Figure 7: McKinsey’s report on clothing manufacturing, October 2018. McKinsey concluded that, “although it won’t be possible in the near future” ； But some production lines will head home. Mass-market brands and retailers need to be prepared to welcome them. ” So, as the world’s largest producer of textiles and clothing, is China ready for this? Meanwhile, Chinese manufacturing has its own tasks to undertake; seeking the brilliance of the Industrial Revolution and the magical power of new driving forces is what **all levels of authority are striving for at present. It’s just that while you’re here striving to seize leadership in artificial intelligence and the industrial Internet, the Americans are working hard to undermine your traditional business in clothing manufacturing. The Wall Street Journal published a casual yet meaningful commentary last year: “Robots are here.” For the United States, this is good news ； And for the poor, this is bad news.” Yes, new technologies have arrived, along with new sources of momentum. Everyone is saying that this is good news. About the authors: Lin Xueping – founder of Nanshan Industrial Academy; Zhou Jinbei – general manager of Beijing Lianxun Power Consulting Company. Zhou Jinbei was formerly the deputy chief engineer at Shanghai No. 2 Textile Machinery Factory and is a member of the Large Fiber Working Group