The death of local manufacturing

"...We don’t outsource, re-sell, or source canoes. We build them from start to finish. Materials come in and canoes go out. We believe it results in better products, reduces our environmental footprint, stimulates our local economy, and provides high skilled jobs to our community... In the end, it’s about satisfied customers, happy workers, and a healthy world."  

      - Kamanu Composites, LLC "Reason for being." 

If you know me only from my blog, then you probably have a skewed impression of me spending my days wallowing in mud, critiquing the experience and occasionally cutting off a chickens head. But, those days are rare. Most of the time I'm clean shaven, wearing matching socks, and trying to manage sales and finance for Kamanu Composites. Because my writing often generates heated conflict (which I don't want to bring upon our shop), I have relegated the focus of this blog strictly to my personal life. While I spend my days attempting (and sometimes failing) to ensure the profitability of the company that I helped found, I'm just one small cog of this socialistic manufacturing machine. And, since my strong opinions are rarely the consensual opinions of our shop, I do my best to avoid getting Kamanu mired up in the moral mud that my writing wades through. But, since my business experience has shaped my perspective (which is the basis of this blog), for once I'll break my own rule and write about it.

In a story ripe with cliche, my two close friends and I spent our four years at Kaua'i High School dreaming about becoming canoe builders. Since paddling outrigger canoes was the focal point of our lives, we would sit around on the weekends continually rehashing our ideas for this imaginary business. When we graduated, we split up to go to college, each with an appointed direction: one went to school for composites fabrication, one went to school for aeronautical engineering, and I went to school for business (I ended up switching to History). In 2007, upon returning from college, we founded our dream company. There was just one problem.

While we were all from Kaua'i, we started the company on O'ahu. Materials were easier to source, Grainger Industrial Supply was right around the corner, and most of the Hawai'i market for outrigger canoes is there. Our intention was to spend a few years getting started then move the operation to Kaua'i.

In 2010, I was severely injured during a canoe race and flew home to recover. The move was supposed to be temporary, but, after being away from Kaua'i for seven years, I couldn't imagine leaving again. So, I had to make a decision-- either go back to O'ahu to continue managing production, or, stay on Kaua'i, take a pay-cut and relegate my official duties to what I could do remotely. I chose Kaua'i. And I've grappled with that decision every day since.

In 2011, one of my partners also faced a similar decision. Being desperate to move back to Kaua'i, he sold most of his share in the company and found a job selling cars in Lihu'e.

Now, seven years after we began our company, we've outgrown our current location and are looking for other options. One of which is to finally bring Kamanu to Kaua'i.

As a manufacturing shop we need industrial zoning. We need 200 amps of electricity for our large CNC machine, industrial oven, and our powerful compressor and vacuum pump. And we need an open floor plan of 6,000-8,000 square feet so that we can maneuver large canoes around. Any building that we move into would need around $100,000 in infrastructure improvements (mainly ventilation systems).

So, here we are with a profitable shop, employing 20 local people at livable wages and good benefits, generating $40,000 a year in excise tax, infusing around $1,100,000 a year into our local economy ($.88 of every dollar we take in is spent in Hawai'i, includes tax, payroll, rent, and materials and does not include the multiplier effect of that money), making a product that otherwise would be outsourced (our main competitors are all in China, and therefore generate nearly nothing for the local economy), and doing it in as environmentally friendly a way as we can (one of two Hawai'i businesses certified by the EPA for using exclusively renewable energy).* And, most importantly, we are highly motivated to bring the shop to Kaua'i-- yet we can't do it.

Why?

For the same reason that owning a home is out of reach for almost every young person on Kaua'i. For the same reason that we're losing access to our coastline and natural resources. For the same reason that local agriculture isn't profitable.

Because our island home is incomparably beautiful, we're losing it. We have made tourism, and the low wage service jobs its provides, the back bone of our economy. Unlike O'ahu, which still has a diversified economy, Kaua'i is marketed as a place of resort communities where the vacation never has to end. Every high end land purchase pushes island-wide prices a little higher and we have created a market fueled by overseas money that is nearly impossible for local people, with local jobs, to buy into. Industrial land (along with agricultural land) is competing against the gentrification/resortification of our island. And, in a story repeated throughout every desirable community in the country, gentrification always wins. Remember the industrial zone in Kilauea, near Guava Kai? Yeah, neither do I.

Without adequate government intervention, the quiet totalitarianism of capitalism forces us to march in step with the invisible force of the market. Because if we don't, we get priced out of our island home (both literally and figuratively).

With just a few vacant heavy industrial spaces for rent on island, all of which are under 2,000 square feet, and no vacant heavy industrial land for sale, moving our shop home is currently impossible.

In the same way that development erases our memory of what used to be, outsourcing erases our collective memory of production. Why build it here when we can buy it from elsewhere? While support for local agriculture remains (for good reason) a political buzzword, support for local manufacturing is... meh.

The composites manufacturing of Kamanu Composites, LLC doesn't fit our island's limited industrial model. Resort communities need custom cabinet shops and granite counter tops, not outrigger canoes. So, Kaua'i's industrial space is tailored to the 1200-2000 square feet necessary for small high-end craftsmen, not mass production. All of which adds to Kaua'i's dependence on tourism and resort developments. While we keep fueling the same fire that is burning us, the self-perpetuating circle continues.

So, now we're looking at signing a lease on a new 8,000 sq foot building on O'ahu. And I am forced again to choose between business and Kaua'i-- because in manufacturing you can't have both. For more info on who we are as a company, check out our website at kamanucomposites.com  or read below on why "we build" is our motto.

*Just because I love disclaimers, let me add that of course all is not perfect at Kamanu. See the dumpster in the beautiful picture above? We send out two of those per week, filled with less than environmentally friendly trash, as each canoe results in its own weight in waste. We also continuously face a variety of production and morale related issues. As is the case in everything I write about, unless we close our eyes completely, all roads are filled with morally ambiguous mud. All we can do is try to tread the cleanest path.  

The words below were taken from a Kamanu blog post I wrote in 2011.  

We Build

We Build Canoes. That three-word statement proudly proclaimed above was the simplest way to express what we do at Kamanu Composites. But the meat of that phrase is We Build. We don’t outsource, re-sell, or source canoes. We build them. Carbon fiber and epoxy come in and canoes go out.

The world is changing so quickly that it can be hard to catch a glimpse as it slips by. Five years ago most of us had never heard of Facebook or Barak Obama. Our phones hadn’t taken over our lives. Money was cheap and jobs were plentiful. Climate change was a distant threat. Tahitian dominance in the Moloka’i Hoe was still being blamed on flat water. And almost nobody was building canoes in Hawai’i. We, as Americans, were on top of a cloud. Debt financing was the way of the future. We didn’t have to produce anything. The cloud was supposed to take us as long as we kept consuming.

But it didn’t. Our extreme leveraging caught up with us and we collapsed. The market peaked in October 2007. Nearly the exact day that Kamanu Composites produced its first canoe. As fate would have it, we began our future here as millions of Americans saw their futures disappear along with their savings, homes, and jobs in the Great Recession.

That is the world that Kamanu Composites grew up in. And it has had a profound impact on where we’re at today. The canoe brought us together; formed us as individuals, as a company, and as a community. But, in the end it’s not really about the canoe. It’s about building. It’s about local production. It’s about being one small gear in this great machine of a world. It’s about the fact that we can’t continually rely on someone else. As a company, Kamanu Composites has framed every decision around one simple premise. We believe wholeheartedly in local manufacturing. Because part of America’s problem was that we forgot how to manufacture after giving it all away. Once we understood why we were doing what we do, it became easy to do what we do. As a community we can have a much greater impact than a small canoe building shop. Every decision we make puts us either one step forward or one step back. The answers are easy, but it starts with understanding why.

Hopes and chicken blood

“To lock yourself up in the ivory tower is impossible and undesirable. To yield subjectively, not merely to a party machine, but even to a group ideology, is to destroy yourself as a writer. We feel this dilemma to be a painful one, because we see the need of engaging in politics while also seeing what a dirty, degrading business it is. And most of us still have a lingering belief that every choice, even every political choice, is between good and evil, and that if a thing is necessary it is also right. We should, I think, get rid of this belief, which belongs to the nursery. In politics one can never do more than decide which of two evils is the less... Even a general election is not exactly a pleasant or edifying spectacle..."   
    - George Orwell, 1948

Sometimes people ask, and sometimes I wonder, why did I stop writing about Yurt life and start writing about Kaua’i politics? Partly it’s out of the realization that the nearly insurmountable environmental and social issues that inspire our “low-impact” life-style have to be solved by government, not consumer choice. And, by focusing my writing on consumer choice and portraying a false glorification of our off-grid life, I was contributing to the chronic schizophrenic inaction of local and national government which is fueled by our societal ambivalence (and periodic malice) towards politics. By gloating about living off-grid, I was saying “hey, look at my self sufficiency! Look at what I can do without utilities or government, and you can do it too!” I glossed over the fact that this lifestyle is supported by my wife’s corporate job in IT, through my partial ownership of a small manufacturing shop, through industrial farming (Organic Layer Pellets), and cheap Chinese labour to produce my material goods (Ikea furniture and Apple phones). More importantly, I glossed over the huge amount of mud, death, and chicken shit.  

While my morning routine is to watch the sun come up while reading George Orwell with a cup of hot coffee, I rarely mention the other side. Like how I spent the last four months raising a hen (she often sat on my desk outside while I worked) only to cut her head off with a rusty Cambodian meat cleaver while waiting for my coffee to boil this morning. It’s easier to offer up trite sentences about the quality of the evening light as the shadows lengthen across my forested yard than it is to describe the incoherent and inevitable momentary panic as I watch my hen’s beak gasp in vain for air while her headless body tries to fly away, all while the sound of my screaming water kettle tells me to get the job done quickly. 

I write about politics (and elements related to politics) because I understand the necessity of the process. I’ve stopped writing about the drudgery of my life because I understand the inherent cherry-picking hypocrisy of it. Any hope I hold out for systemic change towards social and environmental justice is reserved for government action-- not pseudo hipster/hippies raising chickens and living in yurts (in case you’re offended by that description, I’m talking only about myself there). 

Since my head is filled with the wishful thinking of campaign promises and hasn't been tainted yet by the obstructionist politics and inaction bred by democracy, I'll use this rare bout of optimism to lay out my hopes for the next two years:

I hope that Chair Rapozo (he will be voted chair) can work to end the partisan warfare of the last year. Since vague* support for agriculture and fiscal conservancy were his entire election platform, I look forward to seeing solutions on reversing the decline in local ag and balancing the budget.  

Since nearly every candidate voiced support for the bus and our Multi-modal transportation plan as a solution to our growing traffic problem, I hope that bus service can be expanded and shelters constructed. If the counties gain the power to raise the general excise tax (as they are lobbying for at the State Legislature) I hope that any increase in that regressive tax is used exclusively for off-setting its regressive nature through support of the bus.

I hope that the Anti-GMO movement can reject demagogic leaders and the illusory appeal of simple solutions to complex problems and that it can accept that environmental justice can not be achieved without social justice.

I hope that Mayor Carvalho will follow his campaign promise of building the MRF, pursuing methane recovery at our landfill to power the Kaua'i Bus, and prioritizing drug treatment.  

Most of all, I hope that every elected official will read the dire words outlined in the Seagrant report on climate change. Because when the waves lap against Kuhio HWY in Kapa'a town at the end of the century (as predicted in the report), we need to not only be prepared, but know that we did everything we could to minimize our contribution to climate change.

At the end of the day, it's a lot easier to critique the system as an outsider with no political power. So, my personal goal for the next two years is to step away from the ivory tower of my rhetorical keyboard and become more personally involved. And yes, I will do that while continuing to wipe the chicken blood off of my hands in the early dawn light of a chilly Kapahi morning.  

I also want to give a special shout out to Mason Chock-- who earned a spot on the county council while spending less than all of the other candidates, limiting campaign contributions to $50 per person, and successfully managing a campaign strategy reliant on conversations with constituents and community service projects. I hope that his action/ideas oriented campaign will gain traction with future Kaua'i candidates. Our island is small enough that we can reject the crippling influence of big money on our local elections.

Congratulations to every candidate who put their name forward in an attempt to represent Kaua'i as an elected community servant. The lust for blood and the gladiatorial spirit of American democracy are alive and well on Kaua'i. I remain forever hopeful that we can see some good come out of this brutal sport.


* for clarification, the word vague was added on 11/11/14