In all honesty I’m both disappointed and relieved about the fact that all the hype around technologies such as 3-D printing wasn’t in fact an indicator of the ushering in of a new era which would bring industrial-grade manufacturing right into the home. Disappointed because I think I would have liked to get into manufacturing myself if it was to indicatively be that easy, and relieved because many of the clients the company that employs me works with are in the manufacturing business. I mean we’re talking here the likes of an elastic bands manufacturer with a 100-year pedigree in the industry, amongst many others.

If you ask me I’ll gladly tell you that these are the types of businesses which hold the economy and financial system together, because they’re responsible for production in the primary sector, giving rise to pretty much all other industries. La Industrial Algodonera is more than just a Elastic bands supplier, with the company’s resilience seeing them adapt to the dynamically changing trends in industries such as textiles amongst many others. Theirs is a particularly good story because it brings to light what it takes to run a manufacturing operation, which goes way beyond just putting some pieces of machinery together in a factory-building and then churning out product after product from the assembly line.

It takes much more than that to run a manufacturing operation, so even if the likes of 3-D printing would have blown up the way a part of me might have wanted it to, no matter how fast technology advances these days, it would never come close to the pedigree and experience that comes with a manufacturing heavyweight that has been in the industry for an entire century!

Smart Capital

It’s pretty much impossible to start a manufacturing operation without any capital to your name, so some smart capital (investment) will be required. That capital will be spent on a whole lot more than just acquiring or renting premises and the machinery which will be required to produce the goods.

Quality control

Quality control is about more than just making sure the goods manufactured are safe and produced ethically and legally. It’s more about compliance than anything else, which costs a lot of money as part of what it takes to run a manufacturing operation.

A Niche or Market Gap

Often someone who starts a manufacturing operation or a group of people who come together to start up a manufacturing operation do so on the end of having identified a clear need for something they can produce in the market. If the domestic manufacturing scene had exploded in the manner through which a little part of me might have wanted, as discussed, I probably would’ve fallen into the trap of wanting to manufacture a final product that is complex in its nature, whereas the best manufacturing operations are those through which the simplest of goods are produced.

Ribbons? Either way, there needs to be a gap in the market which is identified, or alternatively you can carve out your own niche.