Tariffs Won’t Fix American Manufacturing But Digital Factories Might

Ameriquartz & Americhron Movements designed in-house and assembled in Phoenix, Arizona by the Fine Timepiece Solutions watch manufacturing team, whose efforts to rebuild the American watch industy have been constrained by tariffs.

Jaqua Morrow for FTS

Kunal Naik, CEO of Fine Timepiece Solutions (FTS) in Arizona, is trying to rebuild an American legacy in an industry the United States ceded to Switzerland a century ago. He trains local technicians, some neurodivergent, to assemble intricate watch movements with precision rivaling Geneva ateliers. But when his August components shipment components arrived from India, the tariffs-hevy invoice exposed the myth anything can be 100% Made in America.

“I literally just paid a duty bill this week, and it was 65 plus percent,” Naik told me over Zoom. For context, that’s roughly one and a half times the tariff rate applied to a finished Rolex at peak Swiss tariffs. “It was stems, it was CSLs, it was screws. It was gears; it was not even stuff to make a full movement. It was just the parts that we bring in.”

Naik pays the same 65% whether importing finished movements or individual screws because there isn’t a single American manufacturer making watch components. “Unfortunately, they get dutied just like a finished movement,” he explained. “So if I was to bring in a finished movement, it’s the same 65% as if I was to bring in all the parts and then pay our technicians.”

This is the defining tension of our trade war era: tariffs assume domestic alternatives exist. They don’t. You can’t force companies to source what no one makes. The bridge between tariff policy and manufacturing reality requires reimagining what American manufacturing can look like.

Tariffs Can’t Resurrect the Factory Floor

The nostalgic fantasy of “bringing manufacturing back” still looks, in many boardrooms, like a 1950s foundry: vast sheds, thousands of blue-collar workers, sparks flying. Tali Rosman, a business and M&A advisor to advanced manufacturing companies, considers that Dickensian vision a hallucination.

“I don’t believe, my personal belief, is that you will not bring back the manufacturing capability the U.S. has lost in the 80s to China,” Rosman told me, pointing out jobs already exist here. “We already have over 600,000 open jobs per day in the manufacturing sector. Like, the jobs are out there in the manufacturing sector, we’re not filling them.”

The economic barriers are as daunting as the cultural ones. “We lost foundries to China in the last 30 years. You’re not going to bring back those foundries like-for-like, and you’re not going to do it because, one, good luck trying to build a foundry in the US. You will not meet any environmental health and safety standard.”

And even if you could clear the regulatory hurdles, there’s no workforce waiting in line. “You will not be able to find a laborer to work in these foundries. That is very labor-intensive. It’s the lowest paid labor, and it’s very physically demanding, unsafe work that the young generation just does not want to do.”

Americans won’t accept the wages and conditions making offshoring so attractive in the first place. For Rosman, tariffs won’t resurrect that industrial past; they only make sense if they accelerate a different future.

“The only way to bring it back is with advanced manufacturing, with digital manufacturing, that’s easy to build,” she said. “With digital advanced manufacturing, you can set up a factory in months instead of years.” These aren’t the grimy factories of industrial nostalgia. “These are clean work environments,” she added. “These are kind of white-collar jobs, so to speak, that meet environmental health and safety standards.”

The labor profile changes as well. “They are a lot less labor-intensive than the traditional manufacturing, but for the labor that they do require, it is labor that’s inviting; that the young generation does want to work in.”

Printing a Way Around Tariffs

“In China, you need 100 Chinese to make the same job,” says Sarel Ashkenazy, vice president of sales at Tritone Technologies. “Once you load the jobs into the machine, we need one operator per three machines.”

Tritone has learned how to maneuver in the pursuit of luxury manufacturing without the usual baggage of minimum order quantities, million‑dollar tooling, swollen headcounts and the capital expenditures making traditional factories so hard to justify. Their engine is metal 3D printing.

“With additive manufacturing, you’re doing what is called direct manufacturing of the part,” Ashkenazy explains. Instead of spending a million dollars on a mold amortized across a million identical pieces, 3D printing makes parts on demand. “Because you’re directly making the part, you don’t need any tooling or mold. You can make one, you can make two, it doesn’t matter. There’s no upfront cost to set up the production line of tooling and mold.”

Their technology has quietly infiltrated luxury’s highest echelons, solving the industry’s most fundamental problem by creating truly custom, high-value pieces without cost-prohibitive single-use molds. Tritone’s paste-based metal printing also eliminates the hazards and inconsistencies plaguing powder-based systems.

“Powders have a lot of barriers, which one big barrier is that the powder itself is not homogeneous enough,” Ashkenazy says. “The metal powders are grain metals, and you can never control it so all the particles are the same size.” In six‑figure jewelry and hardware, porosity is fatal. One air bubble can destroy a $10,000 piece at the polishing stage.

“If you have porosity inside the part, when they take it to do the post‑processing, the glazing or shaping, you can sometimes have a hole,” he notes. Paste changes the physics. “If we do paste, you make the paste homogeneous much more than the powder. You avoid the non‑homogenous particles of the powders by making it into a paste.”

As gold prices soar, creating voluminous, substantial-looking pieces with significantly less material has become a massive commercial advantage for Tritone, who makes this possible through hollow manufacturing.

“We can do hollow rings, sealed,” Ashkenazy said. “If you want to do a nice ring made of gold, but you need hollows either for lightweight or to use less gold to save money, we can do it. It will be hollow inside with nobody knowing the way that we did it.”

For Rosman, this is what “bringing back manufacturing” looks like in a tariff world. “The purpose of the tariffs is to make American manufacturing, which is obviously more expensive, more attractive,” she said. “Narrow the gap.”

Additive technologies create digital factories whose core assets are high‑end 3D printers and multidisciplinary teams of machinists, materials scientists and engineers. Machine operators are trained as skilled technicians, not line workers, supported by electrical, mechanical and optical engineers, all working in clean rooms and at control screens absent 1950s blast furnaces.

These digital factories take months to set up instead of years. They’re built for low-volume, high-value production—the opposite of the “minimum order quantity” tyranny keeping brands tethered to Asian molds and tooling. They fit the American labor market while changing the math of efficiency.

“With traditional manufacturing, you typically have minimum order quantities,” Rosman noted. “You have to order at least 500, otherwise it doesn’t make sense for me to invest in a mold. With additive manufacturing, because you’re directly making the part, you don’t need any tooling or mold; now you can make one part.”

This, in her view, is how you sidestep a trade war instead of getting crushed by it. A metal 3D printer in a U.S. “clean factory” lets brands localize production of select SKUs or custom orders, using American staff for finishing and quality control. Raw materials can still come from abroad, but creation happens onshore, where tariffs are no longer the whole story.

Tariffs Alone Won’t Unlock “Made in USA” Export Power

While American manufacturers struggle to build infrastructure from scratch, their European counterparts have perfected the supply-chain sleight-of-hand. The “Made in USA” hurdle is high; the “Swiss Made” bar is lower than most consumers realize.

“I joke about this, but I always talk about the upstairs tour and the downstairs tour,” Naik said of his Swiss factory visits. “If you’re in the media, you get the upstairs tour where you’ve got Sven, third generation, working on the parts, and it’s all handmade.” Insiders are ushered somewhere else: “You get the downstairs tour, which is all the boxes from China.”

Gary Girdvainis, Naik’s partner and former editor-in-chief and publisher of International Wristwatch Magazine, is even more blunt about the global nature of these “heritage” products. “Japan, screw assembly only. China, who gives a fuck? France, no real rules. England, no real rules. Germany, no real rules, except for the Glashütte region.”

That opacity creates an opening for American brands. If “Swiss Made” means global components assembled in Geneva hit a 60% value threshold, then “Made in USA” can stand for radical honesty about the supply chain. Naik sees American companies selling into Vietnam, China and Europe discovering the label carries an immense weight signaling quality, authenticity and a break from the mass-produced norm. “Do you know how many American companies could succeed so much more if they were able to get some sort of designation like that when they’re selling in Vietnam, in China?” he asked.

Yet in an era where domestic manufacturing is a political siren call, the Federal Trade Commission makes officially securing that designation significantly harder than getting a Swiss-made label. To make a “Made in USA” claim, the FTC requires final assembly and all significant processing to occur in the U.S., and all or virtually all components to be of U.S. origin. The purity test is far stricter than anything applied in La Chaux-de-Fonds.

“The FTC is concerned so much about our domestic market,” Naik observed. “But the piece of the equation that people forget about is the value of something that is made in USA overseas.”

For CEOs like Naik, the willingness to manufacture in America and employ American workers shouldn’t come with a tariff penalty simply because the parts they need don’t exist within U.S. borders, especially when the goal is to revive a once competitive American watch industry.

“I just think it’s being done bass-ackwards,” he lamented. “We first need to build the capability in America, we first need to support companies that are doing these things in America, then tariff.” He asks for a modest concession. “We still pay a tariff, but we don’t pay as high a tariff as a finished product, because we’re still employing American people to assemble and put it all together.”

This is where Rosman’s digital factories come back into frame. Drawing on her years in defense and aerospace, where mandates prohibited these sectors from buying anything not made in the U.S., she sees this policy already a step beyond tariffs. “Everything has to be manufactured in the U.S. That’s not making the U.S.-based production of things more attractive. It’s making them the only option, whether it’s attractive or not.”

Digital factories are the infrastructure making this compliance possible. What national security required by force, consumer goods manufacturers might choose by economics. The technology already exists.

The C-Suite Playbook For Designing Your Supply Chain Around Tariffs

If you keep running a 1980s globalization playbook of offshore volume and opaque origin stories, tariffs simply show up as margin drag. If you treat them instead as a forcing function to rewire where and how value is created, they can accelerate a move toward digital factories, more honest “Made in USA” narratives, and a supply chain built for high‑margin customization instead of low‑cost volume. For C-suite executives navigating these challenges, here’s the way forward:

1. Insist politicians stop assuming tariffs create domestic capacity. Tariffs only help if a viable local supply base exists. If it doesn’t, you’re just taxing your own P&L while still being forced to import critical components.
2. Invest in digital factories, not nostalgic ones. The viable reshoring play is advanced, additive manufacturing—clean, highly automated plants that can be set up in months and staffed with skilled technicians, not 1950s foundries no one wants to work in.
3. Use additive to flip the MOQ math. Metal 3D printing lets you profitably produce one‑off or ultra‑short runs without molds or tooling, turning tariffs from a cost to a catalyst for on‑demand, high‑margin customization.
4. Treat “Made in USA” as an export growth lever. In many overseas markets, the label carries outsized pricing and positioning power. Building enough domestic value‑add to make truthful origin claims can be a strategic revenue move, not just a compliance exercise.
5. Push for policy rewarding onshore value‑add. If you’re employing American labor for assembly and finishing, lobby for tariff structures or carve‑outs recognizing that difference, instead of treating semi‑finished parts like fully finished imports.

When domestic supply chains no longer exist, tariffs become a tax on ambition. If “Made in USA” is going to mean anything in the next decade, it won’t be about reclaiming an industrial past or rewinding globalization’s capitalistic benefits.

When molds and tooling live in software and the machines interpreting them sit in Phoenix instead of Foshan, a CMO can decide overnight without regard to tariffs to bring a capsule collection, collaboration, or personalization program back inside the domestic tent, ultimately collapsing the distance between design and delivery and between an idea sketched in a New York showroom and a finished object crossing a Houston loading dock days later.