The U.S. home base for brands like Nike, Adidas and Columbia Sportswear may soon become the epicenter of American footwear manufacturing.
Portland, Oregon lawmakers last month approved phase-one funding for a $125-million effort aimed at building out a green manufacturing campus for shoes and apparel. The Made in Old Town development project will revitalize 10 buildings and four city blocks at the center of a once-vibrant manufacturing district, with the goal of creating a mecca for innovation and onshoring.
At the heart of the effort is Hilos, a software and manufacturing platform (which first debuted as a women’s footwear label) that allows brands and independent designers to make 3D-printed shoes on demand. Founder and CEO Elias Stahl has run the business out of Portland’s Old Town neighborhood since it launched in 2019, occupying a historic brick building that once housed Povey Brothers Art Glass Works, which made stained glass for churches, homes and other buildings across the American West during the early 1900s.
Stahl cherishes the area’s rich history and believes that Old Town (which fell into decrepitude in part because of the flight of U.S. manufacturing to offshore locales) serves as the perfect backdrop for the city’s renaissance.
“We saw that there was both a need from a local and state perspective to re-envision how we see our cities really running and operating,” Stahl told Sourcing Journal. “This project stands at the intersection of two forces: a need for states and cities to re-envision the uses of neighborhoods to be multiuse and multipurpose—and also to allow an industry that has been used to going overseas to think about manufacturing and innovation in their own backyard.”
Stahl has mobilized a collective of industry insiders, government officials, educators and other experts around the cause, claiming that the effort could bring jobs, housing and economic firepower back to Portland. “It’s the beginning of what we hope will be a model for other cities across the country to follow,” he said.
“We went to the city and state and said that we have a vision for repurposing the buildings and creating a community trust to be able to buy, refit and then welcome in manufacturing partners,” he added. If all goes well, the project will create “a thriving ecosystem for high-mix, high-volume, sustainable manufacturing of footwear apparel, back on American shores.”
A rendering of Made in Old Town.
There’s already been “an outpouring” of support and interest from the local footwear industry. While their support is integral to the project’s success, Stahl emphasized that the Made in Old Town campus will specifically house manufacturing and technology firms and startups engaged in all tiers of production.
“This is a non-branded, non-competitive space where the supply chain partners are able to work creatively around new applications and innovation, have their teams based in one place, and scale sampling into initial production runs for their brand partners,” he said. Digital manufacturing, material testing and the creation of small batches of product will all take place there.
The area will also serve as a place for students and recent graduates to cut their teeth.
University of Oregon—based in Eugene, with an offshoot in Portland housing its Sports Product Management Program—is a partner in the project. As is NTX, an Asia-based textile supplier to brands like Reebok, Adidas and Nike, which announced its intention to build its first U.S. facility near U of O’s downtown campus last year.
Ellen Schmidt-Devlin, co-founder and executive director of the Sports Product Management Program, said the project will provide students with the opportunity to create and test products using machinery and technology situated just down the street from their classrooms. Many aspiring product developers previously had to travel overseas for that experience.
Moving forward, she expects to see internships and jobs materialize as a result of the project.
“Made in Old Town creates opportunities for graduating students who want to start their own companies; you have material vendors right here and you can make your products here,” she said. “We have experts here within the ecosystem, and we’ll have a much greater ability for our students to be able to realize their vision.”
Both Sports Product Management and Sports Product Design students will make use of the access to cutting-edge technology, conceptualizing and creating products on their own or developing them with “creation teams.” According to Schmidt-Devlin, the combination of Old Town manufacturing businesses and the NTX facility will provide an ideal environment for learning as well as building brands.
The proximity to industry-leading footwear labels has always drawn hopefuls to Portland, along with the university’s reputable programs that feed into the sector, Schmidt-Devlin said. “I thought we would attract people from around the world, which we have—I didn’t anticipate that they would want to stay, but they do,” she added.
Made in Old Town could be one more reason graduates won’t have to leave Portland to pursue their dreams. “We have a marvelous place here, so part of what we need to do is build more jobs here.”
State Senator Elizabeth Steiner, who represents Oregon’s 17th district, including the Old Town neighborhood, told Sourcing Journal that backing the project was a no-brainer.
“That area is in my legislative district, and I was also on one of the committees of the governor’s Central City Revitalization Task Force that was meeting last year,” she said. “As somebody who both cares about her district and cares about the City of Portland and the state as a whole, creative ideas like that—that revitalize a part of the city that has really been neglected, if not abandoned for a long time, and do so in a way that meet a bunch of different goals simultaneously—are a very exciting prospect for me.”
The Old Town district of Portland, Ore.
Steiner said the state legislature initially awarded the Made in Old Town project with $2 million in seed funding to spur part of the planning process. “We thought it was important to get in early and give them the capital that they needed,” she said. “We really felt like this was the kind of economic development that made sense for the state to invest in.”
The timeline is ambitious; the Made in Old Town campus is slated to open in December. But Steiner said she’s eager to see the three-phase project take off sooner rather than later, which is why she and colleagues in the legislature have pushed for its approval and full funding. “We could build up the economy in an area that really hasn’t seen its economy built up in a very long period—decades—and do it in a way that’s congruent with Oregon values,” she added. The effort “takes advantage of our intellectual resources, technology resources and creative resources.”
Those resources are bound to prove enticing to manufacturers and innovators looking for a domestic foothold, according to Matthew Claudel, founder of benefit company Field States, which is made up of experts in architecture, urban planning, arts and public health. The firm has been helping to develop the Made in Old Town campus, working with Stahl and other players to envision the operational layout for the campus.
“There’s a strong trend toward onshoring, toward local and U.S. manufacturing. Companies and manufacturers are looking at how to get a position in the United States,” he said. “This will be a landing pad for them, and a place for really productive synergy to be happening.”
Claudel, who has a doctorate in Advanced Urbanism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and co-founded the school’s designX Program at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, said he was inspired by his tour of Hilos and what the company’s 3D-printing capabilities could mean for the traditionally “climate-heavy” process of footwear production.
Footwear by Hilos.
“I was obviously compelled by that story. What seemed more interesting for me given my background in architecture and urban planning is that I was seeing the future of the American city,” he said.
“When you have advanced manufacturing, yes, you can create amazing looking shoes—but you can do it right downtown, and that has implications for aligning the creative process with the production process,” he added. “You could have someone who’s a shoe designer who’s rubbing shoulders with someone who’s a supply chain expert, who’s doing the technical work.”
Field States worked with the Los Angeles-adjacent city of Vernon, Calif.—known as an industrial area dedicated to the manufacturing of products ranging from clothing to fertilizer—to envision a transformation to a “dynamic, mixed-use area for working and living.”
Through that project and others like it, Claudel said he learned “about the power of cluster-based, industry-specific innovation.” With Made in Old Town, “What we’re after is really rich, balanced, vibrant, mixed-use urban planning and real-estate development that has an economic anchor in an industry that matters in Portland,” he said.
An urban enclave surrounded on all sides by woods, mountains, and, a bit further out, a rocky coastline renowned for its beauty, Portland is heralded for its outdoorsy spirit. That defining characteristic has made it a welcome home for performance industry titans Nike and Adidas, and inspired brands like Danner, Keen, Under Armour, Cole Haan, Lululemon, and Allbirds to plant stakes in the city.
“We have some of the biggest footwear companies in the in the world right here,” Claudel said, “so we’re really thinking about this as leveraging Portland’s strengths in turning around a neighborhood.”
The project will lend value to the area’s real estate, making it a more desirable place to live for both transplants and locals. “What we’ve seen in the past year or so is that there’s a narrative about the urban ‘doom loop’ and the city collapsing in on itself,” he explained. That story, reinforced on a constant basis by the media, has led to “more vacancy, fewer and fewer people downtown, and less and less tax base.”
Cities from Portland to San Francisco and Seattle “are really worried about how to escape that cycle,” which was made all the worse by Covid, Claudel said. But investment in projects like Made in Old Town could signal a shift. “Portland was kind of down on itself, and recently, there’s been this very tangible enthusiasm for turning that around.”
“We know what is at the core of Portland’s identity, its vision of itself,” he added. “We know how people are talking about the future of the state, and it’s been exciting to hook into that energy.”
