Seen in action, the boxy blue-andwhite machine at top right seems to be pumping fluffy green cotton candy into pillow casings. Obviously, it’s doing no such thing, though the material the machine is dispensing is still pretty sweet, in its own way.

Known as polyester hollowfill fiber, this soft synthetic substance is made from recycled green-plastic soda bottles. We use it now for the plush padding in different HammockSource swing cushions, and in several newer styles of our top-end hammocks.

Not to mention that we’re using it to create more domestic jobs as well!

Our new fiber-blowing machine is just one of several such recent high-priced investments aimed at bringing more of our production work back home to the United States. There’s also our new cutting machine, pictured bottom-right, which slices fabric sheets for use in our Hatteras Outdoors line of outdoor curtains, and in several of our different hammocks and swings as well. With its precision measuring and cutting, this state-of-the-art apparatus not only reduces fabric waste, but also allows our employees to increase output tremendously.

Domestic production has always offered certain fundamental cost-advantages: Centralized shipping saves greatly both on freight and fuel costs, for example. In-house manufacturing likewise offers significantly better quality control, another cost-savings, while equipment such as our new cutting machine now allows us to adapt quickly to changing trends and shifts in customer preference. We’ve recently added an array of additional sizes and styles to our outdoor curtains, for instance, based on repeated customer requests.

Yet with some products we manufacture in greater quantities and that require less-skilled labor to produce, and that also retail for less, there still have been definite financial advantages to having them made abroad.

Now, with the rise in foreign labor costs, along with steady spikes in fuel and transportation costs and materials prices, and the inherent uncertainties in shipping from outside the U.S., the benefits to supplemental foreign manufacturing are quickly slipping away. More “Made in U.S.A.” simply makes more sense.

“The bottom line is, when it becomes cost-effective for American manufactures to produce things at home, then many things will again start being made here,” says HammockSource CEO Walter R. Perkins III. “For us, increasingly, the time is now.”

While our recent equipment acquisitions are helping us to steadily scale back our remaining nondomestic production, we’re proud to say that HammockSource brands The Original Pawleys Island® Rope Hammock and Hatteras Hammocks® handcraft their signature products right here in the coastal Carolinas, the hammock capital of the world. In fact, Pawleys Island has been handcrafting hammocks here since all the way back in 1889!