Heart and Sole: A Case for American Manufacturing
03.01.2018
Tucked into the hills of Portland, KEEN Inc. is quietly rewriting the rules for the entire footwear industry. In the process, it may have found a recipe to bring manufacturing back to the U.S.A.
It was already 102°, the air thick with smoke from some distant wildfire by the time I arrived at KEEN Inc.'s Portland boot factory last month. Perfectly absurd conditions for a factory tour.
But the absurdity felt right.
I was, after all, walking into a shoe factory in the United States. Moreover, at a time when around 99% of the shoes worn in this country are made in another and U.S. factory work is being steadily overtaken by robots and automation, I was entering an American footwear plant that is still dominated by real humans doing real work to create real products.
That's as absurd as it gets. But that's also kind of KEEN's thing.
KEEN, though a relative newcomer in the industrial footwear world, already has a long history of disruption and innovation. Its lines of strange, asymmetrical boots, shoes, and sandals have grown a cultish following based on the company's reputation for its unique, ultra-comfortable fit. As one of our product reviewers once commented, they are more comfortable than broken-in boots, right out of the box.
The company accomplishes this fit and maintains this reputation by doing things differently as a matter of principle and pride. Building a real-life American factory, they say, is just an extension of that.
"Innovation is ingrained in the culture here," explains Rory Fuerst Jr., director of innovation at KEEN. "As we see it, you have to be comfortable in the unknown, otherwise you'll never move forward."
This much was clear even before I got into the place. Located on Swan Island, just across the Willamette River from the company's downtown headquarters, KEEN's PM (Portland Manufacturing) factory was opened in 2010 just as we bottomed out at the end of the Great Recession—exactly when no one in their right mind would open a factory here.
And, going back even further, the company got its start 15 years ago with the bizarre, hard-toed Newport sandal that founder Rory Fuerst Sr. was told no one in their right mind would ever wear.