Burn

Conclusion

Sometime after I opened my American factory, a high‐ranking politician from the US Department of Education visited the site to stage a job training event with local business leaders. As we walked the premises and met with workers, the politician casually said, “I don't want any plants making underwear to come back to America. Those shops can stay in China and Mexico.”

As the founder of a consumer brand that had recently opened a US factory and created 100 American jobs, I couldn't help but wince. Candles are just like underwear, forming part of the undervalued, non‐technology‐driven manufacturing sector. As I've described in this book, such ideas have plagued my business journey, preventing venture capitalists from investing in my company when I began in China and causing me constant headaches with potential supply partners who grimaced at my small volumes and “inconsistent” snowflake textures. As I also detailed, anti‐manufacturing prejudice followed me to the United States, where I learned that the country welcomes technology jobs but makes reshoring manufacturing for operations like mine extremely difficult.

On the factory floor that day, I also realized that this politician's comment crystallized America's central problems with entrepreneurship and manufacturing. When American companies began offshoring factory jobs in the 1970s, post–World War II prosperity declined. In the following decades, our understanding of innovation narrowed, as entrepreneurs increasingly ...