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Cleveland artisans craft their own economic force
Eric Wobser, Cleveland Plain Dealer
President Barack Obama’s February summit on small business demonstrated Cleveland’s wise long-term investments in health care and technology. An equally important but often overlooked economic transformation is being led by a group of entrepreneurs who are as handy with a brew kettle or a band saw as they are with a Bluetooth.
These entrepreneurs are part of what Portland State University professor Charles Heying describes as the “artisan economy,” a movement capitalizing on growing consumer demand for local and unique products — demand couched in part as a rejection of national chains and globalization. Highly specialized artisan entrepreneurs manufacture, produce and sell products that tell a unique local story and, most importantly, create difficult-to-export local jobs.
While Heying describes how artisans have created thousands of jobs in Portland, Ore., a closer look at one small area of Cleveland tells a compelling story of artisans driving economic development locally:
• When Great Lakes Brewing Co. opened in Ohio City in 1988, industry consolidation had left no locally-owned breweries in Ohio. Twenty-three years later, Great Lakes distributes its product in more than 10 states, averages 20 percent annual growth, employs 160 and has annual revenues topping $30 million.
• Ohio City Pasta, founded by Gary Thomas in 1990, employs 17, retails from several locations and distributes fresh pasta in five states.
• Campbell’s Popcorn Shop, a mainstay at the West Side Market, will expand into nearby production and retail space with plans to double its current staff of 11 to service new wholesale accounts.
• Sam McNulty opened Bier Market, a Belgian beer hall, in 2005. In order to keep pace with demand, McNulty opened Bar Cento and Speakeasy within the same complex in 2007 and 2009, respectively. His latest venture, a $2 million microbrewery named Market Garden, will open across the street this spring, bringing total employment to more than 100.
These four businesses have already created more than 300 jobs and are examples of local entrepreneurs generating net regional wealth by exporting their products outside Cleveland.
Research by economist Michael Shuman shows that businesses serving an entirely local customer base also grow the economy, with dollars spent at local merchants creating an economic impact up to four times that of a national chain. This impact is obvious in Ohio City, with many merchants living within a short distance of their businesses, several of them directly above their storefronts….
(23 April 2011)
Vauxhall boss warns over UK carmaking future
BBC News
The future of carmaking in the UK could be in danger if the industry fails to develop a British-based supply chain, the boss of Vauxhall has said.
Nick Reilly, chairman of General Motors in Europe, said a lack of home-based parts manufacturers was the most critical issue facing the industry.
Mr Reilly said firms such as Nissan and Toyota were finding it hard to compete.
Meanwhile, the Sunday Telegraph says Jaguar is considering building a major engine plant in the UK.
‘Lack of suppliers’
Mr Reilly told the BBC that car makers were struggling because they had to import so many vehicle components.
He said the situation added to shipping costs and created currency risks as well as a longer supply chain.
The current government understood the problem but decisions taken decades ago meant the UK had lost many of its small component-making firms, Mr Reilly added….
(24 April 2011)
Sweatshops are still supplying high street brands
Madeleine Bunting, The Guardian
Marks and Spencer’s, Next, Ralph Lauren, DKNY, GAP, Converse, Banana Republic, Land’s End, Levi’s. And so the list of brands go on and on. What do they all have in common? According to a deeply depressing report (pdf) by the International Textile Garment and Leather Workers’ Federation (ITGLWF), the factories in Asia contracted to make their products are still responsible for shocking working practices.
More than a decade after sweatshop labour for high street brands became a mainstream issue, and after plenty of companies have instituted monitoring of their supply chains, the problem still seems endemic right across the global clothing and footwear sector.
Many of the factories supplying the brands likely to dominate the Olympics in 2012, such as Adidas, Nike, Slazenger, Speedo and Puma, “are routinely breaking every rule in the book when it comes to labour rights”, according to the ITGLWF.
The list of brands ultimately sourcing from the 83 factories surveyed in the report is so comprehensive, it seems to make a mockery of the whole idea that the high street has cleaned up its act…
(28 April 2011)
The report can be found here.
THE 25% SHIFT The Benefits of Food Localization for Northeast Ohio & How to Realize Them
Brad Masi, Leslie Schaller, and Michael H. Shuman, Northeast Ohio Food Web (report)
Executive Summary
The local food revolution has come to Cleveland—big time. The city now has so many community gardens, farmers markets, community-supported agriculture (CSA) subscriptions, urban farms, celebrity chefs, and local-food procurement programs that the environmental web site, SustainLane, recently ranked Cleveland as the second best local-food city in the United States. But the region has only just begun to tap the myriad benefits of local food.
The following study analyzes the impact of the 16-county Northeast Ohio (NEO) region moving a quarter of the way toward fully meeting local demand for food with local production. It suggests that this 25% shift could create 27,664 new jobs, providing work for about one in eight unemployed residents. It could increase annual regional output by $4.2 billion and expand state and local tax collections by $126 million. It could increase the food security of hundreds of thousands of people and reduce near-epidemic levels of obesity and Type-II diabetes. And it could significantly improve air and water quality, lower the region’s carbon footprint, attract tourists, boost local entrepreneurship, and enhance civic pride.
Standing in the way of the 25% shift are formidable obstacles. New workforce training and entrepreneurship initiatives are imperative for the managers and staff of these new or expanded local food enterprises. Land must be secured for new urban and rural farms. Nearly a billion dollars of new capital are needed. And consumers in the region must be further educated about the benefits of local food and the opportunities for buying it.
To overcome these obstacles, we offer more than 50 recommendations for programs, investment priorities, and policies. In a period of fiscal austerity, we argue, the priority must be to create “meta-businesses” that can support the local food movement on a cash-positive basis. For example:
• To mobilize consumers in the region to buy local food, we suggest creating local debit, credit, and gift cards, and purchasing platforms that better connect local food businesses to one another and to government procurement agencies.
• To increase the competitiveness of local food businesses, we recommend the creation of local business alliances that facilitate peer learning and new kinds of delivery services, local-food malls, and joint procurement cooperatives.
• To make more capital available to local food businesses, we propose establishing new revolving loan funds, municipal food bonds, and a local stock market.
• To support a new generation of local food entrepreneurs, we recommend deployment of a network of food-business incubators and “food hubs” operating in concert within a network of enterprise support.
Our final—and most ambitious—recommendation is the creation of a NEO Food Authority, potentially owned and capitalized by thousands of shareholders in the region. This Authority might issue tax-exempt bonds and then provide seed capital for many of our initiatives. The next step should be to prepare a business plan for this idea.
(December 2010)
