Made in the USA – Season 2 Episode 1: A Return From China

Entrepreneur Scott Colosimo found early success in China producing parts for his Cleveland-based motorcycle company in the mid-2000s. This is the story of how IP theft issues overwhelmed the business, prompting Colosimo and his team to start over from scratch — and move production back to the United States. Listen to the first episode of season two here, or visit your favorite podcast platform to subscribe to “Made in the USA.” Catch up on season 1 here . Check Out the Modern Machine Shop…. Shop Proudly sport the bold, iconic brand that started it all. Grease stains and coolant blotches optional. The following is a complete transcript for Season 2 Episode 1 of the “Made in the USA” podcast. Scott Colosimo, Founder of Land Energy : I flew to China, and every single factory that I went to, it was how many and how soon. There was so much spark and so much life and so much newness. Great, but then as we got bigger, and we started branching out to other factories, that’s where the IP theft really started to take hold. Every single motorcycle factory was just copying each other. It was dog eat dog. I mean, if you don’t make money, you’re starving. And that sense was real, starting a new company and doing it the way we want to do it. I said, we have to reshore it. And we got to bring it back. Brent Donaldson, Editor-in-Chief of Modern Machine Shop: Welcome to Made in the USA, the podcast for Modern Machine Shop magazine that explores some of the biggest ideas shaping American manufacturing. I’m Brent Donaldson, Pete Zelinski, Editorial Director of Modern Machine Shop: I’m Pete Zelinski. When we launched this show a couple of years ago, we focused on the key topics that drive our conversations about US manufacturing, the 2000s era collapse of our manufacturing workforce, controversy surrounding automation, supply chain problems that COVID-19 put in the spotlight. And what we saw in that last point in particular is a shift in awareness and understanding. The supply chain issues we’ve faced over the past three years have been highly educational. It’s become apparent to many people outside of manufacturing, why the US needs a robust manufacturing base. We need manufacturing in order to withstand crises. We need it to provide jobs and fuel our economy. And we need manufacturing in order to be self-reliant as a country, we have a long way to go. But we’re seeing Made in America become a call to action in a way that it hasn’t been in generations. Brent Donaldson: And that is why we decided to do this again. Except this time we’re taking a different approach. What you’ll hear over the course of this series are first-person accounts from people who are making decisive choices to manufacture here either by moving manufacturing operations back to the United States or beginning their manufacturing here in the first place. So over the past several months, Pete and I have traveled all over the country to hear from people who have made a commitment to US manufacturing. These are people who work at startups, established OEMs, and machine shops who have several different motivations to keep production within this country, often in cases when less expensive offshore options were available to them. Of course, less expensive is a relative term here as we’re about to learn from our first story about a man named Scott Colosimo and his electric motorcycle startup called Land Energy. Pete Zelinski: Scott grew up in Parma, Ohio, Scott Colosimo: A suburban kind of hellscape by Cleveland, Ohio, Pete Zelinski: And after high school, he attended the Cleveland Institute of Art where he earned a transportation design degree. After graduating, Scott worked for a couple of large companies and eventually landed at a foreign-owned manufacturer of vacuums and power tools that sourced many of its parts from China. His introduction to the possibilities of manufacturing in China happened there. Today, both Scott and his company, Land Energy, are back in Cleveland where Scott came from. Scott describes Lands bikes as software defined electric vehicles. The battery packs are swappable. And the same bike can serve as an E-bike, an E-moped or an E-motorcycle depending on which software mode you place it in. Scott says the great majority of Lands parts are sourced in the United States, which was not the case for Scott’s former Motorcycle Company, Cleveland CycleWerks. During his time with […]

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