🎙️ It’s easy to think America doesn’t manufacture anything, but it’s simply not true. But one of the open questions around manufacturing in 2025 is simply: what if American manufacturing were more connected? What if the factories, logistics partners, and service providers already exist but need a new kind of network—one with actual business operations answers—to unlock them?
Chris Nolte is a co-founder of Bloom, a Detroit-based operations marketplace (but with national reach) that helps emerging hardware companies scale. From electric motorcycles to autonomous robots and prefab homes companies, Bloom is helping hardware founders match with domestic manufacturers and logistics partners, then helping both sides finance, communicate, and operate with maximum speed.
Bloom is hard tech grease.
Nolte talks with TOOL OR DIE about the long tail of American manufacturing: why so many companies outsource by default, why so few people know that critical suppliers are still here, and how Detroit’s legacy supply chain can—and must—diversify beyond cars. From tariffs to tooling, high-mix manufacturing to culture change, Chris cheerfully explains the real reasons reshoring is hard to a hard-headed idiot (me) and what it’s going to take to make it work.
Thanks again to Newlab Detroit and Michigan Central for hosting us. We’ll be publishing a few more episodes than usual over the next few weeks; we met several great companies in Detroit and don’t want to sit on episodes.
Timestamps:
01:15 – What Bloom does: connecting hardware startups with overlooked U.S. manufacturing
04:00 – Beyond matchmaking: Bloom’s tools for financing, best practices, and logistics
07:15 – Why reshoring isn’t just patriotic—it’s strategic risk management
10:00 – Rethinking vertical integration and the myth of doing everything in-house
13:45 – The “missing middle” in American manufacturing: why scale is so hard
17:00 – Can Detroit build something that’s not a car? Why it must
22:00 – The hidden factories: who’s assembling TVs and scooters in the U.S. right now
26:00 – The real limiter: tariffs that penalize domestic production
30:00 – Why communication—not tech—is the real bottleneck for U.S. suppliers
33:45 – Bloom’s future: automating matching with AI, building the “Shopify for manufacturing”
37:00 – Rebuilding industrial culture with Zoomers, grit, and mutual respect
Key Topics:
Building a modern network of domestic suppliers, 3PLs, and service shops
The real costs and incentives behind offshoring—and what’s changing
The bottleneck of American "medium-scale" manufacturing
Tariffs, rare earths, and supply chain gaps
Using software and shared infrastructure to de-risk hardware startups
Detroit’s next chapter—and why it must extend beyond the automotive industry
Cultural challenges in U.S. factories—and how better communication changes everything
What it takes to speed up reshoring without giving in to nostalgia
🔧 Learn more: BuildWithBloom.com
Sponsor
This episode of TOOL OR DIE is brought to you by DOSS, the adaptive ERP.
DOSS kills implementation hell by working directly with your team, connecting all your systems to minimize data entry so you can focus on production. Instead of barging in like a bull in a china shop, they take a deep look at your actual operations and build a system that matches how you operate today, replacing only the parts that need improving—rather than trying to fix what’s already working great.
DOSS — One Platform, Total Visibility
TOOL OR DIE is hosted by Joel Johnson, former science & tech journalist turned corporate strategist who built brands like Gizmodo, WIRED.com, and Wirecutter; and Alex Roy, General Partner at New Industry Venture Capital (NIVC.us), known for breaking the Cannonball Run record and his work in autonomous vehicles. Each week, they speak with the people actually rebuilding American manufacturing—one machine, one company, one idea at a time.
Follow them at:
LinkedIn: joeljohnson | alexroy
X: @joeljohnson | @alexroy144
Share this post