Despite bracing for the New England's first big snow storm of the year, I had a great visit yesterday to the New Balance shoe manufacturing plant in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Accompanied by a public radio journalist–decked out in head phones, recorder, and mic–who is working on a piece about this project, I piled in a friend's car and headed north. Though it had taken about a month to work out logistics and schedules, everyone at New Balance that I came in contact with has been incredibly welcoming and accommodating. In fact, they aren't actually set up to provide public tours, but as the only athletic shoe manufacturer left in the United States (they make 25% of their footwear here in Lawrence and in three other locations in Maine and Boston) they were sympathetic to my mission and pulled out all the stops.

We were actually shown around by Claudio Gelman, plant manager of this facility for the past 13 years. An Argentinian by birth, Claudio came to Framingham, MA, as a high school exchange student and fell in love with the state. After getting his engineering degree in Israel, he moved back, got married, and settled in. As plant manager, he is passionate about the process of making shoes effectively and efficiently, down to finding the last hundredth of a second that can be shaved from the production time. I was once again amazed at how hands-on the process is, with highly skilled individual line workers manning presses and sewing machines to get every detail right in the shortest amount of time. Though Claudio told us that most of 'his people' had been there for 15+ years, I wondered how such a tight ship could be a pleasant enough place to work, until we were about to head out and we heard a crackling PA system come to life with a worker's unscripted rendition of Silent Night, followed by an off-key Feliz Navidad. Every worker on the floor laughed and hollered, grinning from ear to ear. All while working fingers and machines, not missing a beat.

Labels: New Balance