And there are innovative schools out there that are teaching young adults the skills necessary to operate new machinery and programs. In schools like Ranken Technical College in St. Louis, Mo., students are being trained on cutting-edge equipment for jobs in the construction and manufacturing industries.

The proof is in the data. These schools have a nearly 98% placement rate and often work with local businesses to employ graduates in hometown companies.

Although education leads to employment, consumers have to be willing to buy American.

Free-range chickens, local oranges and organic avocados in your grocery store. We are largely conscious consumers in that we increasingly research where our food is produced, yet too many Americans don’t take the time to research and demand their t-shirts, jeans and everyday living necessities are made domestically. And some of this burden falls on the manufacturers and storeowners who need to promote the “Made in America” brand.

The perfect example of a major company producing in America is the athletic shoe company New Balance that employs about 1,300 workers in New England alone. While critics make the claim that American-made products are more expensive, New Balance sneakers are competitively priced to foreign-made shoes like Nike.

But what role does Washington D.C. have in this movement? Better yet, what should they be doing to keep jobs in America?

Instead of burying the responsibility in the halls of the U.S. Department of Commerce, we agree with many scholars and thought leaders that there should be a separate agency focused on manufacturing.

A U.S. Department of Manufacturing could create national standards, guidelines and incentives for manufacturers.

As filmmakers, we get tax incentives for making our movies in certain states. Why not do the same for manufacturing companies? Tax incentives would keep U.S. companies from outsourcing and lure jobs back from overseas. In fact, this idea of bringing companies back to America would help bring almost five million jobs to our shores by 2020, reducing our stagnant unemployment rate by three percentage points.

And some — unfortunately, few — are fighting for U.S. jobs in the Halls of Congress.

Scott Paul, president of Alliance for American Manufacturing, a partnership made up of American manufacturers and the United Steelworkers union, has offered great ideas on how to improve our manufacturing policy overseas. He’s called for a refocus on “trade agenda by giving American businesses new tools to counter China’s currency manipulation, industrial subsidies, intellectual property theft and barriers to market access.”

Our country is eager to re-energize U.S. manufacturing and in some towns they are already taking the necessary steps. We are hopeful that success stories slowly coming out of our small and large cities will help motivate a united effort by consumers, educators, the business community and policy makers to bring jobs back to America.

Vincent Vittorio and Nathan McGill are directors of the upcoming documentary “American Made Movie,” premiering nationwide on Aug. 30 .

This space in an anonymous building in New York’s Long Island City neighbourhood, just across the river from Manhattan, isn’t cooking up breads and pastries, however. It’s a factory, filled with 3-D printers “baking” items by blasting a fine plastic dust with lasers.

When a production run is done, a cubic foot of white dust comes out of each machine. Packed inside the loose powder like dinosaur bones in sand are hundreds of unique products, from custom iPhone cases to action figures to egg cups.

Manufacturing is coming back to New York City, but not in a shape anyone’s seen before. The movement to take 3-D printing into the mainstream has found a home in one of the most expensive cities in the country. New York’s factories used to build battleships, stitch clothing and refine sugar, but those industries have largely departed. In recent years, manufacturing has been leaving the U.S. altogether. But 3-D printing is a different kind of industry, one that doesn’t require large machinery or smokestacks.

“Now technology has caught up, and we’re capable of doing manufacturing locally again,” says Peter Weijmarshausen, CEO of Shapeways, the company that runs the factory in Long Island City.

Weijmarshausen moved the company here from The Netherlands. Another company that makes 3-D printers, MakerBot, just opened a factory in Brooklyn. And in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, where warships were once built to supply the Arsenal of Democracy, there’s a “New Lab,” which serves as a collaborative workspace for designers, engineers and 3-D printers.

3-D printers have been around for decades, used by industrial engineers to produce prototypes. In the last few years, the technology has broken out of its old niche to reach tinkerers and early technology adopters. It’s the consumerization of 3-D printing that’s found a hub in New York. The technology brings manufacturing closer to designers, which New York has in droves.

Shapeways’ production process is fairly simple.

Anyone can upload a 3-D design to Shapeways’ website and submit an order to have it “printed” in plastic at the factory. The company charges based on the amount of material a design uses and then ships the final product to the customer. Smartphone cases are popular, but many items are so unique they can only be identified by their designer, such as the replacement dispenser latch for a Panasonic bread maker. There’s an active group of designers who are “Bronies” – adult male fans of the show My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic – who print their own ponies. The company prints in a wider range of materials, including sandstone and ceramic, at its original factory in Eindhoven, the Netherlands.

If that was all Shapeways did, the company would be little more than an outsourced machine shop. But with the help of the Internet, it’s taking the business model one step further. Anyone can set up a “shop” on the Shapeways site and let people order prints from their designs. Want a replica skeleton of a Death’s-head Hawkmoth? That’s $15. How about a full-colour sandstone sculpture of actor Keanu Reeves? He’s $45.

Under the old mass production model, Weijmarshausen says, designers first need to figure out if there’s a market for their product, then raise money for production, and then find a manufacturer, who usually has to custom-make dies for moulding plastic. The cost can run to tens of thousands of dollars. After that, the designer must get the product distributed and find out how customers react to it.

“With the Shapeways shop, that process is completely condensed,” Weijmarshausen says. “If there is no market for your product, then the only thing you lose is some time.”

For its part, MakerBot is spearheading another side of the 3-D printing boom by making affordable desktop 3-D printers. About the size of a microwave oven, the printers feed melted plastic out of “print heads” that move in three dimensions, gradually building objects as the plastic cools. Instead of sending a 3-D design to Shapeways, a MakerBot owner can print an object in plastic at home, as long as it’s smaller than a loaf of bread. MakerBot’s printers range in price from $2,200 to $2,800.

MakerBot’s factory is in an old industrial building on Brooklyn’s waterfront, across the street from a Costco and a strip club. Only assembly, testing and repair is done here, so the interior looks more like a workshop than a manufacturing plant. Subcontractors elsewhere do the dirty and noisy jobs like machining of components.

The privately held company agreed in June to sell itself to Stratasys Ltd., a maker of professional 3-D printers, for $403 million in stock. Stratasys is based in Minneapolis and Rehovot, Israel, but Bre Pettis, the CEO of MakerBot, says the factory will stay in Brooklyn.

Pettis looks like a Brooklyn hipster, with his thickrimmed glasses and upswept hairdo. The company got its start in the borough, and he says keeping the factory here is a rational economic decision. Having the engineers nearby means the company can work fast and introduce more than one new model a year, a crucial advantage in the fast-moving 3-D printing space. Pettis also notes that labour costs are going up in Asia’s manufacturing hubs. “Brooklyn Pride” is also a factor.

“You can’t underestimate the power of people who take pride in their work,” he says.

Weijmarshausen moved Shapeways to the U.S. to get closer to its customers. He picked New York over cities such as San Francisco and Boston because of its design and fashion industry, which meshes well with 3-D printing.

Alas for New York, the consumer 3-D printing industry is still a tiny one, and there’s no indication that it could single-handedly reverse the long, slow flight of manufacturing jobs. Of the one million manufacturing jobs the city had at its peak during the Second World War, 93 per cent are now gone, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The Shapeways factory has 22 employees and plans to ramp up to at least 50, while MakerBot employs 274 people. And the jobs aren’t necessarily well paid; Pettis says the MakerBot factory workers make “more than minimum wage.”

But Weijmarshausen points out that Shapeways has the potential to provide a livelihood for many more people – successful designers. There are already hundreds of them making “substantial” money from their online Shapeways stores, but he won’t reveal specific figures.

In a larger sense, 3-D printing opens up the possibility of a new type of manufacturing economy, one that aligns more closely with the strengths of American creative meccas like New York than with the strengths of China.

David Belt, a real estate developer whose company is refurbishing the New Lab space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, says there’s a demand for products that are made in runs of less than 10,000 units. That’s too few to be economical using conventional injectio
n-m
oulding of plastic, but viable with 3-D printing.

One example of the combined power of 3-D printing and direct-to-consumer sales is the Spuni, a new type of spoon for babies. Boston couple Isabel and Trevor Hardy noticed that a baby taking a bite from a regular baby spoon leaves a lot of food on the utensil. Together with their friend Marcel Botha, an entrepreneur who makes medical devices, they sketched up a new spoon that “front-loads” the food, leaving less uneaten. Thanks to a 3-D printer, they had a prototype utensil eight days later, ready to test with a live baby.

“We were able to reproduce what the final spoon would look like physically at a very low cost,” Botha says.

With the prototype, Botha and his partners were able to demonstrate the Spuni to buyers through a video on crowdfunding website Indiegogo. Their campaign for donations raised $37,235 – enough to start a mass production run. The spoons are being made in a traditional factory in Germany, but Botha is running the Spuni project from the New Lab in Brooklyn.

On the factory floor in Brooklyn, Adjua Greaves, 32, does quality assurance work, testing MakerBot printers before they’re shipped. She used to work in publishing, a signature New York business that’s been hurt by the rise of ebooks. After freelancing for a while, Greaves wanted a steady job, and says she had “a romantic idea about working in a factory,” partly inspired by a Sesame Street episode about the making of crayons.

“I always wanted to have a connection to a factory, but more as an intellectual observer,” she says. “The romantic idea of a factory is very, very different from what it’s really like in a factory, but it’s really, really wonderful to be here.”

Recent news in and around the smartphone space points to an increasingly challenging environment:

• Weaker-than-expected shipments from Samsung;
• Weaker-than-expected June quarter shipments followed by price cuts and layoffs at Research in Motion – Blackberry;
• A sour outlook from HTC that calls for a sharp sequential drop in revenue;
• Apple AAPL -0.88%’s iPhone shipments fell 16.5% sequentially in the June quarter;
• Even though Nokia NOK -1.93%’s smartphone shipments grew 21% sequentially to 7.4 million units in the June quarter, the company’s average selling price dropped 17.8% on the same basis. The net result was had Nokia’s smartphone business revenues treading water.

After rattling those data points off, one would think the smartphone market is on a downward spiral, yet the latest figures from Strategy Analytics confirm the market continues to grow. In the June quarter, the third party research firm tabulated more than 229.6 million smartphones were shipped, up 10% from the March quarter and 47% compared to the year ago quarter. Looking at data from the GSM Association, there are more than 3.2 billion unique mobile subscribers as of August 2013 and that firm forecasts continued growth to 3.9 billion by 2017.

While there may be slower growth ahead, there is still growth to be had as smartphones continue to take share from basic and feature mobile phones. That shift is best seen in Nokia, which reported a sequential 4% drop in mobile phone shipments in the June quarter. On a year over year basis, the shift is far more evident as Nokia’s mobile phone shipments dropped  nearly 27%.

PowerTalk with Motorola Mobility MMI NaN% on the Moto X and bringing jobs back to the U.S. One company that is doubling down on the smartphone opportunity is Motorola Mobility, which is now owned by Google, the company behind the Android mobile operating system. This past week the two companies introduced their first jointly developed smartphone – the Moto X – and I was fortunate enough to speak with Mark Randall, Motorola’s Senior Vice President of Supply Chain and Operation, about the Moto X and what it means for job creation here in the U.S. Mark was formerly of Amazon and as he tells me he helped design the Fort Worth plant where the Moto X will be assembled, back when he worked with Nokia.

During our conversation, Mark talks about the high degree of customization that is possible with the Moto X and while he is tight lipped about what may be next for Motorola Mobility he does point out the size of the Fort Worth, Texas facility. At roughly 500,000 square feet, Motorola and its partner Flextronics International aim to employ 2,200 people when the Moto X ramps to full production. Reading between the lines, it sounds like the Fort Worth facility could be the home for more products and potentially more jobs.

Given the market share gains by Chinese mobile phone and smartphone vendors like Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo, many are concerned about the about the ability to compete with those vendors and be profitable while manufacturing in the U.S. Given the high degree of customization that Motorola Mobility is offering with the Moto X, Mark points out it would have been far more difficult doing this with China based manufacturing partners. He also tells me the closeness of the design team and the manufacturing-assembly team was also crucial and that the labor costs between manufacturing in the U.S. and China were not as far off as many might think.

Moto X will be available in the US, Canada and Latin America starting in late August/early September at AT&T, Sprint Nextel, Verizon Communications, T-Mobile and other carriers as well as at Best Buy stores and Motorola.com.

Given the not only lower than expected job creation numbers reported in the July Employment Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics but also the low quality nature of the report, the re-shoring of jobs by Motorola is welcome news.

While I am all for re-shoring jobs back to the U.S., as investors we have to wonder how successful the Moto X will be. The smartphone space is crazy competitive, and a single product can carry you only so far. Longtime followers of Motorola remember the RAZR craze, but without a killer follow-up product, Motorola soon began to lose its way. Time will tell how successful the Moto X will be and if there will be follow on products, but given its association with Google, Motorola Mobility now has some deep pockets to fall back on and that means it is far from out of the smartphone race. Those deep pockets are making a good sized bet on the Moto X  given the $500 million in marketing and advertising that Google is going to spend on the new smartphone.

Because the Moto X will have a little more than one month of availability at best in the current quarter, that marketing and advertising blitz likely means even greater losses at Motorola for the near term. In the June quarter, Motorola Mobility lost more than $200 million on the operating line on $998 million in revenue. Some quick math shows that an incremental $500 million will sap $1 per share in earnings for Google in the coming quarters, but that’s small potatoes compared with the better than $43 per share that Google is expected to earn this year. If the product receives positive buzz, it will be a positive for Google shares.

Until three years ago I did not believe in magic. But that was before I began investigating how western brands perform a conjuring routine that makes the great Indian rope trick pale in comparison. Now I’m beginning to believe someone has cast a spell over the world’s consumers.

This is how it works. Well Known Company makes shiny, pretty things in India or China. The Observer reports that the people making the shiny, pretty things are being paid buttons and, what’s more, have been using children’s nimble little fingers to put them together. There is much outrage, WKC professes its horror that it has been let down by its supply chain and promises to make everything better. And then nothing happens. WKC keeps making shiny, pretty things and people keep buying them. Because they love them. Because they are cheap. And because they have let themselves be bewitched.

Last week I revealed how poverty wages in India’s tea industry fuel a slave trade in teenage girls whose parents cannot afford to keep them. Tea drinkers were naturally upset. So the ethical bodies that certified Assam tea estates paying a basic 12p an hour were wheeled out to give the impression everything would be made right.

For many consumers, that is enough. They want to feel that they are being ethical. But they don’t want to pay more. They are prepared to believe in the brands they love. Companies know this. They know that if they make the right noises about behaving ethically, their customers will turn a blind eye.

So they come down hard on suppliers highlighted by the media. They sign up to the certification schemes – the Ethical Trading Initiative, Fairtrade, the Rainforest Alliance and others. Look, they say, we are good guys now. We audit our factories. We have rules, codes of conduct, mission statements. We are ethical. But they are not. What they have done is purchase an ethical fig leaf.

In the last few years, companies have got smarter. It is rare now to find children in the top level of the supply chain, because the brands know this is PR suicide. But the wages still stink, the hours are still brutal, and the children are still there, stitching away in the backstreets of the slums.

Drive east out of Delhi for an hour or so into the industrial wasteland of Ghaziabad and take a stroll down some of the back lanes. You might want to watch your step, to avoid falling into the stinking open drains. Take a look through some of the doorways. See the children stitching the fine embroidery and beading? Now take a stroll through your favourite mall and have a look at the shelves. Recognise some of that handiwork? You should.

Suppliers now subcontract work out from the main factory, maybe more than once. The work is done out of sight, the pieces sent back to the main factory to be finished and labelled. And when the auditors come round the factory, they can say that there were no children and all was well. Because audits are part of the act. Often it is as simple as two sets of books, one for the brand, one for themselves. The brand’s books say everyone works eight hours a day with a lunch break. The real books show the profits from 16-hour days and no days off all month.

Need fire extinguishers to tick the safety box? Hire them in for the day. The lift is a deathtrap? Stick a sign on it to say it is out of use and the inspector will pass it by. The dark arts thrive in the inspection business. We, the consumers, let them do this because we want the shiny, pretty thing. And we grumble that times are tight, we can’t be expected to pay more and, anyway, those places are very cheap to live in.

This is the other part of the magic trick, the western perception of the supplier countries, born of ignorance and embarrassment. India, more than most, knows how to play on this. Governments and celebrities fall over themselves to laud India for its progress. India is on the up, India is booming, India is very spiritual, India is vibrant. Sure, the workers are poor, but they are probably happy.

No, they are not. India has made the brands look rank amateurs in the field of public relations. Yes, we know it is protectionist, yes, we know working conditions are often diabolical, but we are in thrall to a country that seems impossibly exotic.

Colonial guilt helps. The British in particular feel awkward about India. We stole their country and plundered their riches. We don’t feel able to criticise. But we should. China still gets caught out, but wages have risen and working conditions have improved. India seems content to rely on no one challenging it.

Last week India’s powerful planning commission claimed that poverty was at a record low of 21.9% of the population. It did so on the basis that people could live on 26 rupees (29p) a day in rural areas (33 rupees in urban areas). Many inside India baulk at this. Few outside the country did so.

But times are tough, consumers say. This is the most pernicious of the ideas the brands have encouraged. Here’s some maths from anObserver investigation last year in Bangalore. We can calculate that women on the absolute legal minimum wage, making jeans for a WKC, get 11p per item. Now wave your own wand and grant them the living monthly wage – the £136 the Asia Floor Wage Alliance calculates is needed to support a family in India today (and bear in mind that the women are often the sole earners). It is going to cost a fortune, right? No. It will cost 15p more on the labour cost of each pair of jeans.

The very fact that wages are so low makes the cost of fixing the problem low, too. Someone has to absorb the hit, be it the brand, supplier, middleman, retailer or consumer. But why make this a bad thing? Why be scared of it?

Here is the shopper, agonising over ethical or cheap. What if they can do both? What if they can pluck two pairs of jeans off the rail and hold them up. One costs £20. One costs £20.15. It has a big label on it, which says “I’m proud to pay 15p more for these jeans. I believe everyone has the right to a decent standard of living. My jeans were made by a happy worker who was paid the fair rate for the job.”

Go further. Stitch it on to the jeans themselves. I want those jeans. I want to know I’m not wearing something stitched by kids kept locked in backstreet godowns, never seeing the light of day, never getting a penny. I want to feel clean. And I want the big brands and the supermarkets to help me feel clean.

I want people to say to them: “You deceived us. You told us you were ethical. We want you to change. We want you to police your supply chain as if you care. Name your suppliers. Open them to independent inspection. We want to trust you again, we really do, because we love your products. Know what? We don’t mind paying a few pennies more if you promise to chip in too.”

And here’s the best part: I think they would sell more. I think consumers would be happier and workers would be happier. And if I can spend less time trawling through fetid backstreets look
ing
for the truth, I’ll be happier.

August 2010
We revealed how factories supplying some of the biggest names on the British high street were making workers put in up to 16-hour days. Marks & Spencer, Gap and Next all launched inquiries and pledged to end excessive overtime.

November 2010
We revealed how Monsoon, the fashion chain that pioneered ethical shopping, used suppliers in India who employed child labour and paid workers below the minimum wage. Its global ethical trading manager urged the Indian government to tackle the issue. The company insisted it had a “long-lasting and passionate commitment to ethical trade”.

April 2011
We revealed how workers in China making iPhones and iPads for Apple suffered from illegal working hours and were made to write confession letters for minor misdemeanours. Foxconn, the Apple supplier, said it was trying to improve working conditions.

March 2012
Working with War on Want, we revealed how Bangladeshi workers producing sportswear for Olympic sponsors Adidas, Nike and Puma werebeaten, verbally abused, underpaid and overworked. The companies promised action

August 2012
The Observer, working with Indian anti-trafficking group Bachpan Bachao Andolan, revealed how boys as young as seven were sold to slave traders for work in the sweatshops of Delhi. Soon after the investigation, India’s government introduced new laws against child labour.

November 2012
We revealed claims that women in India who failed to hit impossible targets while making clothes for British high street names were berated, called “dogs and donkeys”, and told to “go and die”.

Detroit is still Motor City – at least to Chinese automotive companies doing business here.

In the past decade, dozens of them have been drawn to the area, not just because of its existing infrastructure, supply network, abundance of skilled workers or tax benefits, but because of Detroit’s pivotal role in automobile history.

“It is the center of modern vehicle technology,” proclaims John Yang, chief metallurgist with ZYNP International, the US distribution arm of engine cylinder-maker ZYNP China Manufacturing. The facility is located in Romulus, Michigan, about 25 miles southwest of Detroit. “This area still has its strength in technology and talent,” Yang said in an interview.

Overwhelmed by a debt of at least $18 billion, Detroit filed for Chapter 9 bankruptcy protection last week, the largest such filing in US history. A legal muddle created by a county judge’s ruling that the filing was unconstitutional was lifted on Wednesday when a federal bankruptcy judge cleared the way for the case to go forward without legal challenges.

As China’s leadership boosts research and development for auto parts, mandated by the latest five-year plan (2011-15), Chinese automotive companies have stepped up their activity around Detroit, doing everything from R&D on behalf of parent companies back home to making parts exclusively for US auto makers.

Their arrival is welcomed by the state government, led by Republican Governor Rick Snyder, former chairman of California computer-maker Gateway Inc, and ex-chairman and CEO of Michigan venture-capital firm Ardesta LLC. The first-term Snyder administration sees China’s interest in learning more about automobile production as a chance to create jobs for a hard-hit region.

Michigan was in the grip of a deep, decade-long recession through 2010. The state, whose economy is disproportionately affected by the automotive industry, lost nearly 218,000 manufacturing jobs from 2000 to 2005. It suffered further near the end of the decade when auto sales at General Motors, Ford and Chrysler plunged because the Detroit Three couldn’t compete against fuel-efficient Japanese cars at a time of high gas prices. The US industry’s woes were symbolized by the Chapter 11 bankruptcy filings of GM and Chrysler in 2009, moves now seen as necessary steps in the auto industry’s recent resurgence.

More and better jobs
Last year, the Great Lakes State, struggling to recover from the economic slump, exported $3.2 billion of goods and services to China, a 25 percent jump from 2011 and lagging behind only Canada and Mexico. Michigan received more than $917 million in capital from China in 2012 to become one of its top 10 direct-investment states.

“More and better jobs are created both by promoting Michigan exports to China and by attracting Chinese companies to locate operations in Michigan,” said Michael Finney, president and CEO of the Michigan Economic Development Corp, a public-private partnership that provides grants, loans and other economic assistance to businesses that make investments or create jobs in the state.

Finney calls China’s economic growth “an opportunity” for Michigan. Chinese officials feel the same way. During a recent visit to the Detroit Chinese Business Association in Troy, about 40 kilometers north of the city, Zhao Weiping, China’s Chicago-based consul general to the Midwest, called Michigan “an important business partner of China”.

The Chinese auto industry’s increasing presence in the Detroit suburbs continues a pattern of auto-production decentralization that started in the 1920s and shifted into high gear in the 1940s and 1950s, when GM, Ford and Chrysler expanded into new facilities around Detroit. That move helped push auto production into a truly national industry, responsible, at the city’s height at mid-century, for one in every six US jobs.

Detroit’s connection with a golden age of American automobile manufacturing fascinates Chinese automotive executives.

“Here in Detroit, we have a tradition,” said Jerry Xu, president of the Detroit Chinese Business Association, a nonprofit business network that fosters bilateral business relationships between US and Chinese companies. “We have a lot of history and experience that no other place can have. That is why Detroit is always respected by the Chinese as the place for the automotive industry.”

The business association estimates that about 100 Chinese firms, mostly in the auto industry, are active in the region. Those who come here typically aim to make a name for themselves in the global marketplace via Detroit, which has retained its legacy as a model for American innovation, notwithstanding its long decline and financial problems, Xu said.

Understanding that the path to success is through the Motor City, “they have to find a way to push through and come to the US, to the Michigan area, to realize that aspiration,” Xu said.

Sometimes, he said, large companies come with abundant talent and experience in doing business in the US. But “there are a lot of Chinese medium and small businesses that need help when they come”, Xu said.

The area’s abundant engineering talent is a magnet for Chinese auto-related companies looking to increase their knowledge of automobile production.

Hong Su, vice-president in charge of research at the United States R&D center for Chinese automaker Changan, in Plymouth, Michigan, about 40 km west of Detroit, said he has hired about 20 engineers with US auto industry experience in the last few years because of their expertise in developing vehicles.

“We started to think about smartphones, and the main thing we realized was they weren’t very smart,” Motorola Senior Vice President of Product Management Rick Osterloh said at the phone’s unveiling. “We see a lack of innovation because we think there is a lack of imagination.”

Motorola has put its imagination into making the Moto X a highly customizable phone with a few unique software tricks.

Colorful and Customizable Hardware 
The 4.7-inch, 1280×720-resolution Moto X is a big-screened smartphone like many other Android phones, but the hardware differences are in the shape of the device and in the colors you can get it in. The phone has a very comfortable curved back with a small dimple in the center of the back to rest your finger in.

But if you order your Moto X through Motorola’s Moto Maker website you can customize the color of the back of the phone, the edges and even the color of the volume and power buttons and the ring around the camera. There 2,000 color combinations to choose from and the company is even working on a back made of wood.

In addition you can engrave a message or name on back of the phone. You can upload your contacts and a photo for the wallpaper before the phone ships out of the Fort Worth facility within four days of placing the order. However, to start, the color-customized versions of the phone will be available only with AT&T service. The other carriers, including Verizon and Sprint, will have black and white versions of the phone in stores and on their websites.

The phone is powered by 2GB of RAM and Motorola’s Moto X Mobile Computing system, which the company says includes a series of chips. (A Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, quad-core Adreno 320 GPU, a contexual computing processor and a natural language processor, if you’re interested in the details.)

Increases in labor, shipping, and fuel expenses are driving many global companies to bring production back to North America, says Turner.