Mold Reshoring & Reuse

Manufacturers often use plastic, rubber, and metal molds to create parts and products quickly and effectively. Mold-making can require a significant upfront investment, but this cost is usually offset over the life of the mold as it gets used to produce goods. Some rubber molds can last up to 30 years, while some metal molds will last indefinitely with proper care and storage.

When a company outsources manufacturing to another country, the molds used to manufacture products are housed, maintained, and used in the contract manufacturer’s facility. Sometimes these molds can get lost as contract manufacturers go out of business or when ownership changes hands. This requires the construction of new molds to continue production, creating an unnecessary expense that reduces the overall return on investment for the product.

Companies can mitigate the cost of reproducing molds by reclaiming their molds from overseas providers and reshoring them to the United States for use at a domestic contract manufacturer. Many companies rely on mold reuse to avoid the costs associated with new mold creation.

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Mold Reshoring & Reuse at Advanced Prototype Molding

At Advanced Prototype Molding, we can help you obtain molds from your overseas supplier and reuse them in domestic production. In our operation, we use molds for a variety of processes, including:

We’re happy to help you incorporate your existing molds into any of these processes, helping you to avoid the high cost of recreating molds. Additionally, we have an in-house tooling room and mold experts on-staff for assistance with mold repairs and maintenance. This can help to keep your products’ production schedules in motion with less downtime due to mold degradation.

Benefits & Advantages of Reshoring/Reusing Molds

Reshoring and reusing existing molds has numerous benefits compared to building new molds for domestic use. Some of these benefits include:

Easier communication. Using a domestic manufacturer eliminates language and time zone barriers that can hamper effective communication between a brand and its production partner. Using a local supplier also makes it much easier to implement design or production changes.
Lower costs. Increasing tariffs on imported goods from overseas can result in higher total production costs. Variability in tariffs can also mean you’ll face variable product costs. Transferring molds to a domestic manufacturer lowers shipping costs for completed orders since the goods don’t need to travel across borders to get to your facility.
Shorter lead times. Whereas ocean shipments may take up to a month from many common outsourcing destinations, finished orders produced domestically can reach the customer’s warehouse or distribution enter within days.
Better intellectual property control. By retrieving existing molds, product owners retain stricter control of their intellectual property after severing relationships with overseas contractors.
Lot traceability. Using a U.S.-based manufacturer makes it easier to implement better visibility and traceability at every phase of production.
Higher quality. Domestic U.S. manufacturers operate under more stringent industry standards and quality guidelines than contract manufacturers located in many common outsourcing countries.
Advanced technology. A skilled labor shortage in recent years has caused U.S. manufacturers to turn to automation and technology to fill the gap, resulting in better part-to-part repeatability and faster high-volume production.
Closer to end customers. Instead of outsourcing to far-flung destinations and shipping products back to the U.S. for sale, finished goods get to market faster.
Made in the USA. Demand for American-made products continues to rise as consumers become more interested in the origin of the goods they buy.

Prototype & Manufacturing Services from Advanced Prototype Molding

At Advanced Prototype Molding, we stand ready to help our clients reshore their molds and implement them into domestic production. Our in-house tooling room also enables us to make mold repairs quickly and easily so your products can get back into production in less time. To see how we can help you gain better control over your molding processes, please contact us or request a quote today.