Tuesday, March 25, 2025

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From Industry Week | March 24, 2025 | Anna Smith

Whether companies import goods or manufacture products across national borders, President Donald Trump’s tariff strategy poses a major threat, raising the specter of increased costs. But there’s another group of producers — companies that already make their goods domestically or are in the process of reshoring. For those, tariffs could bring back some pricing power or make their products more attractive to customers.

Two companies, one that’s been producing in the U.S. for more than 170 years and another that’s still getting started, discuss their desire and commitments to manufacturing in America and how this moment in history is affecting them.

Warwood Tool

One company keeping a close eye on those metals tariffs is Warwood Tool. As a fully domestic toolmaker heavily reliant on U.S. steel, Warwood Tool is hopeful that these tariffs, along with other initiatives, will level the playing field in terms of competing with cheaper imports.

Founded in Ohio in 1854 as a gardening tool supply company and coal mine, it later evolved to serve other industries like railway maintenance and oil and gas.

“We like to pride ourselves in that our tools literally helped build the infrastructure of the country,” says Chris Azur, president of Warwood Tool.

Warwood Tool’s manufacturing operations for its hand-forged tools, everything from bending and grinding to coating and shipping, all take place within the same plant.

“The biggest advantage we have is that we do everything under the same roof,” he says. “We get it as one thing, usually 20 or 26-foot bars of steel, and then out comes a finished product on the other end.”

Unlike many others, Warwood Tool has been able to stick to its roots and avoid offshoring or sourcing materials from outside the U.S, and the manufacturer has a desire to keep it that way.

Although there is pride in being an All-American company, the commitment to domestic manufacturing isn’t without its challenges.

Sourcing American-made materials isn’t an easy or cheap process, especially for railroad, a key industry Warwood Tool serves.

“Fifty-to-sixty years ago, they came up with a special recipe of steel that was supposed to be superior to pretty much anything else at that time. It was super corrosion resistant; it was very durable, and the idea was that it was going to only be made by a few places in the USA, and that would help keep the imports out, reduce competition, make it good business for the American manufacturers,” Azur says. “But now it’s to the point where … there’s very few, pretty much no one who’s willing to make it anymore, so it’s extremely hard to get.”

Another glaring issue for any domestic manufacturer is price. Competitors that have offshored can offer products at lower prices than Warwood Tool is capable of.

“A lot of people say, ‘I love that it’s made in the USA, that’s really cool,’ but they don’t put their money where their mouth is, and they don’t end up buying the thing made in the USA,” Azur says.

How has Warwood Tool been able to make up for it until now? An emphasis on quality.

“The key, really, is just to hit on the fact that it’s a superior quality product, because simply saying it’s made in the USA is definitely not always enough,” he says.

This is why Warwood Tool is looking to the new tariffs to allow it to compete fairly with foreign imports and make American manufacturing more desirable.

“We truly lost a lot of our capability as a nation,” he says. “If we want a strong industrial economy, we need policies that make it possible for American manufacturers to thrive.”

Azur says he has witnessed over a dozen manufacturers that have gone out of business in the past three years, unable to compete with lower costs of imports. Warwood Tool’s goal is to push the government for aid to help the company avoid offshoring and succeed as a domestic manufacturer.

“Should the tariffs actually impact, it should be very good for us, because by far our biggest struggle is just price. People typically want to go where the money is, and so if you can buy two hammers and one is a couple dollars cheaper, a lot of times, that’s where people go. So hopefully this will be sort of the turning point for us where we can start to maybe get a couple big retailers interested in the brand,” Azur says.

Additionally, other policies meant to revitalize domestic industry, including tax incentives, industry grants and stronger Buy American policies are giving encouragement to the company.

“We’ve never wavered in our commitment to American workers, and with the right policies, we won’t have to,” Azur says.

Hard Head Veterans

While Warwood Tool has been able to keep its manufacturing in the U.S., what does it take for a company to bring manufacturing to the U.S.?

The concept for Hard Head Veterans got its start when the owner observed and experienced problems with the ballistic helmets issued while he was in the military.

“From his experience, they were uncomfortable; they were heavy,” says VP of Manufacturing Dub Robertson. There was “not a lot of versatility when it came to the old-style helmets that we used to get issued.” And the problems didn’t stop once he left the military.

“Whenever he got out of the military and started doing some contracting work, he had to buy his own helmet, and they’re expensive,” Robertson says. “He immediately thought, ‘Hey, I can make this better.’ So that’s where his journey started.”

To begin making a comfortable, efficient and less expensive ballistic helmet for the end user, all while passing NIJ standards for body armor performance, the company had its first helmet shells pressed by contracting overseas, then assembled them into finished goods with off-the-shelf components.

It was a cost-effective option, but having third-party operations brought about complications, including supply chain vulnerability and design limitations.

“He built that brand and got to the point where he saved up enough money to where he can buy a facility” to start an American-made line of products, Robertson says. That’s when the company took a leap of faith and purchased a facility in Sweetwater, Texas, a tiny rural community about 225 miles west of Dallas and 120 miles southeast of Lubbock.

“When I got hired, it was just an empty building. It was my job to get it cleaned up, set up, as the equipment came in, place it, get it to run, troubleshoot it and then figure out how to manufacture ballistic helmets,” Robertson says. “We weren’t sure if it was going to be five years, 10 years, because this type of stuff takes quite a bit of time to figure out, but things progressed fairly quickly. I think from the time that I was first hired to us launching a helmet was a year and a half.”

For years, Hard Head Veterans’ mission has been to support its usual clientele, from military personnel and law enforcement officers to private enthusiasts and doomsday preppers, but just recently it embarked on a new endeavor: manufacturing construction helmets as well as the attachments.

Onshoring has allowed the company to scale production output by around 7x in three years, according to Hard Head Veterans’ Director of Innovation and Growth Kit Dumph.

Despite being a relatively new operation and facing a volatile American manufacturing ecosystem, the company feels ahead of the game regarding tariffs aimed at rejuvenating domestic industry and has concrete plans to continue expanding.

Hard Head Veterans may buy a second facility in the local area if operations outgrow the current plant, and it hopes to soon launch a line of injection-molded hard hats that can be electrically rated, Robertson says.

“The injection molding side opens up a whole new avenue of things you can do,” he says. “That’s our next goal. And then from there it would be using our injection-molding machines to produce things in house, like hardware for our chin straps and attachments that go on our ballistic helmets,” he says.

Although the company has already achieved success moving manufacturing to the U.S., Hard Head Veterans isn’t settling.

“As with anything there’s always room for improvement,” Robertson says. “The long-term goal is to have everything in house, 100% American made.”

Anna Smith | News Editor