You’ve got to specialize in something to manufacture in Orange County.
Everything from guitars and clothes to weapons and medical devices are made here. A common denominator for local factories: a tendency to be small and sophisticated.
For many local manufacturers, their goods sell for higher prices, allowing them to better afford the land and labor costs of OC.
Others are here because they have to be, including food producers that need to be close to their customers so their products don’t rot in transit.
Some electronics and medical device companies have found benefits to keeping their research and development close to factories that can quickly turn out new products.
And some manufacturers are here simply because it’s home.
All of them share the burdens of making stuff here. Those include higher costs for labor, materials, insurance and government regulations.
Manufacturing is about 12% of the county’s workforce, or 177,000 jobs, according to Chapman University. That’s down from 230,000 workers before the early 1990s recession and the technology crash of 2001.
Guitars
Santa Ana-based Rickenbacker Inter-national Corp., whose electric guitars were made popular by the Beatles, is among the older local manufacturers.
Rickenbacker falls into the small, specialized category: Its factory with 80 workers churns out about 10,000 guitars a year.
That’s nothing compared to big rivals Fender Musical Instruments Corp. of Arizona and Gibson Guitar Corp. of Nashville.
Rickenbacker chief executive and owner, John Hall, calls his guitars the Porsches of the industry.
“Three of the Beatles were using our guitars,” he said. “It had a tremendous effect on us.”
Hall said he’s not interested in moving to cheaper places.
“We could save as much as a third of our costs going to a place like Post Falls, Idaho,” he said. “But I’m a ninth generation Californian. This is my home.”
Rickenbacker’s guitars, which sell for $2,500 each on average, are hard to produce, Hall said.
Painstaking production has brought a two-year backlog of orders for Rickenbackers, creating a headache for dealers, Hall said.
To quell some demand, Rickenbacker raised prices twice in the past two years. After the first 10% increase didn’t work, it raised prices an additional 20% this year.
“It’s too early to say if it will work,” Hall said.
Rickenbacker is one of a handful of guitar makers in the county, including Huntington Beach-based BBE Sound Inc.’s G & L; Musical Instruments in Ful-lerton.
Medical devices are a mainstay of local manufacturing. Their complexity and industry regulation make production here possible. They also command high prices, which offsets the cost of producing in OC.
Edwards Lifesciences Corp. in Irvine developed the first artificial heart valve and continues to make thousands of them a year here.
The company has plants around the world, including its newest one in Singapore. But a need for quality and proximity to research and development has kept work in Irvine.
Edwards’ tissue heart valves, which are made from pig and cow tissue, are sewn here. The thousand stitches sewn into the valves that are an inch and a half in diameter are better suited for human hands than machines, according to the company.
“Each one takes six to eight hours to make,” spokeswoman Amanda Fowler said.
Workers get six months of training before they’re up to speed and go into a sterile production room where robes, hairnets and gloves are required, she said.
Some companies take a hybrid approach by setting up manufacturing in Asia and supplementing it with specialized production in OC.
Fountain Valley-based Kingston Tech-nology Co., the top maker of memory products for PCs and consumer devices, does the majority of its manufacturing in China.
The company benefits from lower costs. But manufacturing in Asia also keeps it closer to chip suppliers and computer and electronics makers in the region.
But Kingston’s most versatile factory is the one it has in Fountain Valley, said Wai Szeto, vice president of strategic business development for the company.
“The factory here can make any product we’ve ever made,” he said.
The Fountain Valley production is small compared to King-ston’s China plants. But the benefit is in having it able to churn out anything at any time.
“We’re constantly adjusting operations to match customer demand and changes in products,” Szeto said.
Most of Kingston’s manufacturing is automated. But it relies on nearly 600 workers to do things like test and package products.
Defense
Production for the military has been a bulwark of local manufacturing for decades. Some of that, too, has gone elsewhere. But the region’s history in aerospace and the rigid security requirements of making products for the Pentagon have kept work here.
Most aerospace manufacturing is done here by subcontractors for Boeing Co. and its big competitors.
The closest thing to manufacturing that Boeing itself has here is an Irvine facility that employs 120 people who make prototypes of its A160T Hummingbird unmanned helicopter.
Should the company win a contract for the helicopter, production could end up being moved to one of its cheaper operations in Arizona, Texas or Alabama.
Britain’s Meggitt PLC, which operates in Irvine with 550 local workers, mostly assembles its products here. They include systems that allow fighter planes to score mock battles and have target practice as well as equipment that feeds bullets to heavy machine guns.
