You Can Be A Small Manufacturer In Brooklyn, And You Can Sell To The World

Manufacturing is still alive in the urban sprawl, and Brooklyn, New York – home to some of the hippest neighborhoods on the planet – continues to nurture its own brand of creative and ambitious industry. A handful of the borough’s ardent industrial protagonists came together this week for a modest but enthusiastic business pow-wow in the form of the Make It In Brooklyn Innovation Summit, focusing on real estate, the arts, restaurateurs, tech and just making stuff.

Sustained by grub from brightly painted food trucks, parked before the boxlike Polonsky Shakespeare Center in downtown Brooklyn, entrepreneurs and media breezed through networking chats and scanned local players on hand. The summit attracted figures like Brooklyn Brewery co-founder, Steve Hindy; Airbnb’s man in New York, Wrede Petersmeyer; and real estate developer Bruce Ratner, chairman of Forest City Ratner and part owner of the Brooklyn Nets basketball team.

Also in the building were an interesting group of entrepreneurs making a go of factory enterprises in town, included captains of manufacturing like Diana Pincus of MakerBot, David Calligeros, founder of Remains Lighting, and Rick Mast of Mast Brothers Chocolate.

With space at a premium, operating in Brooklyn tends to produce enterprises smaller in scale. “It’s not mass producing,” says Calligeros. “It’s what you see here: it’s artisan, it’s small scale.”

Mast sees the future of manufacturing as being specifically those types of smaller models; ones that eschew grand scale production.  “You can be a small manufacturer in Brooklyn,” he insists, “and you can sell to the world.” One of the side effects of launching a manufacturing business in an expensive sandbox like Brooklyn, says Pincus, is that only the best ideas – ones that learn to stay afloat early – survive. Why? Because operating in Brooklyn, as in much of New York City, is expensive on all fronts.

In real estate alone, dollar volume for Brooklyn commercial buildings climbed to $6.7 billion, up from $5 billion in 2013. The average apartment clocks in at about $2,720 per month.

What Brooklyn offers, all agreed, was an inspiring combination of culture, business, residential and reputation. “It’s the potential for Brooklyn to add value to a brand, and the access to creative talent,” said Calligeros, who began his antique business in the borough almost 20 years ago before beginning to manufacture his own designs. “Our factory is Williamsburg has residences above it,” said Mast, whose chocolate factory has expanded to facilities in Brooklyn’s Navy Yard, as well as in the Shoreditch region of London, UK. “That’s also part of the beauty of it.”

Also, close proximity to a dense population means having a ready workforce at your fingertips. At MakerBot, prospective employees must endure a short math test, then training in how the 8-piece products are assembled. Says Pincus: “People are used to going 100 miles per hour.”

Brooklyn has some other positives on its side. Its 2,500 manufacturing firms operating throughout the borough are smack in the middle of several transportation hubs, like the city’s airports, train yards, shipping docks, not to mention highways for trucking. Its Downtown Brooklyn Partnership – a cheerleader for the borough’s viability as an entrepreneurial hotbed – has made a point of highlighting its open retail and office space, as well as pushing its schools, nightlife and all the cultural elements that have drawn people to the area for decades.

Brooklyn’s Tech Triangle – an area between DUMBO and Downtown neighborhoods, and the Brooklyn Navy Yard – is home to several hundred companies providing an estimated 18,000 jobs. Total estimated economic impact? Almost $6 billion.

Rick Mast and brother Michael founded their enterprise in 2007, and though they’ve begun manufacturing elsewhere (a downtown Los Angeles location is in the works), their flagship factory – which offers facility tours – will remain in Williamsburg and Brooklyn (more precisely, Williamsburg), Mast insists, will continue to represent a big part of the character at the core of the brand. The factory itself, he says, now feels like part of the landscape. “Its function in the community evolved and developed as the community evolved and developed.”