For decades, the conventional wisdom in apparel sourcing has been straightforward: domestic manufacturing cannot compete with offshore production on cost.

Labor arbitrage made offshoring the default. Supply chain complexity was the accepted tradeoff. And the idea of producing swimwear —a cost-sensitive, trend-driven, highly seasonal product—in the United States seemed economically unrealistic.

That calculus is changing. Not because labor costs have equalized, but because artificial intelligence is restructuring the economics of small-batch domestic production in ways that make the old comparison increasingly obsolete.

I’ve spent over 13 years in the textile industry, scaling a beachwear operation in Brazil to over 10,000 customers before establishing a domestic manufacturing company in California. The transition gave me a direct view of both production models.…