Every owner in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean has heard the pitch: brands want to move production closer to the US. Shorter lead times, lower freight, less tariff exposure. The pitch is right. The question that follows it is harder. How does a factory paying Central American wages compete with a factory paying a fraction of them?

The honest answer is that it rarely wins on the hourly rate. It wins on how many minutes a garment takes, and how many people it takes to build the month that matters.

What one hoodie program showed

In our sample factory, an illustrative model of a fleece hoodie program for a US brand built on anonymized and public data, the floor was running at 42% sewing efficiency. That number came from two independent sources in the factory’s own files: roughly 32 million operator postings, and the efficiency hours. Industry lines typically run 50 to 60%. Best-in-class runs 80 to 90%.

Same output, half the people. The factory did not need a wage cut to compete. It needed its low workstations pulled up toward what its own best line already did. The spread ran from about 23% to 74% on the same floor.

Why this is the nearshore argument

A brand moving a program closer to home is buying speed and reliability. A factory that can show, line by line, what its cost per minute is and how it falls as efficiency climbs is selling exactly that. It can quote the program with a margin it knows, and staff the peak without a hiring sprint.

Labour arbitrage is a race nobody in the region wins. Minutes per garment is a race a well-run floor can win, and the data to run it is already in the factory’s payroll and posting sheets.

Every point of efficiency, as operating profit, plant by plant. See sewing efficiency