Sharpie Found a Way to Make Pens More Cheaply—By Manufacturing Them in the U.S.

 Tucked in the foothills of Tennessee’s Smoky Mountains is a factory that has figured out a way to manufacture in America that’s cheaper, quicker and better.

It’s the home of a famous American writing implement: the Sharpie marker.Pen barrels whirl along automated assembly lines that rapidly fill them with ink. At least half a billion Sharpie markers are churned out here every year, each one made of six parts. Only the felt tip is imported, from Japan.

It didn’t used to be this way. Back in 2018, many Sharpies were made abroad. That’s when Chris Peterson, who was the CFO of Sharpie maker Newell Brands, challenged his team to answer a question: How could they keep Newell from becoming obsolete compared with factories in Asia?

“I felt like we had an opportunity to dramatically improve our U.S. manufacturing,” he said.Peterson is now the CEO. And these days, most Sharpies—in all 93 colors—are made at this 37-year-old factory. Newell did it without reducing the employee count, and without raising prices. But to get to this place took close to $2 billion in investments across the company, thousands of hours of training and a total overhaul of the production process.

The result is a playbook for making low-cost, high-volume products domestically, albeit one that requires long-term planning and a lot of investment.

President Trump, who uses a custom Sharpie, has slapped high tariffs on many imports with the goal of prompting more companies to do what Newell has done and bring manufacturing back to the U.S. But Filippo Falorni, an analyst at Citi, said few companies in the sector have the resources to replicate Newell’s move.

“I really don’t think there’s anyone that can be as competitive as them,” said Falorni.

Even after the Trump administration implemented new tariffs this year, employment in the manufacturing sector has continued to fall, sliding 0.6% in the 12 months ended in August, according to Labor Department data, in part because of automation replacing jobs.

‘Can we make it in Maryville?’

Newell began moving some Sharpie production to China in the 2000s, part of the wave of outsourcing by U.S. companies looking to save costs.

By the time Peterson started his project in Maryville in 2018, the company had moved some of that production back to the U.S., but production rates for Sharpies here were slow compared with competitor products made abroad. And because Newell had acquired so many companies, all with different supply chains, retailers found the company difficult to work with.

Peterson’s proposal was to centralize Newell’s supply chain and operations, and look for more opportunities to manufacture in America. When the marketing department proposed that Sharpie make a new gel pen, Peterson pressed the team to ditch plans to outsource abroad: “Can we make it in Maryville?”

There was a list of challenges. The facility needed to add new capabilities to do things such as make the ink refills for the gel pen. The manufacturing process, which involves making more parts than a traditional Sharpie marker, required new equipment and more training. And the company needed to reduce the turnover rate for manual jobs such as packing.

Peterson, who spent 20 years at consumer giant Procter & Gamble, found that the factory could use robots to do an increasing share of the packing. But he decided to keep the employees who knew the company and convert their jobs to roles such as automation engineering. In that case, an employee would fix a robot instead of packing a box.

To do that, Peterson bolstered a career-training program so existing employees could get the support needed for the new jobs.

That’s what happened to Mike Newcomb. Newcomb joined the company 20 years ago as a packer of chair mats, which the facility made at the time. He took on new roles as years went by. When he reached a point where he wanted a leadership position, Newell’s human-resources department said the company would give him the job, but he would need an undergraduate degree, the cost of which the company would cover.

Newcomb obtained a business degree from a local college and now leads the molding department, overseeing production of the 4.3 billion pen barrels and caps the facility makes each year.Peterson estimates the average wage at its Maryville facility, which employs 550 staff, has gone up some 50% over the past five years—without a change in head count.

With additional investments in robots and training, the factory has been able to make pens at three to four times its previous speed, he said. The quality is better, too.

Last year, when Newell brought production of its retractable Sharpie back from China, engineers spent months designing the robotic system that turns barrels and clickers into fully assembled markers. Technicians figured out how to stop them from drying out—a problem that had plagued the version made in China—by sealing an internal chamber of the pen. Now a vision robot scans for errors in the text printed on marker barrels, while workers oversee production and troubleshoot issues.

Newell’s investments over the past five years have allowed it to offset inflation by lowering production costs—and avoid raising Sharpie prices. A typical Sharpie marker retails for about $1 a pen when sold in a pack. The shift to the U.S. has also allowed the company to fulfill customer orders more quickly, and reduce shipping costs.

If you walk on the Maryville factory floor today, you’ll hear the click-clack sounds of Sharpie barrels and caps being loaded on assembly lines. Workers drive forklifts to transport giant barrels of ink, while smaller robots deliver components like resin to production and assembly areas.

There are marked squares all over the factory floor to delineate space for more lines to shift to America, such as Sharpie’s Clearview highlighter; it will move back from China in coming months. The factory operates around the clock, making 1.8 million fine-tip Sharpies a day.