Long before the city became synonymous with entertainment and media, Los Angeles was a place where things were made – garments sewn downtown, food produced and packaged across the county, furniture built in local workshops, and consumer goods manufactured close to the communities they served.

These industries helped build a middle class, stabilize neighborhoods and create durable economic foundations that lasted generations.

Manufacturing is not a relic of the past. Los Angeles County employs more than 350,000 manufacturing workers across food, apparel, consumer goods, and industrial production – making it one of the largest manufacturing centers of any county in the country.

It remains a growth driver tied directly to economic opportunity and job creation with one of the clearest paths to stable work and higher pay that doesn’t require a four-year degree.

Despite being the nation’s largest manufacturing center, the Los Angeles region has lost more than a half million manufacturing jobs – falling from 850,000 in 1990 to roughly 325,000 by 2020.

And here lies the paradox – while the city slowly loses manufacturing capacity and expertise, it has quietly become one of the best places in the world to launch a consumer brand.

As the founder of Made in LA, I’ve spent the last two years engaging with entrepreneurs launching consumer goods businesses in Los Angeles, only to watch many of them take their companies, jobs and growth elsewhere due to lack of local manufacturing.

Some of the most exciting brands across food, fashion, beauty and apparel are being born right here in Los Angeles. The city is uniquely suited to the role of an incubator because it sits at the nexus of culture, creativity and commerce.

Global cuisines converge in local kitchens to shape new food and beverage ideas. Fashion and design communities influence not just what we wear locally, but how products look and feel around the world. A deep commitment to fitness, health and wellness informs how brands are formulated, packaged and positioned.

Few cities offer such real-time access to consumer behaviors and tastemakers across diverse communities. That’s why global direct-to-consumer brands choose Los Angeles as a place to test ideas, open early retail locations and refine products alongside their customers.

Just as important, Los Angeles attracts doers. Founders come here to build, not just to pitch ideas. They’re drawn by a deep bench of creative talent, savvy operators, and R&D know-how, but also by something harder to quantify: a real, functioning business community that shares knowledge, makes introductions and helps one another turn ideas into companies.

What makes this moment distinct is momentum. Los Angeles continues to draw new entrepreneurs at a time when consumer brands are being built faster, leaner and closer to culture than ever before.

The result is a quiet transformation. While the spotlight remains on entertainment and tech, Los Angeles has become one of the most important places in the country for creating the products people use every day.

With manufacturing, business stays

Here’s what I can tell you: the next wave of household brands is coming, and they will be born in Los Angeles. The question is – will they stay?

Many founders who start companies locally want to manufacture their products locally. The reasons to do so are compelling.

Manufacturing close to home allows companies to maintain tight quality control, move faster from idea to market and stay deeply connected to the product as it evolves. It also enables quicker iteration, stronger relationships with production teams and a level of accountability and craftsmanship that’s difficult to replicate from afar.

But manufacturing and co-packing capacity has shrunk, particularly for small-batch and early-stage brands. The options that do exist are often cost-prohibitive, especially for founders trying to scale responsibly. We’ve lost the middle ground between start-up and mass scale.

For those who consider building their own manufacturing operations, the hurdles grow even steeper: regulatory and zoning complexity, high startup costs and operational burdens that are difficult for young companies to absorb.

As a result, founders move production to other states or overseas. As manufacturing moves, so do jobs, investment and long-term economic value. A brand may be conceived in L.A., but too often it leaves as it grows up. The apparel sector alone has lost nearly two-thirds of its manufacturing jobs since 2007, even as Los Angeles remains one of the most influential fashion and design capitals in the world.

With that said, a small but committed group of manufacturers continue to build in Los Angeles. These businesses are investing locally, hiring and training Angelenos, and choosing to stay despite the challenges. They prove that making consumer goods in Los Angeles, albeit challenging, is still possible.

Proudly rallying under the banner of Made in LA, these companies are proof that Los Angeles doesn’t just generate ideas – it can sustain the work behind them. It represents economic value kept close to home, cultural expression rooted in place and civic pride in a city that has always been more than just ideas on a screen.

But Los Angeles can’t stop at celebrating ideas and creative innovation, it must support the manufacturing grit to bring these early-stage ideas to scale.

If we want to remain a true hub of innovation, not just for concepts, but for companies, we need to support the manufacturing of physical goods as a core part of our economic strategy.

Supporting manufacturing doesn’t require reinventing the economy. It requires protecting industrial space, expanding access to small-batch and scalable production, modernizing permitting and investing in workforce training. It means offering targeted incentives for companies that create jobs locally and publicly championing the manufacturers who continue to build here. These are practical steps, and they would make a real difference.

Los Angeles is an extraordinary place to start a company. The opportunity is making sure it remains a place where companies – and the jobs they create – can stay.

Brian Bianchetti is the fourth-generation chief executive of People’s Choice Beef Jerky and Founder of Made in LA.