Many of these highly branded companies made the (then) bold claim that producing goods was only an incidental part of their operations, and that, thanks to recent victories in trade liberalization and labor law reform, they could have their products produced for them at bargain-basement prices by contractors and subcontractors, many of them overseas. It didn’t really matter who did the physical work, because the real value lay not in manufacturing but in design, innovation, and of course marketing.
