About Us

We believe that products should be made where they are consumed. If they are, then local consumers can see, prioritize and influence the whole picture, when balancing their priorities between a product's:

     a) purchase price

     b) it's environmental impact during its manufacture, operation and disposal

     c) packaging and transportations costs plus shipping's own environmental issues

     d) local employment issues.

Someone barely surviving in rural India will have a different set of priorities than a Californian who has long since met their survival priorities and are now mostly concerned with quality of life, ethical child labor and the environment. One community should not be able impose their moral or financial choices on the other. We believe each community should be able to set their own priorities between local employment, sustainability and affordability.

To that end we have set out to aid in reversing the trend of having most products mass manufactured overseas. This trend is called Offshoring.

We want to slow Offshoring and possibly reverse it in select areas that make good business and social sense. Naturally we call our goal Onshoring.

In this site we will argue the use cases that make sense to Onshore. We will provide anecdotal evidence that it is already happening. To test our theories we will operate an Onshoring business that will prove or disprove our beliefs.

Onshoring will not make sense for everything, but where it does, our objective is to get that message out to decision makers in the production, distribution, sales and consumers ends.

So we stopped doing "yet another iPhone App".  We are now Onshoring Ventures.

By applying what we have learned as serial entrepreneurs, we hope to influence the next generation of entrepreneurs, business leaders and consumers that unthinking Offshoring has done more harm than good and it is not inevitable for all manufactured goods and services. 

We are located in Ottawa Canada, the seat of Canada's federal government and a locus for high tech activities in this country. 

Our first product is a toilet for dogs, made to avoid the disposables currently available. We will  provide a well made piece of furniture and produce it using the latest computer augmented manufacturing techniques applied to small production runs, i.e. Low Volume Manufacturing, which when done right, can be competitive to small or under served markets.

Our second product is a portable construction work bench, which is highly useful in the workshop or onsite but will probably never be available in stores because it is a big package, with consequentially higher shipping and warehousing costs for it's relative low retail price. It's an obvious choice for local manufacturing.

In addition to our own products, we are set up to do custom manufacturing for others. It is our hope that you will bring us your ideas for other low volume production runs of products unique to your area or culture for a price quote and perhaps a bit of advice... if you want it.

We are Onshoring.Ventures