The following appears on bloomberg.com
Matthew Doom texts a lot at work and is a whiz on the 3D printer. Unlike most tech workers, his office is a wooden workbench next to a milling machine where he cuts metal for medical devices and other parts.
The 20-year-old is one of a dozen employees at Baklund R&D LLC in Hutchinson, Minnesota, using Internet connections with far-flung customers, smartphone chats and the 
latest in computer equipment to squeeze more business out of traditional tool and die equipment. Eight months ago Doom was milking cows at a nearby dairy farm.
“We’re taking an approach that is extremely non-traditional and we’ve even been able to beat prices offshore,” said Jon Baklund, 44, a second-generation toolmaker who runs the small shop 60 miles west of Minneapolis. He estimates his factory doubled its business with the innovations, getting inquiries from companies in 37 states last month.
Baklund, which hired four people in the last year including Doom and is seeking two more, is one of hundreds of small shops across the U.S. leveraging technology to meet demand 
for low volume, highly-customizable products. Other companies, such as Etsy Inc. and TechShop Inc., serve as online marketplaces or starting grounds for tiny manufacturers to churn out new inventory in metal, wood and even fabric.
Makers of dies and machine tools have increased employment by about 18 percent since August 2009, compared with a 2.9 percent gain for overall manufacturing, according to Dan Luria, an independent manufacturing economist in Brighton, Michigan.
Wal-Mart Attention
The growth in low-volume, high-variability production is catching the attention of companies such as Wal-Mart Stores Inc., said Wally Hopp, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business who has worked with the world’s largest retailer to study U.S. manufacturing trends. Wal-Mart said this year it wants to buy an additional $50 billion in American-made products in the next decade.
“You’re seeing these mom-and-pop operations picking up manufacturing, doing it in a highly flexible, highly local kind of way,” Hopp said in an interview. “This is something that’s going to permeate through the whole manufacturing economy. We gave up on manufacturing too soon.”
It’s too early to call it a renaissance because the hiring gains are scattered across the U.S. 
and hard to quantify, he said. As of September, the U.S. has regained about 503,000 of the 2.3 million factory jobs lost in the aftermath of the 18-month recession that ended June 2009, according to U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data.