Ed Juline, a manufacturing consultant in Guadalajara who came to Mexico in 2001 with IBM, has seen many companies both attracted and repelled. Like others who help American businesses in Mexico, he described last year as a tipping point. With studies showing Mexico rapidly reaching the same cost level as China for the production of certain products, dozens of companies came to him — including KidCo — looking for help to find a Mexican factory to contract with or buy.

Business owners were in a rush. Some had tired of the travel to China or the six- to 10-week wait for orders to arrive from across the Pacific. Others said their Chinese suppliers were raising prices even as quality declined.

At KidCo’s headquarters outside Chicago, the headaches were mounting. Last year began with a factory in northern China that produced the company’s best-selling products, a series of child-safety gates, demanding a 10 to 12 percent pay increase. Then an entire shipment of wooden gates arrived with a major flaw. “That’s when we realized we really needed to have backup supply,” said Mr. Kaiser, 61, who contacted Mr. Juline.

Mr. Juline did have some success to point to. One of his clients, Casabella, a broom, brush and mop company from Long Island, had recently completed a deal with a factory near Mexico City to produce about $800,000 worth of brushes.

Image Falmbeau’s hunting decoys. Credit... Rodrigo Cruz for The New York Times

But success turned out to be a rarity. The more Mr. Juline traveled around Mexico seeking partners for American manufacturers, he said, the more he realized that many Mexican business owners were unwilling to take on a surge of new business, either because they could not line up suppliers or credit, or because they feared demands for money from government inspectors or gangs.

Guillermo Calderon, the factory manager for Diseño Global, said his response to KidCo’s bid request may have seemed high — about 20 percent above the production price in China — but that was because he wanted to make sure his company took on as little risk as possible. “It’s easier to look at the opportunities you already have instead of looking outside,” he said. “What if we get a 40,000-piece order and then they leave?”