“We were the first to merge high design and sustainability,” said Ryan. “We were foolish enough to take on some of the world’s largest multinationals and it forced it us to have to be so radically different to have a chance of success.”

And they were ready to take that success to the city of Detroit in late 2012, early 2013. They were looking to locate their first U.S. manufacturing facility somewhere in the Midwest, and they seriously wanted to bring it back to their home city.

They visited Chicago and Detroit and other locales, telling the mayor's office, local brokers and developers they were looking to rehabilitate an existing factory or build new on an abandoned site. They knew what they wanted — to bring jobs and investment into a struggling area — and they needed the local experts to help them make it so.

“We wanted to go into an urban area and take something that had been abandoned and turn it into a factory for the 21st century,” Lowry told me after the panel discussion. “Doing that takes an unusual amount of coordination. We needed a lot of help understanding what it would take to remediate a brownfield site.”

But when their brokers took them to see properties in Detroit, they didn’t fit the brief. “It was like they were just showing us properties they wanted to get rid of,” Lowry said.

Lowry wouldn't identify exactly who the Method team spoke with — other than to say the Michigan Economic Development Corp. and the Detroit Mayor's Office — but the parties never coalesced to help them find the right property and push forward.

“When I shared this vision of what we wanted to create with the city of Detroit and the city of Chicago, well, this was a time when the city of Detroit was going through tremendous change,” Lowry said delicately. “By contrast, Mayor Rahm Emanuel himself very quickly got involved in the project.”

Emmanuel quickly appointed one of his deputies, Steve Koch, to be the point person and coordinate all efforts.

They got the permits in 20 days.

In one year, a LEED-certified manufacturing plant rose from an abandoned 22-acre brownfield site on Chicago’s Southside. Method employs 70 people there, and a commercial greenhouse — on the roof — will bring at least 30 more jobs. A bottle manufacturing facility is also scheduled for the property.

And Koch is now deputy mayor of Chicago.

The story was shock to the representatives of the Detroit Economic Growth Corp. and city of Detroit who were sitting in the audience Wednesday. Waymon Gillebeaux, executive vice president of project management for the DEGC, had never even heard of the project. Neither had Marcell Todd, who worked under the Bing administration and is the director of city planning.

They cornered Lowry after the speech, the three of us boxing him in to find out what had happened, what could have been done differently.

For Lowry, it came down to communication and vision. The city of Chicago, he said, knew what type of businesses it wants to grow. Every developer sang from the same hymn book, knew what types of projects could be expedited. Detroit, meanwhile, was haphazard with the parties not speaking to each other. It was, at least at that time, economic development by happenstance, not by plan or grand vision.

Chicago won the business with a better pitch and the entire team in sync. But Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan is laying plans to change that. He has a lean processes team looking at the city’s permitting and licensing operations. He is putting the Detroit economic development process in order, ready to pitch — and win — the next time a big opportunity comes through.

Are things changing fast enough that the next manufacturer to come calling will get a warmer reception? Let’s hope so. Here’s to a less soap opera-style city hall, and to more soap factories.