3D printers make it easy to create one-off products. Kickstarter gives makers capital to produce at scale. But there aren't many resources to help navigate the world of high-volume manufacturing. Maker's Row, a marketplace that connects designers and American factories, aims to fix that by acclimating creators to the culture of manufacturing and making sense of obscure terms like AWO to ZQC production.

The Maker's Row website allows designers to search for factories with keywords, browse projects the factories have worked on and, in some cases, see videos of the shops and founder in action. The site's design and videos manage to make manufacturing feel glamorous, and even a little patriotic.

The company grew out of an organic need. Co-founder Matthew Burnett worked for Marc Jacobs and Izod before launching his own line of leather goods. He convinced a friend, Tanya Menendez, who had worked at Google and Goldman Sachs, to join him and help grow the business. After dealing with a costly manufacturing setback overseas, they realized that reorganizing the trillion-dollar manufacturing industry had more upsides than producing well-tailored accessories. They recruited a web designer named Scott Weiner and launched the service.

"Our primary mission is to bring outsourced manufacturing back home, and to plant the seeds of the next generation of businesses that will be able to easily find American manufacturing partners," Menendez says.

Basically, the site allows designers to filter their search based on the type of factory they need. If they're still in the idea phase, they can find the appropriate types of factories, instead of those who expect more production expertise at the beginning.

She points out that overseas production isn't always the most beneficial. "Many companies were born in the U.S., having never even considered domestic manufacturing because of the inherent advantages of low-cost foreign labor," Mendez says. "Foreign labor prices alone have multiplied exponentially since the advent of outsourcing. Maker's Row will highlight the many short and long term advantages of manufacturing in our own backyard."

The easy-to-use design of the site stands out from that of other services like Alibaba, the $1.8 billion company that connects Asian factories to global entrepreneurs.

But more importantly, Maker's Row serves a critical function, connecting the hundreds of millions of dollars raised on Kickstarter to domestic manufacturing partners who can deploy it most efficiently. The service helps those factories, still reliant on trade shows, printed directories and word of mouth, to catch up with foreign competition. "We acknowledged that none of these marketing methods are sustainable when compared to the online marketplace resources of foreign competitors," Mendez says.

Having launched a month ago and hindered with some slowdowns from Hurricane Sandy, the site is now in full swing. Let's hope delayed Kickstarters start showing up in a more timely manner now.