The US imported about 2.1 million household sewing machines in 2024, and roughly 1.3 million of them came from Vietnam alone, according to UN Comtrade data. We looked for a regular flatbed household sewing machine still built in the USA and didn’t find one. What we did find are American companies building longarm quilting machines, leather stitchers, walking-foot machines, and industrial equipment, and nearly all of them assemble here from a mix of domestic and imported parts. Check out our complete list, research tips, and popular brands not made here below.
Complete List of Sewing, Quilting & Leather Stitching Machine Manufacturers Made in the USA
We grouped this list by who the machines are built for. Longarm quilting machines for home quilters and quilting businesses come first, followed by walking-foot and leather machines for hobbyists and small shops, then industrial machines for factories.
Out of Carroll, Iowa, APQS has been building longarm quilting machines since 1982, back when it went by its full name, American Professional Quilting Systems. The lineup includes the Millie, Millie30, Freddie, Lucey, Lenni, Ellie, and Tilly, and the company’s Quilt Path system adds computer-guided pattern stitching. The machines pair aircraft-grade aluminum construction with electronic controls. APQS labels them handmade in the USA and acknowledges that some components are imported. You buy through independent retailers, and the machines are built for both home quilters and people running quilting businesses.
Ken Gammill and his wife opened a sewing center in West Plains, Missouri, after moving there in 1965, and the Gammill Quilting Machine Company followed in 1980. Today the West Plains factory assembles and tests every machine before it ships, including the hand-guided Vision 2.0 and the computer-guided Statler and Statler Ascend. That Statler name traces back to the Statler Stitcher system Paul Statler developed. Gammill uses some imported components, so these machines are assembled here rather than made start to finish. The warranty covers commercial use whether you quilt at home or for paying customers, and Gammill also sells pre-owned machines through a resale program.
Laurel Barrus founded Handi Quilter in 1999 after designing a portable quilting frame for use with a home sewing machine, and the company introduced its first dedicated quilting machine, the HQ Sixteen, in 2002. It now makes longarms like the Moxie and Amara, plus sit-down quilting machines, frames and tables, in a 70,000-square-foot building in North Salt Lake, Utah. Only some of its products are assembled in the USA, though. Sewing machine parts and other components are made overseas and shipped to the Utah plant for assembly, so check the specific model you’re considering. Handi Quilter sells through a retailer network and runs a 10,000-square-foot education studio for training.
INNOVA engineers, machines, and assembles its longarms in Montgomery, Texas, near Houston, with capacity for up to 1,000 quilting machines a year. The family behind it goes back to 1947, when Arthur Schwarzberger developed a quilting machine concept in his Chicago garage. The operation moved to Texas in 2003 and released its first INNOVA longarm in 2007. You’ll find the M Series in several throat sizes and the AutoPilot Mach 3 computerized quilting system. Some components are imported, so INNOVA machines are assembled in the USA. Parent company ABM International also owns Gribetz and Atlanta Attachment Co., two industrial machinery makers further down this list.
Of the longarm brands on this list, Nolting does the most of its own parts work. The Hiawatha, Iowa company makes its machines and frames in-house, down to its own pulleys, shafts, and gears, and outsources only the painting to a shop in nearby Marion. Every machine is built to order, and you can configure the frame color, size, length, and height. The lineup runs from the entry-level Raya through the Flair and Elara up to the Diamond, and Nolting also sells factory-recertified used machines. Fred Nolting began developing the machines in the 1970s and turned it into a full-time business in 1984.
Sailrite started in 1969 as Jim and Connie Grant’s supply business for sailors making their own sails and canvas covers. Their son Matt later developed the Ultrafeed, a portable, all-metal walking-foot machine for sewing sails, canvas, and upholstery. The company assembles the Ultrafeed and its larger Fabricator industrial walking-foot machine at its headquarters and factory in Columbia City, Indiana. Here’s the catch: manufacturing partners in Taiwan and China supply the key castings and internal metal parts for the Ultrafeed. Workers in Columbia City install the motors, assemble each machine, and tune and test it before it ships. Sailrite also sells the fabric, hardware, and tools for marine, upholstery, and RV projects.
Dennis Tippmann started building leather sewing machines in 1989 after seeing that Amish harness makers in the Midwest needed something that could sew heavy material fast without electricity. The result is the Boss, a hand-operated stitcher you run with a pull handle. It sews leather and other materials up to 3/4 inch thick, and people use it for saddles, tack, holsters, knife sheaths, wallets, and motorcycle seats. Tippmann Industrial, based in Fort Wayne, assembles the Boss in Indiana from both domestic and imported components. Since the Boss has no motor or circuit board, it skips the two parts of a sewing machine that are hardest to source domestically (more on that below). The company also makes clicker die-cutting machines, a roller press and a flatbed attachment for the Boss.
Elvin C. Price started Atlanta Attachment in 1969 in the basement of his home, building metal folders, hemmers, and binders for industrial sewing machines. The company now runs about 250,000 square feet in Lawrenceville, Georgia, with in-house engineering, 3D CAD design, and CNC machining. It builds automated sewing workstations, quilting machines, decorative border workstations, and packaging equipment for mattress producers, along with automated sewing systems for the furniture, automotive interior, and apparel industries. Not everything it sells is made in the USA. It also sells replacement parts for brands like Juki, and the machines it does make here include some imported materials and components. ABM International, the Texas parent of INNOVA and Gribetz, acquired the company in 2025.
Dan Gribetz founded his company in 1940 to build king-size lock-stitch quilting machines, and in the 1980s it developed the first three-needle-bar quilter. Today Gribetz builds industrial quilting, binding, flange, filling, cutting, and packaging equipment for commercial mattress and bedding production. These aren’t machines for home use. Headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the company manufactures at a plant in Sunrise, Florida, and at a plant in Carthage, Missouri, which it acquired in 2025. We verified that its equipment uses some imported materials. ABM International bought Gribetz from Leggett & Platt in early 2025, along with the Porter International and Galkin Automated Products brands.
The Merrow family built a knitting mill in Merrow, Connecticut, in 1838, and Joseph Millard Merrow invented the first crochet machine in 1868. By 1887, the company made only sewing machines. In 2004, brothers Charlie and Owen Merrow bought out the Merrow Machine Company and moved it to Fall River, Massachusetts, where it now engineers and builds industrial overlock, crochet, and end-to-end seaming machines. Merrow produces components in-house on 5-axis computerized milling machines, though some components are imported. Its machines go to apparel makers, technical textile producers, and other commercial manufacturers, including military uniform makers, and Merrow sells them through agents in more than 60 countries.
Union Special calls itself the last industrial sewing machine company producing its machines from casting to finished product in the United States. Heat treatment, frame manufacturing, investment casting, CNC machining, stamping, and assembly all happen at its Huntley, Illinois plant, where production started on May 3, 1948. Founded in 1881, the company builds machines for bag making, bag closing, carpet overedging, and geotextile and turf production, and it sells replacement parts worldwide. Japanese sewing machine maker Juki owned Union Special from 1989 to 2008, when three longtime executives bought it and returned it to private American ownership. These are commercial machines, so you won’t be setting one up in your sewing room.
How to Find These Machines Made in the USA
A list only goes so far in a category where nearly every domestic brand builds machines from parts made elsewhere. Here’s how to read a sewing machine’s origin claim and figure out how much of the machine was made here.
What Does “Made in the USA” Mean?
To make an unqualified “Made in USA” claim, a company has to show that “all or virtually all” of the product is made here. The Federal Trade Commission’s Made in USA Labeling Rule spells it out: final assembly must happen in the US, all significant processing must happen in the US, and all or virtually all components must be made and sourced in the US. The FTC doesn’t pre-approve any of this. Companies self-certify, which leaves room for the label to be stretched or misused.
A sewing machine has a cast frame, a motor, and often a control board, so that’s a high bar. Most brands on our list don’t claim to clear it, and they say so. We cover how the standard works and how to spot a stretched claim in our breakdown of how to verify made in USA claims.
Materials
A sewing machine is mostly metal, motors, and electronics, and each of those has a very different domestic supply picture.
Cast Iron and Steel
Frames, shafts, gears, and the rotary hook that catches the thread are traditionally made from cast iron or steel. Raw steel isn’t the bottleneck. The US became the world’s third-largest crude steel producer in 2025 at 82.0 million metric tons, per worldsteel, though China made 960.8 million. Turning that metal into castings is a separate step. The US was the third-largest producer of metal castings in 2018 at 10.76 million metric tons, behind China’s 49.35 million and India’s 13.39 million, according to Modern Casting’s census of world casting production.
Foundry capacity here doesn’t guarantee a sewing machine’s castings come from a US foundry. Sailrite gets the key castings for the Ultrafeed from Taiwan and China. Union Special, which does its own investment casting in Huntley, and Nolting, which makes its own shafts and gears, are the exceptions on our list. If metal parts matter to you, ask where the frame and castings are poured and machined.
Aluminum
Longarm quilting machines use aluminum in their heads and frames because it’s light and rigid, and APQS builds with aircraft-grade aluminum. US smelters produced an estimated 660,000 metric tons of primary aluminum in 2025 at six smelters in five states, per the US Geological Survey. That’s less than Iceland’s 750,000 tons and a small fraction of China’s 45 million. Recycling adds about 3.6 million tons a year. Even so, the US imported about 60% of the aluminum it used in 2025, and Canada supplied 56% of those imports from 2021 through 2024. With that much of the supply coming from abroad, you can’t assume an American-built longarm uses domestic aluminum, so ask.
Electric Motors and Magnets
Most modern longarms and industrial machines run on servo or stepper motors, and many of those use neodymium rare earth magnets. China produced 94% of the world’s sintered permanent magnets in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency. Domestic production is only now restarting. MP Materials began trial magnet production in Fort Worth, Texas, in January 2025 at a facility designed to produce about 1,000 metric tons a year, with General Motors as its anchor customer. That means a motor in a US-assembled sewing machine likely contains imported magnets, even if the motor itself isn’t imported. When a brand says its workers install the motors, as Sailrite does, that tells you where the motor goes in, not where it was made.
Circuit Boards and Chips
Stitch regulators, speed controls and computerized quilting systems like Gammill’s Statler, APQS’s Quilt Path and INNOVA’s AutoPilot all depend on circuit boards and chips. The US share of global printed circuit board production fell from over 30% in 2000 to about 4% by 2022, while China accounted for around 50%, according to IPC, the electronics industry association. Chips aren’t much better. The US held 10% of global semiconductor manufacturing capacity in 2022, per the Semiconductor Industry Association. Electronics are the hardest part of a sewing machine to source domestically. The more computerized the machine, the more of it was likely made overseas, which is why a manual machine like Tippmann’s Boss, with no motor or board, has a simpler supply chain.
Labeling
Here’s what the labels and claims you’ll run into on a sewing machine mean:
- “Made in the USA”: the FTC standard. All or virtually all of the machine, including the castings, motor, and electronics, must be domestic. Very few sewing machines can make this claim.
- “Assembled in the USA”: the machine was put together here from parts that came from somewhere else. Per the FTC, the principal assembly has to happen in the US and be substantial. Most brands on our list fall here, and it’s an honest description when a company uses it.
- “Made in America” or “American-made”: the FTC treats these the same as “Made in USA,” so they carry the same “all or virtually all” standard. If a brand uses one of these phrases but won’t say where its parts come from, ask.
- “Designed in the USA”: the engineering happened here. The manufacturing didn’t.
- American flag imagery: no regulatory meaning. Any brand can put a flag on a box or a machine.
- Title 19, Chapter 4, Section 1304: federal law requires imported goods to be marked with their country of origin. That’s why an imported machine will have “Made in Vietnam” or “Made in China” on its data plate or packaging, even if the branding around it leans American.
When a dealer tells you a machine is “built in the USA,” ask whether that means made here or assembled here.
Final Tips
Before you buy, here’s how to check a sewing machine brand on your own:
- Check the brand’s official website, especially the About page, product pages, and FAQ. Brands that build here almost always say so prominently, usually down to the city. If a sewing machine brand says nothing about where its machines are built, treat that as a signal.
- Look at third-party retailer and dealer listings, including Amazon. Country-of-origin details often appear in product specs even when the brand’s own site is vague.
- Contact the company directly. Ask where the machine is assembled, then ask where the castings, motor, and control electronics come from. Brands that assemble here usually answer the second question directly.
- Look at the machine’s data plate or the shipping box. Imported machines have to be marked with their country of origin.
- Apply what you know about labeling. “Assembled in the USA” is an honest claim, but it isn’t the same as made in the USA.
Sewing Machines Not Made in the USA
Here are some of the most popular household and quilting sewing machine brands and where they make their machines.
- Singer — manufactured at SVP Worldwide’s factories in Asia and Latin America, including a plant in northern Vietnam that SVP acquired in 2022; SVP is headquartered in Nashville, Tennessee
- Husqvarna Viking and Pfaff — also SVP Worldwide brands, manufactured at the same factories in Asia and Latin America
- Brother — manufactured in Vietnam (Đồng Nai Province), China (Zhuhai) and Taiwan
- Janome — manufactured in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand
- Juki — household machines are manufactured mainly in China (Shanghai); industrial machines are made in Japan, China and Vietnam
- Bernina — manufactured in Lamphun, Thailand; in January 2026, the company announced it would move its last Swiss production to Thailand as well
