[jtoberon]

In the NYC area, there's http://www.refactory.co/. I used to work with these guys, and they know their stuff.

They argue in favor of both designing and manufacturing locally. A quote from their blog: "If you kind of just prototype something and bring it to China expecting that then thousands of these things can be made easily without understanding the processes and materiality of manufacturing, that is gonna be a big problem for you. What works is when the design process is iterated alongside the manufacturing process."