Anyone here try to have things made overseas?
Outside of the engrish, I’ve found the experience pretty enlightening.
Some firms… will take forever with a quote and end up losing the specs/CAD files you sent them or stop replying to your emails outright
Others will reply within 1 hour with an incredibly accurate price breakdown, terms, shipping options and more data than I originally asked for. Even recommended a great shipper and offered extra logistics help since this was my would be first order with them
The only part that has annoyed me is that I have to wait until 11pm-1am to get communication done is we wanna rapid fire questions and answers.
If your wondering why I am not getting my stuff made in the US…
They (US) don’t care about low quantity orders/small business. In china I can get away with 100,000 units made while here I was told to bump up my order by 3x to make it worth their while.
Quality control in China sucks so bad it will make you cry. My last company went through this and did my fathers company. No matter how well done the drawings are, no matter how impressive they claim their QA/QC, unless you have full time inspection in their factory you will get junk.
I know a guy that sent some drawing off to china to have them manufactured. He works out a deal with the company after getting some details about the product worked out. About a month later, he finds pictures of his samples on a website, selling the product he designed.
Something tells me they did not lose the drawings. They just wanted to manufacture the product for themselves.
We sell raw materials to China based manufacturers. It’s rather interesting. On a rising market they hold you to your contracts. On a falling market they will cancel on you. Its just life.
The funny thing is the native owned Chinese companies are way easier to work with, rather than the factories that are owned by foreign companies, such as the Taiwanese or Singaporean owned companies.
I’d rather do business with other US companies but when they moved to offshore contract manufacturing we had to sell off shore.
It’s a small world.