When you’re just starting out as a hardware company, it’s likely that you won’t be dealing with volumes in the six or seven digits — you’ll be looking to produce hundreds or maybe thousands of units. How do you get started? We turned to industrial designer Ti Chang, co-founder of Crave, for some tips.
HWY1: As someone working in the US, how do you go about finding a factory in China?
TC: It starts with Alibaba listings, and there are just a vast, vast number of those — so be prepared. The first thing, and pretty much the only thing, I check is what kind of products they’re making. The trouble is, half the listings you’ll see are false — they misrepresent what they do, or their factory photos are stolen from somebody else. Honestly, a fair amount is luck: you reach out to factories whose products resonate with you and see what the salesperson there is like.
- How responsive are they?
- How well do they understand your questions?
- How thorough are their answers?
All of those are indicators of their attention to detail, and that’s what gets me to the stage where I actually meet them. I never make a decision on any factory or supplier until I meet them in person and see the factory.
What other criteria do you have when choosing a lower-volume manufacturer?
There are three:
- Willingness to work with you. It’s really great to have a factory that believes in what you’re doing, who buys into your vision and what you’re trying to do instead of thinking of you as just another customer. It helps when they’re a little more invested in you emotionally.
- How you get along with them. While there are always going to be communication and cultural differences, there will still be certain factories or salespeople who you’ll get on with better and want to work with you.
- The factory itself. It’s super important to make sure their capability and volume are a good fit for you. You might find a good factory, but your volume might be pathetic compared to what they’re used to dealing with. This means you’ll have a hard time getting them to pay attention to you — that’s just not a good match. On the other hand, a factory that’s not as big and still a little rough around the edges but turns out clean product and deals in volumes that make sense might be fine.
Do you have any tips for the in-person visit phase?
Bring someone along who speaks Mandarin if you don’t. On the other hand, enough factories exist that you can include English competency in your search and exclude the ones who don’t meet that benchmark. That’s fair — there’s no one right way to do this — but know that you’ll probably end up paying a little more for the convenience if you go that route.
You may find out once you arrive that the person you’ve been talking to isn’t a sales rep for a factory at all. There are brokers out there who happen to know English and make their living representing multiple factories. That might actually work for you if you find a broker who’s very good at what they do: you pay a premium for it, but they can arrange whatever you need.
It helps to have some knowledge of manufacturing, a person who does, or just a willingness to ask a lot of questions. You need to understand a factory’s true capabilities, because oftentimes what they say they do isn’t what they actually do. You might find a place that calls itself a contract manufacturer, but when you arrive, you discover they mostly do plastic injection molding and there’s a tiny table where they assemble things; that’s not a CM. You should be able to understand what their true core competency is. What are they good at? What are they actually sending out the door?
There are some general common-sense things to watch out for as well. Some factories aren’t legit, and they have to keep themselves concealed and hidden. For example, certain plating processes are only zoned for particular areas, but in order to stay in business where they are, a facility might be doing some plating where they’re not supposed to. If you get to a factory and it’s in the back of someone’s house with chickens running around, that’s probably not a good fit. I have seen those personally and they are usually a red flag.
What are the major differences between smaller-scale factories and large ones?
Look at the way the salesperson does quotations or invoicing. With smaller factories, you may be wiring money directly to someone’s personal account. Also, smaller factories tend not to have quality control documents or assembly instructions, relying instead on what amounts to tribal knowledge, individuals who are highly skilled but have no documentation. Larger factories have a system of documentation, process, and their own QC chart of the part they’re making, so in theory at least, it’s not supposed to change and tends to be repeatable.
The majority of manufacturing is done by small to medium factories. You can tell the difference by their way of doing business and how they introduce themselves. Smaller factories will just walk you around the place; a bigger one will take you to a meeting room and show you a PowerPoint. The more sophisticated factories want to vet you just as much as you’re vetting them, whereas smaller suppliers have less of an eye towards building a relationship. Bigger factories view their work as nurturing you in the beginning. Every big company started out small, and they’re hoping to discover the next unicorn and grow with you.
