Upstream: A Visit To China Post Kickstarter Fulfillment
In an empty, fluorescent-lit corridor on the upper level of an electronics mall in Shenzhen, China, children were playing, running backwards down escalators and darting around boxes of circuit boards. Women slept, slumped over their counters, next to mounds of iPhone cables. In stall after stall, merchants sold the parts to make any smartphone in the world. Others sold LCD screens inside of half-assembled cases. Everywhere I looked there were generic and knock-off phones, computers, stereos, and bluetooth accessories, along with all the parts to make each of them thousands of times over again.
I was standing in the Huaqiangbei electronics mall, which I’d visited out of curiosity while on a sourcing trip this summer. My friend Spencer and I had worked with suppliers in Shenzhen while putting together the Public Radio, a single-station radio that was a Kickstarter success last year. But once we were on the ground in China, we realized how little we actually knew about the vast sprawl of micro-manufacturing we had been dealing with on the other side of the Internet.
We visited factories, negotiated changes to our designs with suppliers, and tried to get a handle on how electronics manufacturing in China really works. It was invaluable to have a closer look at where so many products today are made and where more and more startups call home, knowledge that is especially helpful now that I work closely with design and technology creators at Kickstarter. Our trips to Huaqiangbei and other electronics malls let us take in the atmosphere of these places where components are ordered, products are assembled, and packages get shipped all within the same square block.
There were people “hacking” and “making” everywhere, but not in a self-conscious, we-are-a-movement sort of way. And as parts moved around the mall and between the shops across the street — as men, women, and children carted off boxes for shipping — the very real amount of human touch that kicks in after you order something off of the internet, and that is so masked by the internet itself, came into focus. In Shenzhen, we were so close to and so far up the supply chain of consumer electronics that sourcing was less a matter of finding a part in stock somewhere, and more one of having someone actually make you the part you need.
Being in Shenzhen feels a little like being in an Escher drawing. Causeways lead to alleys, back entrances of buildings become skyways. Hundreds of yards of bamboo encase new construction in a checkered pattern. Cranes are everywhere. And all around you bear witness to 20% of the world’s population coming online and diving into modernity.
Huaqiangbei is one of the city’s better-known electronics malls, though there are several others along Shennan Road. The city has exploded over the past 30 years, going from a population of 30,000 to over 7 million just in my lifetime. Only one person I met was actually from here: most had migrated to take advantage of the manufacturing boom.
In some areas of Huaqiangbei, vendors are grouped by technology and things seem mildly curated. For the most part, though, any sense of a master plan is utterly lost. Every six feet there is another glass counter filled with neatly arranged electronics components. Everything is for sale.
Assembly happens here too. Adults and teenagers stand over piles of parts, making everything from antennas and wire harnesses to phones and laptops. On one floor we saw a group sitting with stacks of broken computer parts and assembling truly refurbished Macbooks; nearby, vendors sold bogus “CE” or “RoHS” certification stickers. There were Apple logos in sticker form, some with the left side of the apple missing instead of the right.
Back at home, we had spent a lot of time sourcing components for the Public Radio and managing relationships with our suppliers. When we put together our bill of materials, the simple things, like resistors, capacitors, and other generic components, were easy to come by on sites like Digikey, Mouser, or Octopart. I found that these were great resources if I already knew what I wanted. But for things where the look and feel is important, there would have been a tremendous advantage in being able to try out parts in person, at a moment’s notice. Being at the mall, it was obvious that this was part of the power of prototyping here: quick access to an enormous variety of components.
Walking around Huaqiangbei, we pretty quickly found similar versions — or possibly better alternatives — to our radio’s switch, potentiometer, and battery clip, all for a fraction of the price we were paying for them. One of the first stalls I stopped at had a card with almost 100 varieties of pogo pins (used for making electrical test jigs) laminated on it. When I was designing the programming interface for our radio last spring, I spent the better part of a day sifting through those same 100 varieties, mulling over photos on some buried webpage and then speaking with a supplier on the phone. This little card was exactly what I’d needed.
But it’s hard to say who the typical customer would be for some of these stalls. A lot of the merchants had laptops open to chat windows on websites that looked like Alibaba or Taobao. It’s possible, I thought, that when I’d needed 50 three-conductor JST cable assemblies in a non-standard length for another project, and ordered them on Alibaba last year, the “factory” they’d come from was Huaqiangbei. The “factory” was that husband and wife duo who’d been making cable assemblies two floors down. They, in turn, had no doubt bought their raw materials from the people selling connectors and cabling on the first floor.
Generally, though, it looked like everything was moving in bulk. No one was buying just one or two of something — orders seemed to be at least in the hundreds. And it was hard to gauge the quality of the inventory. I saw thousands of trays, each holding hundreds of surface mount components,not protected by antistatic bags, which made me feel that if you wanted something for a production run, the mall was probably not the place to get it after all. At some stalls, though, there were stacks of business cards listing the address of a factory just outside the city. The message being that if the thing you want isn’t sold in the mall, then someone very close by can probably make it.
Stepping outside Huaqiangbei onto a street that felt like Broadway in Manhattan, there weren’t people pushing tickets for tour buses, or men selling hip-hop CDs, but there was a gentleman walking around with business cards who stopped us and said “Hello, I know many suppliers!”
When the Public Radio raised $88,000 on Kickstarter last October, we saw that it had the potential to become more than just a nights-and-weekends hobby. We revamped and improved the radio-in-a-jar design over the winter and made our first production run of 2,500 units by spring. We convinced friends and family to help out with the final assembly, and in the end we delivered radios to our backers just shy of two weeks late. It was a tremendous amount of work, but we considered the project a success, and, honestly, both Spencer and I were shocked that we hadn’t run into more trouble along the way.
Standing outside these malls in Shenzhen, I could see the entirety of our work on the Kickstarter campaign — from managing customer orders and sourcing parts to assembly and fulfillment — unfolding within the mall’s ecosystem over the course of a single day. And it was all in pretty stark contrast to the micro assembly lines, fulfillment parties, and fancy lunch spreads we’d set up in order to reward our friends for helping us out.
While we’d kept crucial contract services for parts like our printed circuit-board assembly close to home, several of our key components had come from overseas suppliers. Because of the tight delivery date, we weren’t able to visit any of these suppliers before production, and instead spent late nights and early mornings exchanging emails, photographs, and drawings with them. The main purpose of our trip was to visit these suppliers.
In the morning, we left Shenzhen for a series of factory visits. We saw three different factories, all quite different from one another in terms of size, throughput, and the degree to which they’d incorporated advanced manufacturing techniques. And there were surprises with each of them.
My assumption was that these factories would look similar to the scenes in the documentary Manufactured Landscapes, which I’d watched before the trip: endless rows of production lines stretching on, with workers in color-coordinated uniforms sitting beside conveyor belts and blazing through a mixture of mechanized and hand-assembly tasks. I imagined a highly orchestrated assembly process, combining cheap labor with a small amount of robotics.
At the factory of our antenna supplier this was more or less the case, just on a much smaller scale. Everything was as manual as it could be. The company’s raw material was stock tubing — they made syringes, bent copper tubing for cooling, even forks — all bundled and then cut using a wire EDM machine. The pieces were then walked over to a series of “swaging” stations where the parts were formed into shape. There were no conveyor belts here, though; parts were moved around manually between the factory’s three floors at various stages of the assembly process.
Our speaker supplier’s factory, by contrast, had three main assembly lines along separate conveyors for woofers, mid-range speakers, and tweeter drivers, with overhead suspended tooling for final assembly. They had a dedicated R&D floor that included an anechoic chamber and a listening room, and the compound had its own mold workshop and injection molding facility where one of the machines even had a robotic track setup for automatic part removal. When we asked about the new robotics, our assumption was confirmed: labor prices were rising and they’d begun to adapt.
In large part, our factory visits were very informal. We sat around a table with our antenna supplier, sketching out the requirements for a new design, passing drawings back and forth, and grabbing sample antennas from their display case to use as a baseline of their production capabilities. For the most part, this worked. A week later we received drawings of the part we’d agreed on.
We had a similar exchange with our speaker supplier. We described the flaws with the current design and made a suggestion for a new part, they pushed back, we broke out our laptops, and in a couple hours we had a design for a speaker incorporating a completely custom housing that would, in theory, save us many thousands of dollars in labor and shorten our parts list.
In those three days, we had more human-to-human interaction with suppliers than we’d had in the entire course of our project. It helped. This wasn’t really a surprise, but it’s easy to forget that looking at drawings together or being able to see a supplier’s facility can dramatically speed up the prototyping and production process. The internet is fast, sure, but things get lost in translation, both literally and figuratively. We didn’t even know that our speaker manufacturer had in-house injection molding capabilities until we were there.
The night after visiting the speaker manufacturer, we stayed in Dongguan, a city about an hour north of Shenzhen, in a kind of Grand Budapest hotel that had been built sometime in the 90s. It was empty, large, and a bit run down, but had very shiny floors and three restaurants inside. Dongguan, we’d been told, used to all be dirt roads until fifteen years ago. It’s home to the world’s largest abandoned mall.
But we found something else unique. Taking a stroll towards the city center that night, we walked past several factories, past a couple of restaurants and street vendors, and through a square. On the far side was a little roll-up gate shop with a light on. Two kids in their early teens were working a CNC mill and EDM machine in a space no bigger than 300 square feet. It was casual — they were working in tees and flip-flops — but it was late, and these kids were young, and they were using real equipment.
We kept walking, and a few blocks ahead there were dozens more of these machine shops sandwiched between noodle spots and grocery stores. Each seemed to be independent from the next and all of them were humming along at 10pm. CNC machines, Bridgeport mills, more EDM machines, all packed in similarly small spaces with dogs, kids, and babies hanging around. We just stood and watched.
The next day, as we were driving to lunch after a factory tour and our hosts were pointing out where Barbie gets made, I asked about these shops. I was told they were the equivalent of quick-turn services, supporting the very local industry. A factory might break a tool on the line during the day, for instance, and overnight these small shops would spin up and make new tooling for them.
It’s important to remember that some of these shops were also people’s homes. In the US, people get excited about 3D printers and the way in which they might be facilitating micro-factories and distributed manufacturing. These shops were exactly that — only in a very real, very un-maker-y way.
Like the hand-assembled MacBooks and cables at Huaqiangbei, the work being done in Dongguan’s overnight factories was almost entirely devoid of the kind of glory or cachet it would carry at home. There were no slick websites associated with these places, no one was hosting a Meetup, and no one was a “hacker,” although they were doing the same hands-on work. In the US there is a kind of cool that adheres to owning a 3D printer or using an Arduino. Here they were just jobs.
Early on in our search for antennas and speakers we’d turned to Alibaba as a resource for finding suppliers. Filtering search results with the specific parts we were looking for, we narrowed our options to fewer than half-a-dozen factories. Two of them worked out in the end, and delivered exactly what we’d asked for. It was somewhat miraculous, and a bit of a mystery that everything turned out alright, despite communication over the internet being painful at times. Alibaba managed to conceal most of the legwork that happened behind the scenes in order for our speakers, antennas, and knobs to be delivered as requested. For all we know, parts of the speaker could have come from one of the malls on Shennan Road. Or the tools needed for the production line could have been repaired by teenagers working nights in Dongguan.
When you hold a radio in your hand that says “Made in China” on it somewhere, it’s easy to assume that the steps that went into making that radio were highly automated — and in some cases they are. In the mall at Shenzhen, in the speaker factory, and in the nighttime streets of Dongguan, though, it was apparent just how much very real human interaction and actual, physical touch go into making all of these things we use everyday.
~For more pictures from our trip, click here~
~Special thanks to Dragon Innovation for tips and support abroad ~
This story was originally published by Kickstarter.
