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So a few years back I started a watch company in a similar way. I think I was actually one of the first to do it, since when I started I couldn't find many com

So a few years back I started a watch company in a similar way. I think I was actually one of the first to do it, since when I started I couldn't find many competitors. I tried a million kinds of promotions, from "free, you just pay for shipping" to offering people discounts and referral codes. I actually created my own watch designs (well, modifications of the face, case, and strap with the same Chinese movement.) Some of my improvements started to be used by the manufacturers. I'm not at all invested in it anymore: I left the business after selling a substantial, but not massive number of watches and finding that it wasn't terribly profitable if you included the cost of advertising, shipping, and (most importantly) my own time. My own "watch company" was more real in a few ways: watches that I did in fact design myself, shipped from my address in the US, and the quality of the watches was actually quite good. To this day I wear a watch from my company and it has held up to an incredible amount of abuse. I say this as someone who (used to) collect watches. I also was upfront about the cost of shipping and the watch itself - I might have, for example, a banner that says "Free 3-Day US Shipping" and then the price of the watch would be clearly labeled as $20, so people would know that they would only be paying a total of $20 for the watch. The prices varied a lot over time, from $10 to $40 per watch, but surprisingly my profit was never huge even though I only spent about $3 on the watch itself and $7 on shipping. If anyone's curious about the whole thing (and lives in the Netherlands) I still have hundreds of these watches and I'd be happy to sit down over a coffee, tell my stories from the business and show the watches.

Iv 9y ago
Nowadays several Shenzhen companies offer to do the shipping directly from China. Do you feel that this would have made your business a lot more profitable?
- owenversteeg 9y ago
  Oh, absolutely. My biggest expense was shipping, by a long shot. If I could have shipped from China I could have been ridiculously profitable, which explains the massive growth in these companies. At the same time, shipping from China would have made the whole thing more... fake, I guess. Like the author of this article found, these companies never had any physical address. The quality of the watches from these companies also seems much lower than the quality that I had. That's one of the problems with dropshipping - you don't know the quality that your customers are getting. I could take the 5 in 40 watches that would be broken or had dings/scratches and toss them, but you can't do that if you dropship. There's also the ridiculously long shipping times and lack of tracking.
  - Iv 9y ago
    Interesting. Thanks. A lot of things have changed in China. You now can have ISO-certified factories and you can order quality control also. But I admit that if I were to do something like that I would probably end up spending a few weeks in Shenzhen to bootstrap it.
tomcam 9y ago
Parent is also the creator of the underrated Min.css framework, which does a ridiculous amount in under 1k, has support for browsers going well past a decade, and has a thousand stars on Github.

Iv 9y ago

Nowadays several Shenzhen companies offer to do the shipping directly from China. Do you feel that this would have made your business a lot more profitable?

owenversteeg 9y ago
Oh, absolutely. My biggest expense was shipping, by a long shot. If I could have shipped from China I could have been ridiculously profitable, which explains the massive growth in these companies. At the same time, shipping from China would have made the whole thing more... fake, I guess. Like the author of this article found, these companies never had any physical address. The quality of the watches from these companies also seems much lower than the quality that I had. That's one of the problems with dropshipping - you don't know the quality that your customers are getting. I could take the 5 in 40 watches that would be broken or had dings/scratches and toss them, but you can't do that if you dropship. There's also the ridiculously long shipping times and lack of tracking.
- Iv 9y ago
  Interesting. Thanks. A lot of things have changed in China. You now can have ISO-certified factories and you can order quality control also. But I admit that if I were to do something like that I would probably end up spending a few weeks in Shenzhen to bootstrap it.

tomcam 9y ago

Parent is also the creator of the underrated Min.css framework, which does a ridiculous amount in under 1k, has support for browsers going well past a decade, and has a thousand stars on Github.