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I have a similar experience manufacturing a kickstarter hardware in China. Although we could ship with a few months of delay, we lost $9k. Our story was a bit

by milani 8y ago

I have a similar experience manufacturing a kickstarter hardware in China. Although we could ship with a few months of delay, we lost $9k. Our story was a bit different. We first got to know about factories through a hardware service provider and consultant firm. We decided to continue with two well-known factories, one for molding and the other for pcb and assembly. At some point, we paid $9k to start the final injection. Our project manager in the molding factory made up a story that their email were hacked and someone had intercepted the invoices and that we had paid to a wrong account! He knew we could not follow up the story as we were under pressure and investigating the issue could delay the production for at least a year. We paid again, this time with a lot of double confirmations in each step. A lot more problems occurred after that. The final quality of the product was different from what we expected and from what we controlled in the factory. So we did not continue with them. These factories have no control over their staff. There should be multiple points of contact to avoid these problems. Overall, hardware is hard and manufacturing in china is even harder.

sargun 8y ago
Are there any better choices for manufacturing stateside? From what I can tell, not only is manufacturing stateside much more difficult and expensive, often times factories don’t want small business.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- lh7777 8y ago
  I've worked in product development consulting for over a decade, and I wouldn't say stateside manufacturing is more difficult -- quite the opposite really for many of the reasons mentioned in other comments. There are plenty of small molding, machining, PCB, etc. shops across the country who would love to work on these kinds of low-volume jobs. Cost and time are the killer, though. To manufacture a simple electronic product in the US could easily double the lead time compared to a Chinese manufacturer and tooling costs might be 2 to 10x. Per-part cost really depends on what it is you're making and how much hand assembly is required. My industry is much more concerned with quality and predictability than cost, so choosing US (or European) manufacturers hasn't been a hard choice. But for consumer products, I'm not surprised that the math doesn't work out.
baybal2 8y ago
> We first got to know about factories through a hardware service provider and consultant firm. That will be a red flag for me from the start. hardware service providers, consulting firms, and auditors making money on naive Western entrepreneurs are quite often big crooks themselves. It is the same story with companies in financial space being forced to pay 10x premium to get just anything done on software front because they have near zero internal expertise, and they have no alternative to following whatever crooked colluding consultants say them to buy. If you were homed on the moulding factory by a consultant, there is a big chance that he himself was in share with them. I myself, I never had any issue ever on that front. Never place the whole order. Look for mid-sized contractors with a track record and cultivate your own relationship with them. Prioritise ones with shorter lead times, and ones pitching on their ability to handle design changes, and expertise on work with different materials. The paragraph above is what people in Shenzhen charge $1000 and more in consulting fees (hourly.)
- c2h5oh 8y ago
  How do you start if you have no contacts or expertise in this space? I'm seriously asking because I was trying to source something way simpler than a keyboard - a couple thousand meters of simple brass chain in spools - for months without luck.
  - baybal2 8y ago
    > How do you start if you have no contacts or expertise in this space? The only answer other than "you don't" is that you learn, people don't become electronics magnates without spending a career in the industry. As for Americans, it is even tougher for them, as they have close to no experience in modern manufacturing to mentally to superimpose on things in China. One can probably become Mark Zukerberg with just really a lot of luck, but nobody becomes Duan Yongping without spending his entire youth on assembly line
- milani 8y ago
  I believe that was not the case, at least for us. They simply helped us find factories we needed and they were not part of the process after. We were lucky that we had friends in HWTrek. They helped us a lot to resolve the issues. In our case, we had to get help from experts to setup contracts and relations between parties. We naively thought everyone is responsible for their part. But it seems they can easily fool customers ;)

by milani 8y ago

sargun 8y ago

Are there any better choices for manufacturing stateside? From what I can tell, not only is manufacturing stateside much more difficult and expensive, often times factories don’t want small business.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
lh7777 8y ago
I've worked in product development consulting for over a decade, and I wouldn't say stateside manufacturing is more difficult -- quite the opposite really for many of the reasons mentioned in other comments. There are plenty of small molding, machining, PCB, etc. shops across the country who would love to work on these kinds of low-volume jobs. Cost and time are the killer, though. To manufacture a simple electronic product in the US could easily double the lead time compared to a Chinese manufacturer and tooling costs might be 2 to 10x. Per-part cost really depends on what it is you're making and how much hand assembly is required. My industry is much more concerned with quality and predictability than cost, so choosing US (or European) manufacturers hasn't been a hard choice. But for consumer products, I'm not surprised that the math doesn't work out.

baybal2 8y ago

> We first got to know about factories through a hardware service provider and consultant firm. That will be a red flag for me from the start. hardware service providers, consulting firms, and auditors making money on naive Western entrepreneurs are quite often big crooks themselves. It is the same story with companies in financial space being forced to pay 10x premium to get just anything done on software front because they have near zero internal expertise, and they have no alternative to following whatever crooked colluding consultants say them to buy. If you were homed on the moulding factory by a consultant, there is a big chance that he himself was in share with them. I myself, I never had any issue ever on that front. Never place the whole order. Look for mid-sized contractors with a track record and cultivate your own relationship with them. Prioritise ones with shorter lead times, and ones pitching on their ability to handle design changes, and expertise on work with different materials. The paragraph above is what people in Shenzhen charge $1000 and more in consulting fees (hourly.)

c2h5oh 8y ago
How do you start if you have no contacts or expertise in this space? I'm seriously asking because I was trying to source something way simpler than a keyboard - a couple thousand meters of simple brass chain in spools - for months without luck.
- baybal2 8y ago
  > How do you start if you have no contacts or expertise in this space? The only answer other than "you don't" is that you learn, people don't become electronics magnates without spending a career in the industry. As for Americans, it is even tougher for them, as they have close to no experience in modern manufacturing to mentally to superimpose on things in China. One can probably become Mark Zukerberg with just really a lot of luck, but nobody becomes Duan Yongping without spending his entire youth on assembly line
milani 8y ago
I believe that was not the case, at least for us. They simply helped us find factories we needed and they were not part of the process after. We were lucky that we had friends in HWTrek. They helped us a lot to resolve the issues. In our case, we had to get help from experts to setup contracts and relations between parties. We naively thought everyone is responsible for their part. But it seems they can easily fool customers ;)