Being demanding of your suppliers seems like a risky choice. Especially if you're small and your demand is small. But it does have swagger. Being candid about r

Being demanding of your suppliers seems like a risky choice. Especially if you're small and your demand is small. But it does have swagger. Being candid about real dates and real requirements sounds great, refreshing even. But then "we need our suppliers to jump through hoops for us, to expedite, to get supply not otherwise allocated to us" sounds like you're asking suppliers to 'hustle' to meet their commitments to you. What if the problem is there's no cadmium available anywhere, world wide? To what extent does oxide care about how supply is produced and how they get their supplies, transitively? What if to secure the supply they need to offer more money, but instead you tell them to "hustle"? But yeah sourcing middling sized batches of project components has got to be rough in the best of times, since it's probably mostly coming from overseas and mostly from Shenzen. That route gets more expensive with Covid and also US geopolitical tensions with China. Its an interesting time to be a hardware-startup constrained by how freely atoms move around the world. My suggestion is that you hire a few smart, attractive Shenzen biz types, give them some generous entertainment accounts, and watch your orders get filled with ease.