You can have a lot of garbage come from Aliexpress and still come out ahead.
It's interesting to see how brands are positioned differently in different markets. IIRC, Stella Artois is the PBR of the UK, but without the hipster cool, while it's relatively premium in the US.
I've bought counterfeit books from Amazon where the text bleeds due to poor inks. As well as low-quality paper from "international edition" textbooks instead of the high-quality paper I'm used to. Worse yet: a counterfeit copy likely is "pirated goods", where the Publisher / author don't get the money. (The main point of buying books is to support the author, more so than perhaps the text itself). It was fine when I was a student and needed to save money, but my personal library has no use for bleeding books printed on poor quality paper. I only have two bookshelves (for books) in my house, I don't have enough room to keep all the low-quality books.
Branded goods are often slightly miscategorized or mislabled on Amazon. I'm talking 2300mAh Energizer AA vs 2400 mAh Energizer AA. In these cases, I was trying to match up battery packs for electronics, where its very important to get matching NiMHs, but the Amazon Marketplace merged the two battery types ("close enough" isn't good enough for me). I now buy my electronics products from Adafruit / Digikey, two stores which understand the importance of documentation and precise SKUs. Commodity AA NiMHs I buy from Home Depot, which have been properly labeled in my experience.
Finally, Walmart prices are actually pretty fine, and sometimes beat Amazon's. A good example this past month was when I bought a Cast-iron skillet.
* https://www.walmart.com/ip/Lodge-Logic-Seasoned-Cast-Iron-12...
* https://www.amazon.com/Lodge-Skillet-Pre-Seasoned-Skillet-Si...
I made sure to shop around for the lowest price, and lo-and-behold, Walmart was cheaper.
> You can have a lot of garbage come from Aliexpress and still come out ahead
Do you trust the preseasoning of a Cast Iron skillet to a cheap no-name company? I guess if you're planning to strip the cast iron skillet of its seasoning and you're going to oil it up with Flax Seed oil yourself... its hard to get the "Cast Iron" part wrong. Its the pre-seasoning process that you're buying in this case.
Lodge's pre-seasoning isn't the best, but its type and quality is well listed and documented: Soybean Oil (http://www.lodgemfg.com/use-and-care/what-is-seasoning) . That's good enough for most people, and its probably too much of a bother for most people to find higher-quality oils and season the pans themselves.
Buying the brand-name has benefits. Final bonus points: Lodge Cast-iron is still made 100% in America, for those who care about that little detail. But the brand name trust is a benefit.
There's lots of people who review and discuss Lodge's choice of pre-seasoning, so its a well known constant. Buying no-name brands on Alibaba is a risk: you pretty much have to do quality-control yourself.
Perhaps I'm obsessing too much over the quality of a $20 pan. But frankly, if I can't trust the pan's quality in my kitchen, its complete garbage to me. I have enough cheap pans in my kitchen, I'm spending more time throwing out broken kitchen appliances than buying new stuff.
I mean, sure, I could risk it with maybe a $5 or $10 pan from Alibaba instead. But why should I even risk it? Lodge has high enough quality, is highly reviewed in cast-iron enthusiast online discussion, and is widely available.
It's worse than that. With random chinese jank, you don't know if that "cast iron" pan didn't include pot metals. I heard that lead, cadmium, and other heavy metals were "tasty". Because they, like iron, leech into the food. Fortunately, the amount of iron that leeches out is diet-wise necessary... Whereas lead - not so much.
I wouldn't risk a free "cast iron" pan from anywhere China. Or India. Or the South Pacific countries. There's too much at stake(steak) to ingest in things that have little to no: QA, testing, laws, quality standards. Not worth it.
Though typically one would use a cast iron pan for savory items more than sweet ones, so I have my doubts about intentionally adding lead.
[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/sugar-of-lead-a-...
But pure cast iron is just that: Iron. Iron isn't "pure", it will have varying carbon content and other metals. But these metals (and other materials) all have far higher melting points than Lead, so Cast Iron itself is probably lead free (otherwise: the metallurgy process probably would fail if you didn't purify the Iron Ore enough before casting it)
The simplicity of the design and manufacturing is one of the reasons people buy pure, classic cast iron skillets. There are strong guarantees built innately to the casting process. The iron doesn't need to be particularly high quality either for the pan to work.
Higher-quality metals (ex: Steel) are somewhat against the point of cast iron. Steel pans are smaller and thinner, but the point of a cast-iron skillet is the huge weight which slows down the cooking process. A cast-iron skillet is slow to heat and slow to cool down, because its made of super-heavy iron. Aluminum or Copper Frying pans have a similar issue: they are so lightweight that they won't make the same kind of sear as a classic cast-iron pot.
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But I think you have a point about lead-worries in Ceramic-enamel Cast Iron products like: https://www.amazon.com/Lodge-Enameled-Classic-Enamel-Island/...
The paints and ceramic composition are far more ambiguous and subject to quality-control issues. Lead used to be very common in a variety of paints
Other places, Walmart might be pretty good.
Also, there are only so many ways you can put a bikini together. The Chinese should have learned this by now. Or they can simply hire an Italian fashion student for a small price.
One packet from a factory came with each product individually wrapped in aluminum foil like a child did it (and probably did) and each product was still coated in a sheen of gross machine grease. That was the worst out of a round of Alibaba buying of maybe 20 SKUs.
There's also a big world out there and the discount that comes from buying products of poor quality is more appealing than the quality itself. There are, in fact, many ways to make a bikini.
As for QA, if they aren’t trying to build a brand with repeat buyers, QA is simply overhead. Even if they are, they might not have the foresight or management experience to implement QA correctly. The lack of merit-based management talent is a huge problem.
And it's working well for them.
But why doesn't it exist in many product categories ? Why it's so hard to find a list of similar Chinese brands for different product categories ?
[0] e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfyAjkPIYyc [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCO8DQrSp5yEP937qNqTooOw [2] e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZh7VfxBmcw
Chinese manufacturers and retailers are moving up the value chain as fast as they can, but it's not an overnight process and no-brand goods aren't going away.
I observed a progression going like this in my hobby (firearms and accessories):
1. No Chinese goods. Expensive US and European brands dominate the market.
2. Chinese goods enter by extending their airsoft product lines, and quickly dominate the "cheap junk" market. But there's a huge gap in both price and quality between them and older brands. Older brands still retain a large part of the market, because the quality of that new stuff below "good enough" in most cases.
3. Small companies that don't have an established brand name and compete on prices start outsourcing to China and offering products at "made-in-China, QC'd-in-USA" prices, with warranty, tech support etc. The prices are now about 1/3 of established brands, unlike the junk before that was at 1/20. This creates a whole new market segment, which takes away a lot of customers from those brands, because it's past the "good enough" bar.
4. Large companies jump on the bandwagon to compete. You start seeing essentially the same design with minor cosmetic changes being rebranded and sold by various companies. Because this is fairly obvious in the age of the Internet, the value of the brands diminishes.
5. Chinese suppliers find their way to the American market, and start selling the same stuff directly, offering comparable warranties and customer support, but at even lower prices. New brands get established in this manner (e.g. Holosun).
6. Chinese brands start targeting the high-end market, and adding exclusive features for their own products, that are not available in generic product lines intended for rebranding (at least, not until sometime later).
The industry was around #1 up until mid-2000s or so, and it just got to #6 about a year ago. Anything that's not made in China is squeezed into narrower and narrower niche at the top of the market. Holosun got to the point where they are making $1K+ electronics that is competing against $2K+ equivalents by established brands - in other words, they're already contesting for the part of the market way above where most customers are.
I've been working in OEM manufacturing for 12 years, with short brakes for college and freelancing stints.
Answer to that: quite a few do, but it is very hard for higher quality Chinese goods to reach Western markets. It is that entire global trade mechanism that was built on trading nothing, but "cheapest shit" that is working against them.
Often, it is the original Western OEM client that insists on bargaining to the last cent, taking cost cutting down to such silly things like thickness of plastic parts, paint quality or borderline electronic component rating.
In worst cases, the appallingly low quality of a product may even be an intentional design decision by the buyer:
When I was an exchange student in Singapore in 2010, I worked in a trade company. One of our clients was another sourcing company that allegedly worked for Amazon.
So, those guys come to our office to check what power supplies we have for them. They pick apart our samples saying things along lines:
"Sample A has too high spec parts, they don't need to last that long. Plastic on sample B is unnecessarily thick. Sample C has non-essential stress reliever on the cable and the cable itself is way too thick..."
Why would a Chinese company try selling quality stuff to the West if no sourcing agency employed by American MNCs will pick them up? There is no incentive for that.
A western OEM can overpay and still get bad quality. Unless you are willing to send your own QA people over there, you aren't going to get the quality you want. Anyone who successfully outsources in China is very hands on about it.
> "Sample A has too high spec parts, they don't need to last that long. Plastic on sample B is unnecessarily thick. Sample C has non-essential stress reliever on the cable and the cable itself is too thick..."
That's also true, but in this case they are at least working with their customers on costs, not promising something for a price they can't deliver on and silently cutting corners later on to make up their margins.
> send your own QA
Rarely... what American big co. managers understand under "sending your own QA" is usually something like:
1. Hiring a lawyer "doing" that
2. Lawyer company hiring a manufacturing auditing company
3. Auditor company hiring an inspection and certification expert
4. That expert company finally hiring a professional services company which sends an underpaid engineer temp to finally visit the company and do a 5 minute check.
It sounds absurd, but I've seen that way too often, few times with things happening in this exact sequence.
Being hands on about that is the key. It is not rocket science, but so few are doing that... almost like if C-levels of American companies get some kind of "yuck factor" dealing with Chinese.
Those guys have it almost as an unconscious impulse to hide behind a wall of 10 legal counsels and other agents whenever anything involving China has to be done. Before coming to the West, I could not have imagined that it is even possible to hire an attorney for doing something like that.
I do not doubt this for a second.
OTOH, recently we've even seen quality on Apple's Mac products deteriorate noticeably. Assuming Apple is extremely good at this strict QA, I wonder if some sort of China manufacturing sea-change has occurred.