My experience outsourcing manufacturing to China | Hacker News Reader

My experience outsourcing manufacturing to China

trekdek.wordpress.com

61 pointsdmd14927 comments

We had a similar experience when we created our first designer toy. We were looking for exceptional quality as our designers were incredibly talented and we waned their work showcased in the best possible way.

First rule: stay away from Alibaba. We went this route initially, found someone who looked like they could do it, and even found other small toy manufacturers who had supposedly heard of the factory and recommended it. This was important since many of the factories tend to steal and re-post product photos from eachother.

We went with this factory, and production started fairly smooth. We let the factory complete the sculpt (a rookie mistake on our part) and we began the tweaking process. Their sculpt was “ok”, not on model really, and it didn’t “feel” like our product. After a few months of sending photos back and fourth, we asked to have a sample shipped to us so we could see it in person. When we got them in the mail, we knew we were in trouble. Not only were the samples “way” off model (downright ugly, actually), but they didn’t even stand! The factory had, for some reason, rounded the bottom of the feet…

Decision time- we were already in the hole a few thousand $- it’s a lot for us, as our entire operation at the time included myself and my fiancee. We’re bootstrapped and pay everything out of pocket. We decided to move forward, picking the best of the worst of the samples, and again attaching notes for fixes (“can we get the toy to stand, please?”). That’s when everything went really south. We never saw any fixes, never got to see the colors printed, or the designs in final form from this factory. What we got were weekly emails for 6 months that basically read, “so sorry for the delay, it’s almost ready- should have them for approval next week.”

The following year came the stories of the Alibaba CEO stepping down over fraud investigations. No surprise: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870447660457615...

Second Rule: China is the wild west, do it the right way. We started going to trade shows like Toy Fair and others, and began asking people with real product in the market for leads. While most kept their factories a secret, we made progress. We discovered the HKTDC, a more legitimate group, and then caught our break- someone who had connections and personal relationships and connected us to a truly great, legitimate factory.

Result: http://aartingcollection.com – and our first designer toy on the market.

First, putting a want ad on Alibaba is asking for trouble - i doubt any good playing card manufacturer is monitoring that and the one that do respond probably don't specialize in card printing and don't have the equipment to make them efficiently at high quality. In China, its common for someone to say they can make something even if they can't do it well - they re hungry for business.

You need to search Alibaba to find companies doing the manufacturing for Bicycle or other big companies and ask them if they do custom printing. I found a lot: http://www.alibaba.com/trade/search?SearchText=playing+cards...

If you say you are looking for 10k+ decks, they may do your samples for free. I've never had printing done over here, but with metal and plastic parts, we have engineering drawings for them with tolerancing, surface finish, etc. so they know if the part is good or rejected. Perhaps you could make a similar document showing placement of the die cut, lamination info, etc.

I'm traveling in China now visiting factories. DM me if you have questions or need a translator.

As was said once by Tim Feriss, in China they have a saying that roughly translates to "If you can fool them, fool them". This saying was confirmed by a few people that I know that grew up in China.

However, the big elephant in the room is the fact that many of the factories there just don't have a good grasp of English. You can explain exactly what you want and they will always say they got it even if they don't get it because they want the business.

I have one friend who has had a lot of success manufacturing in China but its because he has someone who grew up there and can speak the language fluently and understands the culture of negotiation. They give her the "Chinese pricing" instead of the "American pricing".

They have the capability to make good quality stuff in China, its just that you won't get it without some know how (and someone who can speak fluent mandarin and doesn't have an American accent).

> Here are my options now:

> ...

> d) Market test the cards

D, D a thousand times D. I assume you have a plan on where you are going to sell these? Dip your toe in and see if you are barking up the wrong tree.

My experience was, they stole $50,000 from me.

Never pay up front, even if you've been doing business with them for years.

Is there any type of insurance to hedge against these types of occurrences?

The only really affordable insurance against that, is simply not to pay a significant amount up front.

Lawyering up isn't going to help all that much (cross border contract law and other legal matters is at best difficult, and it is very easy for the people involved to just vanish and the new people (if the whole company doesn't vanish) will refuse any responsibility to you), trust simply doesn't cut it (this is business, not a friendship, while trust is worth something you still need to protect your arse from every angle), and you are not going to find any insurance company that will give a good rate against that sort of risk so hedging that was would be impractical.

No matter how safe you feel, how much you might think you can trust the other party, and how much legal protection you think you have: be very very very careful about what you hand over up front.

Good advice.

There are companies that will hold money in trust for you until an agreement is reached on completion of work, which is the arrangement I should have been using.

If you use an escrow service make sure you pick it, not the other side. If you go with a suggestion made by them (or anyone else) do plenty of background research before making any arrangements - there are some bad escrow companies out there and dodgy businesses (and individual scammers) are certainly not above creating a fake but official looking services.

Escrow? Elance does that.

There is a blog post it that!

To me printing is more of an art than a science — and as a graphic designer I can tell you that you usually get what you pay for in terms of quality. Another problem the author may have had is that the quantity of said order is so tiny that a major printer wouldn't have taken the job, so you get the small guys.

Thanks for the comment. What are your criteria for judging the quality of a printer (besides price)?

one criteria is the prepress process. Before committing to print, good quality printers usually have a whole prepress process - from checking the correctness of file formats (I think this is why you were missing certain things on your deck - maybe they can't read your file, or had outdated and/or pirated software), to generating digital proofs - the best printers have a way to let you check the proofs before they even print up a sample. Some even let you come in and check it on their proofing workstations at their press. That's what you're paying for when you go for the "expensive" local printers - it's not really expensive when you think about it - by getting it right the first time you go to press.

As you found out, samples don't always turn out right, and it's great to be able to "double check" their work.

As for the print run size - if you look locally, you should be able to find a good quality press that does gang run printing - basically printing multiple clients' projects together to save on overhead.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Gang_run_prin...

In your case, the special card stock for playing cards might make it difficult to find someone to do this type of printing for you - but in your case, you should be looking for a specialty card printer - maybe even printing on plastic (not paper) - which would involve searching within a whole different industry all together...

wow that was incredibly useful. whats funny is I didn't even consider not outsourcing the project. In fact, most of the costs associated with outsourcing was shipping. I wonder if I'd be able to find a local printer that does playing cards. As far as the plastic goes yea, that would be difficult.

You don't happen to know of any good printers in the Portland area do you?

Glad to help with some information, but no, I don't know the Portland area. Perhaps other commenters will be able to give you some tips.

A number of years ago I was in a job that had me doing weekly press checks for high-run gang print jobs. The press operators were all very professional and well-trained, but it was surprising how many defects would be present after the colors had been calibrated and the "make-readies" had been printed. Some of these were huge runs on Heidleberg presses, with measurable offsets on registration or Pantone colors that were off.

My takeaway from this: if you care about impeccable quality, it's a constant fight to get it and keep it. No one will care about your product as much as you do.

Some things I found useful for these high-value offset print jobs:

1. Print out a hard proof (at full size obviously), and have multiple people review its accuracy.

2. Provide your printer with both a PDF/X file and your Indesign file. Use Indesign. Ask your printer if they have a preference for the PDF/X settings.

3. Provide all of the above to your print house.

4. Request, at the very least, an e-proof from your printer. This is generated after they push it through their processing workflow. If it looks good, your only other concern would be press calibration.

5. If it makes financial sense, schedule a press check. I believe we paid $100/hour for ours, but they would not usually take more than an hour. I'd usually ask for adjustments if they were needed, then pluck off a print that looked good and sign it. I'd take an identical copy for myself. They'd then use this to compare press output with during the printing job. If any part of the job came out like crap, I could use my copy to show how off it was and get a refund or credit on my next job.

Well I'm a designer so I may see things that a non-designer wouldn't pick up on. The first thing you want to do is to see printed samples of their work. This is a test not just to see the work itself, but to see how quickly they get it to you and if they follow up after it's been sent. When you're looking at the printing see how black the blacks are — are things trimmed well? How are their communication skills? Also a must have for me is the ability to see a printed proof — looking at an acrobat file on a computer screen is a waste of time.

Board game designers are often happy to talk about the experiences they had getting their game made, and they frequently deal with decks. I would start with http://www.silcom.com/~tomjolly/design.htm Various threads on boardgamegeek, e.g. http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/83696/printing-game-cards , suggest looking at http://www.printerstudio.com/unique-ideas/custom-playing-car... or https://www.thegamecrafter.com/

Printing specifically seems to be more common to outsource to canada than china. Presumably for the shipping. I'm under the impression that usually you don't do stuff in china unless you can fill a freight container. But I only know someone who deals with this, I don't have personal experience.

Alibaba is a very mixed bag.

I recommend using Panjiva.com to do some diligence on suppliers before committing. You can see who else they're supplying in the US, historical data (ie. are they doing more or less US business?) and even pull credit records and other data.

It's not failsafe but you'll get a much more complete picture of a supplier than with Alibaba.

Interesting, and predictable. I had a similar experience, and ended up outsourcing manufacturing to Germany :)

BTW I really love the TrekDeck idea, I don't know if there's a sizeable market but the idea is really entertaining, I'd certainly buy it. Kudos.

I have done all my printing in Germany for a few years now and can also highly recommend it. The companies we have dealt with have been excellent in proofing the data. They have gotten back to me because an image was fractions of a millimetre off compared to other images in my brochure and similar minuscule details that make the difference between a good and a great product.

The best way is to use Google Translate and find the German name of the product you want to manufacture and search like that since a lot of sites are in German only.

We are based in the UK so we're getting the benefits of being in the EU but even for the US market it might be worth looking into.

Any specific companies to recommend? If I search for something like "spielkarten hersteller", I find that linx.de has a nice list, but they're not all necessarily wonderful.

I don't have a job in mind at the moment, but I'm always curious to explore the possibilities.

Through a separate list I found a couple of companies: http://www.spielkarten.com/ http://philos.quasarshop.de/Home.asp?Lang=D http://www.dalnegro.com/ (Italian company)

I have never dealt with playing cards specifically so I cannot give concrete advice on this market but as with most products that I have had to source, I have found that most people are very helpful if you either write to them or pick up the phone and call and ask for advice. Since the playing cards market is not that big I am sure that companies are more than willing to give advice to entrants to this specific field.

You didn't write a lot in this post about your business outside of the outsourcing experience, so my advise may be off but I am latching off "option D" in your post and have the following comment:

For any product that's a game the two biggest business risks are:

- Will people play and enjoy it. - For long enough to at least feel they got their "money's worth" and recommend it to friends. In almost all cases, games most important distribution channel is word of mouth. If it's not fun enough for people to play it with friends it will not succeed. Which leads to the second point

- How will you distribute it - Even if it's awesome, if you don't have a robust plan to get it in front of the right players and customers (may be the same person of not, btw) at the right time it will be a challenge to reach success.

So by all means, figure out if people like it NOW. And also use it to identify and lock-down "channels to market" -- NOW.

It will take time. Use it to continue to evaluate the manufacturing bit (some really good ideas on this thread) in the most frugal way possible until you get to the quality you want. I'm sure it's doable.

The author was lucky that he received a bad sample. Generally how this goes is that they'll provide an great sample, wait for the large followup order, then ship you garbage. Many firms don't have the stomach to continue after their first batch of defective goods arrive.

Your experience was that you got low quality goods? Welcome to doing business with China my friend.

A friend who does low-tolerance machining here in the States is making a killing and constnatly expanding his business even though he can't compete with Chinese providers on price, he can achieve quality they don't. His customers are used to ordering 4x as many of a product as they want from China just so they can get 1x that actually meet specifications. And that's on the low precision work that they actually do offer.

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