A manufacturer in China can do magic at the product level once things are working. To get to that point you have to invest many hours in many conversations.
Challenges in communicating with a Chinese manufacturer
Complexity arises mainly for these reasons:
Two or more people are speaking in their non-native language (English). This frequently leads to confusion and misunderstandings.
The product you order is almost always
Variations and changes from the base version you found on Alibaba. These changes can cause problems.
You compete for attention with other customers who write to the “account manager” who then communicates with the factory. Sometimes the one who shouts the loudest gets the most attention.
Improvements we have implemented in communication with China
To counteract the negative effects accurate mobile phone number list mentioned above, we have moved on to implementing the following measures.
Document and specify everything in detail that we need at the product level. It is better to have everything in a document than in the Alibaba chat message. This is obvious.
Frequent reminders. Even if you said you need “x” in the first batch of production, it doesn’t mean that it will be taken into account in the second one.
Insist, but in the most pleasant way possible. People want to deal with pleasant people, I say…
Another curious thing is that they don’t give you deadlines. When you ask them “until when will you be able to do x…” they have an endless time giving you an estimate. The answer I get is that they will do it as soon as possible.
Well, that’s what we’re doing.
Lego EOL is not pulling the cart (yet)
By this time we had already billed much more with Lego. It may want to build customer loyalty? take us a few more days to get there this year, but the Legos we had already speculated a bit about may not reach the point of maturity this year and we may have to wait another year for it.
Unexpected problems
This product had the potential to bill almost 10% of the 550k. Then it gambler data arrived in a defective state. We had not counted on this, of course, but at least we have a plan to solve it. With a bit of luck we can get rid of a large part of the inventory by this time.
We are already at 33% of Christmas. The strongest dates for billing are yet to come. It doesn’t matter how we look at it. We have to increase a lot these days.