Look for a sourcing company that is based in Asia, with a bilingual staff who have a clear understanding of the expectations Western companies have in terms of product quality, customer service and competitive pricing. Choose a company where the owners are Western, easy to communicate with, and intimately involved in daily operations. They should have an established portfolio of proven factory partners, and have the experience to assess a factory’s quality systems and production efficiencies at every stage.
We contract for services from manufacturers and add our profit to the total production cost as part of the final price to you. In some special cases at very high-volume production, we might work on a set percent of value basis.
At P2P Manufacturing, we look to engage in opportunities where our client has authored a credible business plan, is funded for success, and has a clear picture of their path to market and how they will drive sales of the offering. You need an actionable product design, and enough capital to support creation of any necessary tooling for factory mass production and your initial production run. If you need to estimate costs, or you need design help, we can often help for a fraction of what industrial design providers in the United States are charging.
Yes, you need a product design, and if you don’t have a prototype, we can help you produce one, but there is a cost for doing so. If you already have both a design and a prototype, we can accelerate the entire process and execute much more quickly. Even if you have a product design, it may be need to be tweaked to optimize it for efficient manufacturability, and we can help you with that.
P2P has a multi-facet strategy for helping you protect your intellectual property rights related to your sourcing project. We suggest our clients use both U.S. and Chinese patent laws and processes to seek protection for proprietary designs that they bring to us. In situations involving IP sensitive designs, we purposely control the amount of access any one supplier has to the complete picture concerning a product and its target market. As necessary, we can also selectively handle final kitting and packaging in a separate controlled facility, to secure secrecy concerning the final product’s design features, assembly methods, packaging and even the identity of the client and their target market.
It depends on the product, the number of components involved, whether tooling is needed, and the factory processes required for generating the initial samples. We’ve turned around samples of simple products, not requiring tooling, in as little as a week, but sampling typically requires 30-60 days after a completed design has been defined. Complex products requiring difficult-to-source components and custom tooling can take longer.
Normally, mass production takes 30-60 days for custom-designed products after the initial production order. For the initial production run of a new product, it can take up to 30 days longer than subsequent orders due to start-up processes and documentation and the need to get up-to-speed with the new project. Once your product is produced, packaged and ready for shipment, we can arrange for air or ocean delivery methods. Air freight can be delivered within a week for express freight deliveries, and with standard air freight in about two weeks. Ocean shipping schedules can vary considerably, but 30-55 days is typical from the time the order leaves the factory to receipt at your U.S. location, using ocean freight shipping through most US ports.
All business is conducted using United States Dollars and all payments are made using wire transfers.
Once your product design is finalized, and depending on the complexity of producing initial samples, there may be sample costs payable prior to sample production that include any applicable engineering charges, 3D printing, and the cost of sample tooling if it needs to be produced.
After initial samples are approved, you will pay 50% of the cost of the mass production tooling if applicable, and a 30% deposit for the initial production order prior to the mass production tooling being created. Once any necessary tooling is completed and P2P has produced a first article sample which you approve, any remaining balance for the mass production tooling charge will need to be paid for mass production to begin. Final payment of the remaining 70% of the production run payment will need to be paid once our quality assurance inspection is completed and prior to the release of the order from the factory.
Absolutely. We’ve manufactured products for several businesses that started with crowdfunding and ended up being on, or even getting investment offers while on Shark Tank. P2P is friendly to companies with a strong business plan who are closely managing their upfront investment, and our low-cost design and prototype production can be very helpful to businesses that are crowd- funding. Our ability to nimbly mass produce products and scale quickly as needed, will help ensure our clients can meet the lead time expectations that their backers will appreciate.
Because we are quality experts and we are there to ensure it! We choose our manufacturers carefully and we serve as your eyes and ears at the factory to guarantee, before it is shipped, that every order is produced to the targeted quality standards. P2P performs our quality assurance inspections in addition to the factory’s own quality program, traveling all over China and to many parts of Asia to inspect, problem solve and ensure our factory partners are producing quality products in a timely manner. We can refer you to some of our current clients to help you understand better how high of a priority quality is, and needs to be, in the P2P business model.
You can if you just want to take your chances and buy a commodity product from somebody you find through Alibaba or any other Asian sourcing online platform. But if you want to get a custom designed product made in China, especially one with some complexity to it, there are significant risks and challenges to doing so. These challenges come in the form of language, law, culture and customs differences between the East and the West. There is a very good chance you will make mistakes which cost you both time and money.
What you really want is a on site operational expertise, a sourcing and quality assurance company that will help you bring your quality product to market quickly and competitively priced without the mis-steps.
Let us make your life easier by focusing on the manufacturing part of your business, so you can have more time to focus on marketing and all the other facets of your business.
The short answer is that anything and everything can go wrong.
Known defective products shipped, shipment dates missed without prior notice, factory payment collected without shipment having occurred, changes to BOM components without client approval … these are just some of the problems that are all to common.
It is a cultural reality that in China uncomfortable truths often don’t get communicated, even when they are vital information. This can take the form of inaccurate answers to tough questions or things that go unsaid that shouldn’t be. It is common in China to focus on “saving face” rather than identifying and solving problems earnestly. Sometimes the answers given are convenient answers aimed at creating false comfort and avoiding conflict, or they just push the issue downstream without focus on identifying and solving the problems. This practice can turn small issues into large problems, resulting in subsequent mistakes which complicate matters and cost time and money. During the early stages of a project, these issues can drastically hamper execution in getting a product to market in a timely basis.
P2P operates in a “Strait talk” fashion with our factory and our clients, and we teach our factories to work in a straight talk fashion with us. As a result, we prevent you from having to deal with delays, expenses and missed opportunities that often result. Sometimes things will go wrong on projects, and P2P can identify and resolve them quickly and decisively because we are face-to-face on site, and we understand the culture. We train our factories to deal in straight talk with us by going to see with our own eyes at the factory what is going on with your project, confirming the facts and modelling the transparency we expect. Our decades of experience and being face-to-face enables us to push back on unacceptable answers, know when to escalate matters upstream, and having relationships with factory leadership which allow us to do so effectively.
Finally, all shipments pass our final quality assurance inspection before the order can ship out of the factory and before you need to pay the balance payment to us. We guarantee that the product you receive will be the product you ordered. If you don’t have your own savvy on-site representation in Asia, like P2P, you run the risk of finding out about shipment problems when they arrive defective on your dock, and you have no recourse to resolve them.
We have experience working with clients who sell retail products through Big Box Retail channels, where it is common for the retailer to fine their suppliers for late shipments, we therefore understand the importance of timely deliveries. Beyond the unique attributes of that particular channel, we take a lot of pride in being on time with our shipments. We choose our factory partners carefully and we like manufacturers that under promise and over deliver. We know your timetable is critical to your success. We would be happy to have you speak with a few of our customers to gauge their satisfaction with our dependability.
Tariffs have worked to bring China closer to the rest of the world in competitiveness, but it is still far and away the world leader in manufacturing due in part to all of the transfer of technology from multi-national companies who have been operating factories here since the 1980s, and the resulting infrastructure of component and finished goods manufacturers now operating there across all industries and products. Additionally, the strong factories have become incredibly cost efficient due to the Chinese being very industrious hard-working people, and their highly competitive wage model. Most often we see lower cost labor countries continue to lag behind China’s competitiveness due to this combination of factors. Therefore, even with the higher tariffs added to the prices of goods produced in China, the total cost is still typically lower than they would be producing the goods in the US or in other countries with lower production wage rates.
For some select products, prudent manufacturing strategy has already relocated to lower cost labor markets in Asia that also have lower import duties to the U.S., and for those types of products we are sometimes already sourcing them in these optimal locations. When our sourcing strategy extends to Vietnam or elsewhere outside of China, we have extended our inspection teams to be able to provide QA support for factories located there.