Doing it yourself – how to make your stuff in China

In “Going It Alone: How to Make Your Stuff In China, Part 1” and “...., Part 2” Adam Hocherman, Guest Author on CrunchGear, has begun to recount how he sources his products in China.

It's not easy to make a product in China and sell it in the U .S . You can't just “dial up AliBaba.com, find a factory in Asia, throw a napkin sketch at them and wait for your container of packaged corporate job freedom to arrive in America,” observes Hocherman.

In a series of upcoming blog posts on CrunchGear he promises to share some of the “secret sauce” that makes his company, and others like his, possible today.

“The best way to source a factory in China is to go there,” he writes. He travels regularly to China for factory site visits . In the post he writes of meeting with factory owners, project managers and engineers, some of whom he has worked with for almost seven years – all happy to see him.

Perhaps in part due to the global economic crisis, the boom times for sourcing in China appear to have peaked. Foreign companies with business units in China are increasingly focused on penetrating the nascent domestic market, and less on sourcing in China. Every year the large multinationals produce a greater percentage of their output for either domestic and/or Asian-Pacific consumption. While welcoming factory owners are typical for China, good treatment is to be expected with export orders down in his field of consumer electronics .

If you cannot go to China yourself and/or if communicating efficiently with the staff of your China-based contract manufacturer poses a challenge to you, the next best way to source a factory in China (and to conduct follow-up site visits) is to have a trusted expert or team of consultants based in China visit facilities on your behalf. After all wouldn't you rather forego the long flights to and from China, and the costs they incur on both your body and your budget? These consultants should have experience working in manufacturing environments in China, and fluency with both Mandarin and the local culture.

At a minimum Mandarin is absolutely essential for communicating with production line personnel, if not in many cases engineers, and more often than not, project managers and senior management. While most managers are able to communicate in English via email, a large percentage of them will likely have varying degrees of deficiencies in oral English. Communicating directly with line personnel is highly valuable, because sometimes management, for a variety of reasons, will offer a rosier picture to you than what is actually occurring on the production line.

Beyond exercising strong fundamentals and best practices, I can only speculate what ingredients he thinks are essential to his “secret sauce”. In a more recent post I comment on his process.

In the meantime for a look at how those in the trend jewelry industry are faring in their China sourcing endeavors, see this post I did earlier this week.