I will do this in the context of manufacturing the simple electronic product shown below – a digital kitchen timer that we call the Klip!.  This is an item that we sell at The Container Store chain and at gourmet stores across the United States.  I chose this product because, while relatively simple, it still encompasses all of the major facets (noted in the white boxes) of manufacturing a mass-produced electronic item of greater complexity.  I’ll start with a little background, then I’ll give a very basic overview of each manufacturing sub-process and I’ll conclude with a summary that will serve to make your first visit to a third-party manufacturing facility more effective and productive.  Armed with the knowledge from this post you should be able to walk into an Asian plant for the first time and have the basic working knowledge that you need to converse intelligently about the creation of your item.

American Innovative Klip Kitchen Timer - Dissected

Although the scope of my company’s products is fairly narrow, my personal background in manufacturing is more broad.  I have visited upwards of 50 plants both here in the United States and in China which include facilities as diverse as the GE Locomotive factory in Erie, PA to the Dunlop Tire plant in Buffalo, NY to the massive VTech Electronics factory in Asia.  I am knowledgeable of lean manufacturing techniques, Poka-Yoke and Kaizan events just to name a few.  I mention these subjects only to give you a taste of how deep the topic of manufacturing can get.  As someone who is planning to contract with a third-party rather than build a factory of your own, these subjects are more academic in nature than you need to know about for now.

Origins of a Factory

The Exterior of a Plant. While Not Gorgeous to Look At, This Is One of AI's Best Partners

One of things that I like about working with the factories in China is that big or small, I am typically interfacing directly with the owner and director of the facility.  I like these people because they are, like I am, entrepreneurs.  I respect these people because as difficult as it is to start and run a company in a country that encourages and embraces capitalistic activities – try doing it in a country like China.  Many a long car-ride I have spent trading war stories with these factory owners – one entrepreneur to another.  I know that many of you who read my first two posts draw your line between America and China, but I draw it between the entrepreneurs and the corporations.  We live in a global economy.  These individuals work as hard as anyone I’ve ever met, put people to work and make a life for their employees and their families.  To me, that is as honorable a pursuit in China as it is in this country.  More on this topic at a later date – for purposes of this article I plan to focus on the mechanics and leave further discussion of the culture for another post.

Assembly

Take a moment to put modern-day electronics in perspective.  If you’re under 20 years old, you may feel like inexpensive electronic gadgetry has always been as ubiquitous as it is today.  However, I’m 34 and I still remember the mechanical alarm clock that my parents had which displayed digital-like numerals on a series of “leaves” which “flipped” by gravity, as a mechanical gear-train churned away to keep the time.  This product predated the advent of the inexpensive, mass-produced integrated circuit (IC) and related display technologies (7-segment LEDs).

Of the factories that American Innovative works with, the oldest ones are a mere 25-30 years old and the youngest one is no older than American Innovative itself – about 7.

Admittedly, the young factory is not as sophisticated as the older factories but, much like the older factories, it began primarily as an assembly house.  Over time this factory has (and will continue) to acquire machines and technology that will allow them to bring more and more functions in-house, that are currently performed outside.  Perhaps other functions will never be brought in-house.  While we tend to view in-house injection molding (see below) as a sign of a more mature facility, we work with at least one very high-quality facility that continues to outsource this, presumably by design.

Assembly Line - Notice the instructions behind each worker which outline the detail of that step.

Assembly is what most of you probably think of as the heart of the factory, and it is.  All related components have either been acquired from outside sources or manufactured elsewhere in the facility and they come together in long rows of moving conveyor belts and – yes – young, predominantly female, wage-workers which perform a solitary function on the line (more on who these people are in a future post).

The lines are setup such that each worker performs a very specific task, which is carefully planned and designed in advance.  The details of that tasks are outlined on a sheet of paper which hangs alongside the station.  More recently I’ve seen a more sophisticated setup in which flat screen monitors replace the papers that you observe in the photo here.

A single assembly line step might be to use an electric, torque-limiting screwdriver to secure a PCB (Printed Circuit Board) to a plastic, injection molded base.  Another worker might then solder two wire leads to a speaker and a third might be an in-line QC (Quality Control) person which uses a harness to connect power to the partially-built product and test the speaker.

SMT PCB Manufacture

So where does said PCB come from?  Printed Circuit Boards are obviously the lifeblood of any electronic product and, not surprisingly, the technology used to create them has come a long, long way.  There are two common types of PCB – through-hole and SMT.  If you’ve ever assembled a circuit board from a kit using a soldering iron then you’re familiar with through-hole technology.  Wire leads from individual components are hand-fed into the PCB (etched previously).  The leads are then soldered and snipped.  Some components are still done in exactly this manner today but more recently newer, less manual-intensive, technology has replaced this process.  SMT stands for Surface-Mount Technology.

American Innovative Klip! Timer PCB

Look closely at the photo above.  This is the PCB that is the core of American Innovative’s Klip! kitchen timer.  The board above is an example of an SMT PCB.  On the far right you see a shiny metal cylinder which contains the quartz crystal responsible for running the clock.  This is the lone through-hole component on this board.  Next to that you can see two white wire leads which run to the speaker.  There are a couple of wire jumpers and the battery contacts on the left but other than that the remaining components are surface-mount technology.  The small, rectangular boxes are various resistors, transistors or diodes which comprise the circuit.

SMT Machine - Notice that many small PCBs are being assembled all at once. They are later separated.

These special SMT components are placed on the PCB using a machine which literally grabs the components one at a time and places them on the board using a guided positioning system or in some older machines I’ve seen (like the one picture at right) by moving the PCB itself around, with the feed mechanism stationary.  As an aside, I’ve even been to a factory that makes these machines – there happens to be one in upstate New York.  If you ever wanted to know what the machine is that makes the machines that make the machines?  Well … it’s us.

There are countless videos on YouTube that will allow you to see an SMT machine in action.  Here’s one that I located randomly.  Next the boards are run through a machine called a wave solderer that essentially solders every lead all at once, thereby replacing the extensive manual labor that used to go into the creation of a similar board made using through-hole technology.  The SMT boards are smaller and more reliable.

IC Bonding

IC Bonding Machine in Action - The Finished Item Will Be a Walkie-Talkie

Looking at the photo of the PCB again, you’ll notice that I haven’t mentioned anything about what that ubiquitous little black blob is.  That is a blob of epoxy.  Beneath the epoxy is the board’s MCU (Micro Controller Unit).  The MCU is “stitched” to the board in a process that looks not unlike sewing with a sewing machine.  A worker aligns the IC bonding machine with the receiving area of the PCB using a high-power digital magnifier and then the rest of the process is completely automated.  Finally a blob of epoxy covers the delicate MCU pins to prevent damage and deterioration.

Injection Molding

“One Word: Plastics”.  Injection molding is the process by which hot, liquefied plastic is injected into steel (or sometimes other materials) cavities called moulds, under high-pressure.  There is a real art to injection molding that includes proper design of the parts themselves, the moulds that form the parts and the various parameters that can be tweaked during the injection process itself.  For now, suffice to say that all of the plastic components of your product are made – one at a time – using this process.  In the photo at the very top of this post, this would include the white housing components, black belt clip and battery door, translucent LCD cover, rubber buttons and even that tiny, little white spec which is the “Set” button from the rear of the unit.  One or two workers typically operate the station.  A first worker runs the injection molder, removing each newly molded part by hand.  A second worker removes flash – excess unwanted plastic – from the finished part using a knife.  The final parts are carefully stacked in bins for transport to the assembly area mentioned above or, if injection is an outside process, for shipment to the main factory.

Tool & Die Making

Steel Tools - These Massive Steel Tools Are Inserted Into The Injection Moulding Machines

Closely related to injection molding is the tool shop.  Again, not every factory has injection molding in-house and even those that do may outsource the creation of the steel tooling to an outside specialty house.  Creation of the steel tooling is one of the longest stages of the product design process – typically taking 6-8 weeks from beginning to end.  Steel blanks are machined using CNC (Computer Numerical Control) Machines or by another process called ECM (Electrochemical Machining).  In another post perhaps I’ll talk a little about the design of plastic parts which, in addition to serving their intended purpose in your product, need to be designed in such a way that they can be easily injected.  Smart design of your plastics will allow you to avoid features that are difficult to mold, resulting in mechanical apertures called “actions” which make your tools more complex and more expensive.  A basic understanding of plastic part design is important for this reason.  As someone new to this world, you may have a state-side company design a basic CAD database and they may not do it well.  The Asian factories you ask to quote your part will typically not question your design and you may get back extremely expensive quotes (thereby deflating your entrepreneurial spirit) for a part which, if designed, slightly differently may have resulted in tooling charges a fraction of the cost.  Even slight knowledge – “talking points” type of knowledge – of every aspect of the design of your specific type of item will go a very long way.  This is akin to the consumer who gets ripped off by the local garage because they don’t understand that cars no longer have carburetors, distributors or batteries that need refilling.  A basic knowledge of your car may save you a lot of money at the repair shop.

Painting & Deco

Painting of plastic parts that are not molded in color is typically done using masking and spray booths.  One of the nice touches that we added to the Klip! timer is a rubberized paint on the rear housing, belt clip and battery door.   This rubberized paint makes the product nicer to hold and gives it a higher-quality appeal.  It is worth noting, that this rubberized paint is not without a cost.  I believe the upcharge is something like 10-12 cents, which by the 4x rule, is approximately forty cents at retail, but we felt it was important.  Determining your target retail price point and understanding whether or not you can make your item for a cost that will allow for that retail price is extremely critical and should predate any discussion with designers or factories.  Alas, this subject is again a topic for another day.

“Deco” refers to lettering or other graphics which are applied to the product using processes known as pad-printing or silk-screening, to name two.  I won’t get into the details of these processes but typically the results from silk-screening are better but the shape and size of your part may limit your ability to use this process in some cases.  Pad printing is a more flexible alternative in that case.

Quality Control (QC)

Quality Control is such an important topic that I can not possibly address it in a paragraph or two.  Suffice to say that QC is not a single “station” – it is a thought process, a way of factory life and something that takes place (or should take place) throughout the plant.  There’s inbound QC, in-line QC, outbound QC and third-party QC.  For today, your take away should be that if you visit a potential manufacturing partner you are going to want to grill them on what their QC process is and any good factory will want to show-off their attention to this aspect of the manufacturing process.

What To Look For

Welcome Sign At Entrance To Factory - We Have Arrived!

The day of your visit has arrived!  Above, I’ve outlined the major processes that go into the manufacture of your garden-variety consumer electronic product.  So what does all this mean to you?  How are you going to apply this knowledge when you walk into that Asian facility for the first time.  The key is to think about the steps that I’ve outlined below.  Think of assembly as the hub of the factory.  How many assembly lines are there?  More importantly, what percentage of them are actually in use during your visit.  If there are a lot of idle lines that may be a red flag.  Find out why.  Ask the representative who is giving you the tour how many workers the factory has.  They will give you a range.  The reason for this has to do with the seasonality of the business and should not be cause for alarm.  Dig deeper – ask how many of the total workers are on the line, in QC, in the engineering department, or in other disciplines.  A mid-sized factory (say 400-700 total workers) is probably a good size for a first project – not too big and not too small.  That said, there are large factories that are willing to invest in small, new companies and there are new, smaller factories that are destined for greatness.

As the tour continues, make a note of which of the sub-disciplines mentioned above are present and which are not.  Ask questions about this.  If there is no injection moulding present, ask why.  Ask who they work with (they may not tell you).  Ask if they plan to bring it in-house in the near future.

Ask for numbers.  One easy way to compare factories (even without visiting) is to ask things like:

• How many injection molding machines do you have?
• How many SMT machines do you have?
• Is IC bonding in-house and, if so, how many of those machines are on-hand?
• How many assembly lines are there?
• How many shifts do you run?
• What percentage of the year are the lines occupied?

Believe it or not, the marketing managers are used to being asked these things and will typically have the answers to these questions at their fingertips.

If examples of the factory’s items are not in the conference room where your visit will begin, be sure that you tour their showroom.  Look at the items and the name brands (if they are visible – they often will be).  Observe the complexity and quality of the items that are on display.

Try to meet one or more of the product engineers, if the engineering offices are adjacent to the factory.  See how well the engineers speak English, if at all.  Try to get a sense of who you will be working with from day to day.  One single face-to-face meeting goes such a long way in a relationship that will take place over e-mail for months to come.

Finally, make sure you look around.  How clean is the factory?  How well organized is the layout?  How happy do the line workers look?  Observe how the director and the mid-level managers interact with the engineers and even the line workers.  These sniff-tests will all serve to give you a sense of what the factory culture is like and whether or not this factory is a good fit for you and your project.

The factory will take you out to lunch and pay for it.  Try everything except for the chicken feet.  They may kid you but the factory reps know that Americans won’t eat the chicken feet and they’re ok with that – you will not offend anyone.  I heard on the radio just this week that chicken feet go for 40 cents a pound in China and 2 cents a pound in the United States.  Can you say arbitrage opportunity?  Now you know what to pack in the available corner of your suitcase, before you depart.  Good luck!  You’ll do great.

At CrunchGear.com As of April, 12, 2010

Just a quick word of thanks for the overwhelming response that I got to the two-part “Go It Alone” series that was published on CrunchGear.com this past weekend.  Commentary was active and generally very intelligent.  I appreciate you letting me know that there seems to be interest in this subject matter and in subsequent posts.  I also appreciate the comments from those who seemed to accurately ascertain that I am new to the blogging world and to ignore the “haters”.  Watching the commentary unfold in real-time was truly a great introduction to this world for me and I look forward to delving into it further here at DesignTheatre.net.  Many of you voiced in the CrunchGear commentary that you’d like to see a “Part III”.  If you haven’t yet voiced that, but would like to, be sure to add a comment over there as well.

Thank you again,
Adam

• Ideation – Where do Good Ideas Come From?
• Marketability – Is  a Good Idea Necessarily a Marketable Idea?
• SBA Funding – What is the SBA and How Does One Take Advantage of It?
• Protecting Your Idea In America – Basics of Intellectual Property
• Protecting Your Idea In China – Is This Really Necessary and, If So, What Can I Do About It?
• Vetting a New Manufacturing Partner
• Tips On Industrial Design – Is This Something That Can Be Outsourced As Well?
• Is it Even Possible to Make This Kind of Stuff in the USA?
• Effects of Outsourcing: Trade Deficit? American Job Loss?
• Analysis of Cost of Manufacturing the Same Product in the USA vs. in China.
• Reading Your Own Product Reviews  – Thick Skin Required.
• The Logistics … Of Logistics.  How Does Importing Work Anyway?
• Is The iPhone Killing Good Old-Fashioned, Mass-Produced Product?
• Mysteries of Retail Revealed – What Are Buyers Looking For in Terms of Margin via Various Channels (Boutique, Catalog, Big Box, Mass, etc.)
• The Best Working Prototype of All May Be … A Rendering?
• Vet It By Committee?  Thoughts On “Crowd-sourced” Product Development (i.e. Quirky.com)
• The New World Order of the Direct Sale (Etsy, Zazzle, CafePress, SpreadShirt, etc.)
• The Armchair Inventor – Online Resources Useful To The New Product Developer
• OEM, ODM, FOB, FCL, LTL.  GTLKA … Guide To Little Known Acronyms
• Continuous Improvement … Handling Quality Control From Afar
• More To Come …

American Innovative Chef's Quad Timer Pro

I am sitting in the lobby of the Royal Plaza Hotel in Mong Kok waiting for the owner of the factory that makes our Neverlate and Quad-Timer items to pick me up.  The final legs of my journey were largely uneventful although it was nearly 2am local time before I finally closed my eyes to go to sleep last night.  Dealing with the jet lag on the way out is easy.  I basically stayed awake the entire time, dozing in out of a half-sleep the way that someone who is over six feet tall does on airplanes.  Some five small airplane meals later, I had lost track of what meal I was supposed to be on.  Acclimation to the time zone on the way back is much more difficult and if you’ve ever been to the International Pavilion at the CES you can attest to this first-hand through the observation of countless sleepy Asian booth attendants nodding off in uncomfortable plastic rented chairs.

Before I continue where I left off from last time, I’d like to pause to address the question that was the inspiration for writing this article.  That question is why?  Why “go it alone”?  Why take the route that I’ve taken rather than license your idea (actually, let me be more specific – your product concept) to another party?  I am of the opinion that there is a place for licensing, but it is not for low cost – say, sub $100 – consumer products.  If you have a proprietary technology – something that you embed in another product then, by all means, license it.  If you have an idea for a consumer product and the desire/willingness to put forth the effort to bring it to market, then you should go it alone.  The reasons are many, but the main ones are (1) IP, (2) margin and (3) control.  Let me speak to these one at a time.

1. IP, or intellectual property.  There are proponents and critics of the US intellectual property process and I would definitely fall into the category of proponent.  That said, I know first-hand the realities of obtaining a strong US patent for a consumer-type device.  Anyone can file for and receive a utility patent but there is a vast chasm between that and receiving a utility patent that is useful or, in patent parlance – “strong”.  If you plan to license your device, then at a minimum you need a stong patent – one that is defensible in a court of law.  While you may not be able to read and make sense of the claims for a utility patent, you may rest assured that counsel for the company you are attempting to license your concept to can and will.  Aside from the fact that patents are time-consuming to write, and ultimately expensive to file, many great product ideas simply are not patentable in a manner that will serve the end that you have in mind.
   

   Recycle Factory Toy

   Take, for example, a very cool toy that I saw while mining for new ideas in a Hong Kong Toys ‘R’ Us store. It’s a children’s train set similar to the wooden track toys of my youth.  What’s cool about it?  Instead of plastic or wooden track, it came with a pulp-maker and a set of press molds.  The child grinds up newspaper and makes pressed track sections using the kit, which are then assembled for the battery-operated train.  Is it a brilliant take on a new “green” toy?  Absolutely.  Is the idea of molding paper pulp into train tracks patentable?  In the eyes of the USPTO probably not or, at best, very very narrowly (i.e. a patent that the inventor of this toy might be granted will probably not be broad enough to protect against a host of similar knock-offs).

2. Margin.  Speaking now from the perspective of the licensor – product margins on consumer electronic products are thin.  Manufacturing costs continue to rise, consumers (that’s you!) continue to demand rock-bottom prices and retailers remain stubborn in maintaining their, often very aggressive, margins.  The result is that the guy in the middle gets squeezed.  There is more room in some product segments than others but for electronics it can be hard to make the numbers work.  As such, the idea of handing over an additional percentage to a product entrepreneur who walks through the door with not much more than an idea (and this happens to me once or twice a month) is not very attractive.
3. Control.  Licensing an idea necessarily means relinquishing some degree of control over its final implementation.  And that’s fine for some but not for me and maybe not for you.  After all, your product is your baby and no one else is going to develop it in just the way that you want.  I respect what Chris Hawker did with his PowerSquid product (see related CrunchGear series).  In fact, it was his article that inspired me to reach out to CrunchGear.  However, you need only read his series to get a feel for the pain that he experienced.  While ultimately successful in his endeavor, it wasn’t clear to me that Chris felt very satisfied with the end result.  It may have just been my interpretation of his story but I got the feeling that had he to do it over again, he may have tried his hand at bringing the PowerSquid to market independently.

Now all of this is not to say that doing it my way is all a bowl of fruit.  It definitively is not.  One nice thing about licensing that is not true of bringing a product to market on your own is that someone else manages the marketing, sale, customer service, accounting and logistics of your product once it is “done”.  Albeit at a great cost, but it is one way to see your idea come to fruition without having to spend the rest of your life dribbling it up the court, as I must.

So what exactly, you must be asking by now, is involved with sourcing this thing yourself?  Ultimately what all of this productizing boils down is execution.  What I mean by this is the “putting of the one foot in front of the other”.  There are lots and lots of little steps involved and it takes a detail-oriented demeanor to get it done right … to get it done at all, in fact.

Alright, back to the task at hand.  One step at a time.  When we left off at the end of the previous installment, you had a “long list” of possibly appropriate factories that you located on GlobalSources.com and a decent product specification.  Hang onto your product spec for the moment.  The next step is to blast off an RFQ to the members of your long list using the automated features of GlobalSources.com to do so.  The automated RFQ (or you can manually email to the listed contacts, if you prefer) is a teaser.  The form fields will ask you to describe your project and you should do so at a high-level.  Be sure to clarify that you’re not looking to purchase and private-label an existing product that the manufacturer produces but that you have an OEM project (a custom, ground-up design) that you’d like to discuss.

Your RFQ blast should result in a decent response rate.  You’ll typically hear from one of the company’s marketing or project managers.  This is typically a young woman (but not always) that has a good command of the English language and a decent grasp of the technical process behind developing a custom product.  She is the liaison between you and non-English speaking members – management and/or engineering – of the factory.  She may even ultimately be your main contact for the duration of the project, depending on the factory.

Neverlate Executive Alarm Clock

Next you want to request that the factory sign an NDA (Non-Disclosure Agreement) before you send over your product spec.  Get one off the internet.  The NDA is basically non-enforceable, in practice, but you should send it anyway.  The factories know this, but sending the NDA (a) makes you appear serious about your idea and the protection of your IP – which you are and (b) is a handy way to take a first pass at eliminating factories that are not serious about working with you.  This small bit of admin will quickly separate those that are genuinely interested in hearing more from you from those that aren’t.

If you started with 12 factories on your long list, you’re probably now down to five or six.  Send these factories your product spec attached to an e-mail describing your interest in working with them.  You should reasonably expect two to four legitimate quotations to result from the dialog that remains with the factories that signed your NDA.  Some will determine that they’re not a good technical fit for what you’re after, others will simply lose interest.  Along the way they’ll ask you questions that you don’t know the answers to, like: What will be your initial order quantity?  What’s your target FOB cost?  What does FOB stand for anyway? (they won’t really ask you this, but you should know).  These are all questions that are elusive to a first-time product designer, but questions that have easy answers … perhaps in the next installment that I write.

• How did you found the company?
• How did you get the ideas for your products?
• How do you patent something?  And the all-time favorite …
• How do you make stuff in China?!

This blog will be a forum by which I can reveal some of my experience in a casual and fun way that I hope will bring both enjoyment and knowledge to my readers.  I welcome your comments for ideas on what elements of product design, intellectual property, Asian sourcing, and especially small business ownership you would like to hear about.  You may also like to follow me via Twitter at http://twitter.com/designtheatre.  Twitter is admittedly new to me and I plan to make use of it in a very sparing manner … so learn and grow with me!

Neverlate Executive Buttons

It’s Saturday morning at 6am.  I’m about to leave my Boston apartment for the first of three legs from Logan International Airport to Hong Kong via New York and Tokyo.  I will arrive at 10:30pm on Sunday.  Against insurmountable odds it appears that both my Boston and New York flights are on-time – an anomaly if there ever was one given that we’ve had a full week of driving rain inBoston and two feet of snow in Westchester County, just 45 minutes north of New York City where my parents told me they’ve had to sleep at a friend’s place because they’ve been without power for days.  Still, never to disappoint, and despite clear sunny skies, my commuter flight from Boston to New York is delayed almost two hours on account of “missing personnel”.  This conjures up images of airline top brass scrambling around to replace the guy who’s responsible for loading the salty snacks on the plane (as if) when the gate agent clarifies that our secondary officer is on his way from another city.  Or maybe he overslept.  Fortunately, having learned my lesson just months ago when traveling to a trade event in Las Vegas (my luggage was lost, never to be recovered to this day!) I seemingly accurately surmised that the chances of my checked baggage successfully navigating three airplanes and two carriers would be slim-to-none.  As such, I had packed light.  My fiancé made me pack two pair of pants, which I felt to be overkill, but I have a feeling I’ll thank her later.

So if you think you can’t fit a week’s worth of clothing into 75% of a roller carrier-on, then you’d be wrong.  The other 25% of my bag is filled with a menagerie of loose electronic components, busted circuit boards from my company’s products that I want to return to the factory for analysis and a dozen rare, Russian-made numeric display components called Nixie tubes which are to be part of a forthcoming American Innovative product.  As I remove my shoes for the usual TSA security dance I muse about the fact that I still have to unpack my laptop but the Kindle, iPod, BlackBerry and myriad of electronic components I’ve just described do not need to be unpacked.  However, TSA has the last laugh when they flag the Nixie tubes as suspicious looking and pull me and my bag aside for further investigation.  I am secretly pleased that TSA seems to be doing their job and then momentarily scared as the agent swabs down my box of gadgetry for a scan.  The Nixie tubes I have on me are what are known as NOS (New Old Stock).  In this case, this means that these tubes were made in communist Russia some fifty years ago although they were never installed.  Who knows what else they were making.  Still, I breathe a sigh of relief as I pass the scan and am freed to go.

It wasn’t the threat of a 10-hour interrogation that was making me nervous but the specter of not arriving in China at the appointed time which begins a meticulously planned five days of meetings and transportation, all arranged in advance with business contacts old and new, and long before my journey ever began.  Where I’m going in China, you don’t go as a tourist.  The industrial zone is not a pretty place.  You can’t rent a car, even if you wanted to.  There is no public transportation.  Pick-ups and drop-offs are pre-arranged with factories.  The good news is that the factories love when I visit or, for that matter, when any Westerner visits.  There’s a certain hospitality that can be found doing business in China that doesn’t exist to such a great extent in the United States.  They book the hotels for me, all meals are provided.  They roll out the proverbial red carpet when I visit, which is nice.

Downtown Shenzhen

The best way to source a factory in China is to go there.  For every would-be product entrepreneur whose wind I just took from your sails … relax.  In fact, that is not the way that I sourced the first three factories that I ever worked with and I still work with each of those facilities to this day.  I am looking forward to seeing factory owners, project managers and engineers, some of whom I’ve worked with for almost seven years.

Before I tell you how I sourced those first three factories, I want to speak to the cover article of this month’s issue (Feb, 2010) of WIRED magazine about the “New Industrial Revolution”.  Like many people probably reading this article, WIRED is my favorite magazine.  I read it cover to cover every month and have been doing so since almost the inception of that fond rag.  In that article, “Atoms Are the New Bits”, the folks at WIRED make it out like all that’s needed these days to make and sell a product is to 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.  If this were true, I would not be so willing to write this article and to give you a little peak into the secret sauce that makes my company, and other companies like mine, possible today.

Ok, so the AliBaba.com part is true.  Personally, I prefer a competitive directory called GlobalSources.com but it’s about the same thing.  Thousands of manufacturers have listings and photos of OEM items that they specialize in.   So your first step is to perform a search for similar items – or rather, items that may be made similarly.  American Innovative’s first product was an invention of my design called the Neverlate 7-day Alarm Clock.  In short, it is a clock radio that was designed with college students in mind – and facilitates a separate alarm setting for each day of the week in order to accommodate class schedules.  Not surprisingly, I searched for manufacturers that made clock radios and not electric motors or stuffed bears.  Seems obvious, right?  Well in the case of the Neverlate it was but we’re about to release a new item that is a handheld USB device with a dot-matrix screen, which we call the PBA (Personal Baby Assistant).  It’s designed to help parents of infants collect data about their newborns – sleep and eating patterns, medication administration, etc.  Well who makes one of those in Asia?  Hopefully no one.  (Aside: If you happen to find your invention during your search for a manufacturer you may want to reassess how unique your idea is.  Hopefully you’ve vetted your concept long before when you performed a detailed prior art search, but that’s a whole other article for another day).  If your concept is truly new then your process is the same, but you need to be a little more creative.  Recall the witch scene in the 1975 movie Monty Python and The Holy Grail.  What else (besides a duck) floats?  Very small rocks.  What else is small and electronic, has a screen and a USB port and some buttons?  An MP3 player.  A fancy bike computer.  A heart-rate monitor.  Countless things.  A factory that has some experience with these items may be a good candidate to investigate further.  Find a dozen such companies and make a list.  You’ve completed step one – the long list.

Injection Moulding at AI's Neverlate Facility

The next step is a little harder.  You need to turn the long list into a short list and here’s how you do that.  Get out your spec.  You do have a spec, right?  Ok, get out the napkin sketch.  Now open a Word document and write down exactly how your product operates from a user perspective.  What do the screens look like?  How does the unit respond when buttons are pressed?  What are the expectations for brightness, battery life, audio quality if you’re doing a hi-fi or talking device, textile quality and texture if you’re doing a cut-and-sew, materials safety, and so forth.  Sound difficult?  It is if you’re not serious about your product.  If you’ve been lying awake nights dreaming about making this widget, then you’ve already done the hard part – now put it down on paper.  How about the external design?  Regrettably it is outside the scope of this article to get into too much minutia on this subject but suffice to say that good visuals will both result in a final product that is closer to the vision in your mind and will lead potential manufacturing partners to take you more seriously.  After all, it may be China but a napkin sketch there is perceived the same way a manufacturer would perceive a napkin sketch here.  Do yourself a favor.  Go to Coroflot.com and spend a few hundred dollars to have a bright freelancer or a RISD student work you up some drawings or, better yet, a basic 3D model.  Whoa.  You want me to spend money?  Regrettably yes.  And if you’re not willing to spend three hundred dollars for drawings then you should not be proceeding down the “go it alone” path.  The trick is to spend smart money.  Some good eye candy is excellent bang for the buck, particularly if it’s a 3D Alias model (which can directly feed the mechanical design stage someday).

Ok, spec in hand, it’s time to turn that long list into a short list.  Stay tuned for the second installment.