Manufacturing »

They say the best way to verify a supplier is to visit them personally.

So I did.  I visited two suppliers in Jinjiang, China.  Both of them I had found on Alibaba. There are a lot of horror stories about factories who use Alibaba; in fact, if you google ‘alibaba scams’, you get 254,000 results.   However, the vast majority of people who are scammed want to  buy things like iPhones, and really, common sense should tell you that factories are not going to jeopardise their million-dollar contracts with Apple in order to flog a few extra iPhones to novice buyers.

I was also warned by my inspection agent in Shanghai about factory agents who try to give the impression that they are factory owners.  I’m sure these people do exist but I was lucky enough not meet them on this trip.

Jinjiang is a very prosperous, industrial city halfway between Shanghai and Hong Kong.  It is apparently the shoe capital of China.  Here is a little video which I took from my hotel room window, the sound of car horns was just amazing but incredibly it all turned into white noise after a few days and I didn’t even hear it anymore.

I visited two factories while I was there.  The first one was the factory which I have been working with for a long time now but who have been quite slow at getting samples to me.  Visiting them definetely made them take me more seriously; as soon as I arrived the samples that I had been waiting months for miracuously became ready.

As my trip was delayed by the volcanic ash,  I ended up spending the weekend in Jinjiang.  What I didn’t realise was that Chinese business etiquette dictates that a factory has to look after their clients for the whole time they are around.  On the Saturday I told them that I wanted to catch up on some sleep but on the Sunday they insisted on taking me sightseeing in Xiamen.  It was a lovely day out and the Island we went to was amazing, but I felt quite bad about dragging the factory girl out on a Sunday after she had told me that she had a 4-month old baby at home.   I have been emailing this girl at least once a week for the past 6 months and I can’t remember a time when she didn’t answer my emails after a few days.

The second factory I visited I will probably never work with as they quoted me a price which was too expensive but visiting there was a fabulous experience.  The wife of the factory owner invited me to her house for lunch, I tried to refuse as I expected it to be far away and I had a flight to catch but it turned out that her family lived in the top floor of the factory!   The building that they lived in was like an office block and it was so weird to see their furniture and pictures in it.  In fact, in both of the factories, all of  the workers seemed to live there as most come from far away provinces.  There was washing hanging up everywhere and little pre-school kids playing in the large courtyard in the centre.

All-in-all it was a hard trip; I never really got over the jetlag and and as I was the only foreigner at the hotel (other than lots of middle-eastern looking people) I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb and whenever I left the hotel I was chased by old-women beggars everywhere.  It did make me feel a little sad and uncomfortable how easy I have it compared to the people I met there: a girl who barely sees her little baby and migrant workers who probably leave their factories  and go back to their families once or twice a year.

However, I did enjoy spending a bit of time alone and all the hotels I stayed in (no matter how upmarket or cheap) had free internet (why they can’t do that in this country I don’t know, it must be so cheap to do) which, despite a lot of websites like Twitter and Youtube being blocked, made me feel a lot less cut off.  By visiting my supplier in China I probably saved months of product development time and gained a lot of trust on both sides which will make things much easier.