[andrewmb]

To provide a somewhat-contrasting anecdote, I've been dealing with Chinese factories (mostly in the Pearl River Delta area) for the last 3 years, manufacturing fairly high-tech products. We haven't had any of the problems you describe. We did our first small manufacturing runs sight-unseen with our initial partners and everything went well. I think the story of cratered Kickstarters has more to do with creators who have little experience in manufacturing and no clue what they're doing in China, rather than some intrinsic failing of Chinese factories.

There are plenty of ways to make your BOM work in your home country, but at least in the US it's surprisingly difficult to get low volumes (<5k units) manufactured economically.

[powertower]

> manufacturing fairly high-tech products. We haven't had any of the problems you describe.

Only because of the nature of your product...

It's all about the product type, its price range, and the availability of reaching the customers.

A US company that made a general consumer-level (non-pro) 1 milligram scale (e.g., accurate on the weight to within 1-3mg) outsourced its manufacturing to China, which then had the same production lines make 2x the order, placed its own brand/sticker on the additional units, got it into the US, and had the various distributors provide it at a price that was 80% less than the company was selling them.

I bought one off Amazon. Why pay $200 when I can pay $20-$40?

If this is legal or not it does not matter - if it can be done it will be done.

In your case, the time is not just right. But the moment when everything aligns and they think they can compete with you...

[No1]

I'm curious - which scale was ripped off?

[contingencies]

So what do you want, patents?

[nakedrobot2]

Patents won't save you. Trademarks can help you prevent imports like this, but nothing will ever stop your product from being sold in other places, especially mainland china.

[contingencies]

Right, so ... you've just re-iterated my point. Whinging about the nature of reality aint gonna change it.

[nakedrobot2]

No, my point is you need to find people who won't steal from you, not because you have patents, but because they're not scumbags. Going to Shenzhen, the odds are very much stacked against you with this.

[contingencies]

Do small fly-by-night factories care about reputation? No, probably not. Does having your stuff produced elsewhere given this reality protect against its copying? No. Realistically, we just have to recognize that the exclusive right to produce something does not exist, except as vaguely enforced at retail through certain developed markets' monopoly-assisting enforcement arrangements... if you have enough dosh for lawyers to back it up. From a business standpoint, the cold hard truth is that producing anything physical is more about the object's distribution and marketing than the design and production, which can be monopolized only temporarily.

[nakedrobot2]

How do you know that your product hasn't been cloned and sold inside China, for example?

Anyway, I am glad to hear that you're having good experiences, and I'd love to hear more about it. How can I contact you?

[andrewmb]

The easiest way to know is to watch the chinese deal websites. I use those for sourcing anyway so I perform an idle search here and there. In all honesty, if you're getting cloned it's a positive signal that you have a potentially good product (at least on the higher end of the technology scale--for someone like an early-stage fitbit it would be disastrous if the cloners were capable). If you aren't able to watch deal websites, there are other pretty easy ways to track it.

It's also about the strategy of your development--you can take a few very small actions early on that will make it orders of magnitude more difficult to copy your product. But, generally, it's not worth a factory's time to clone your product, especially if it integrates manufacturing processes they don't have access too. I have this benefit because I work mainly with small factories and while they do cooperate with each other, there isn't the infrastructure or margins to allow them to do anything other than focus on building parts as quickly as possible.

My email should be in my profile, drop me a line!