Lessons Learned From 7 Years of China Factory Visits
My morning ritual usually consists of sorting through my morning email and extracting what is useful and deleting the HAM. One message that caught my attention this morning was from a manufacturer in China asking if I would be interested in their products. Curious I decided to check out their website and noticed that all of the floors in the photos were green.
Having been to a few factories it dawned on me that many of the large factories (the ones with windows) often have green floors but I never bothered to ask why. So, I went to Google.
My search returned an interesting article titled "Lessons Learned From 7 Years of China Factory Visits".
It’s been almost two hours now. There is a hot-ass cup of green tea sitting on the conference table in front of me. A large free-standing air conditioner unit is blowing warm air. Everybody (except me) is barking at each other in Chinese. We’ve been looking at the same mechanical sketches for an hour. The English translations offered by our sourcing agent are remarkably succinct. 5 minutes of aggressive back and forth in Chinese is time and time again reduced to statements like: “This product very difficult to assemble.
”Ya don’t say?
After reading over the lessons you begin to see a clear picture of China and why products are built the way they are. In one of the latest Hardware Asylum Podcast episodes Darren and I talk about Computex and the colorful people I encounter along the way. One discussion centered on the CaseLabs vs Thermaltake and the question on if TT stole their design. I fully believe that TT stole the design however, they won't admit it because to steal a design requires the blueprint. What they did was "reverse engineer" the design based on photos and the actual product to create their own version.
The lessons in this article talk about that and why it is important to basically block China from your e-comm stores. There is no copyright in China and they will do whatever they can to ensure the product is built as quickly as possible even if that means borrowing designs from the last thing they built.
Now, if I could only find my green floor answer 
Related Web URL: http://www.tropicalmba.com/china-factory-visits-oh...
