We are a small operation and pride ourselves on quality and customer service. We've made a conscious effort not to expand our core operation for reasons I'm not going to explain right now. So it is obvious to outsource if we get more orders than we can cope with doesn't it?
We've tried other companies in the UK, we've tried France, Eastern Europe and China. We've lost shedloads of money shipping moulds backwards and forwards and reject parts.
Lesson 1.
Start with an precise engineering level quality standard.
We didn't, we thought some of it was obvious.
Lesson 2.
Don't use places outside the UK unless you are going to put a lot of business their way. Any price advantage will be lost in poor quality; agency fees and tooling costs.
One consignment from China was 90% reject. The frustrating thing was that the base product was fine, these were all lacquering problems.
Conclusion.
All our motorsport carbon production has been brought back in house.
All of our phone case production has been brought back in house.
