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Manufacturing: What is the best way to go about procuring ceramic cups in Asia? (By best I mean reliability and scalability.)

Stanislov Krapivnik, Russia and Russians and How to do business here. answered:

I'm more than happy to go over this on a conference call in greater detail. I can't answer a large portion of your question, simply because I do not have the information.

So lets start from the very beginning: if 10.000 units of something relatively cheap as a commodity such as ceramic cups is an absurd number, are you sure you need to be sourcing them in the first place?

What are these cups for? Are you planning on selling them? Giving them away as a one off at a charity? Without this kind of information it is difficult to do a GAP analysis on your issue. Seriously, are you sure you even need to source these from any manufacturer and it would not be simpler to go through a centralized distributor?

If you are interested, give me a call and we can go through this in more detail. I have 12 years of sourcing experience, including from low cost countries.

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Question

I've been using Alibaba.com to find ceramic cup manufactures in China and other parts of Asia. The problem is, (as great of an invention as Alibaba is):
A.) most of the manufacturers I've spoken to require an absurd order quantity (10,000+ units),
B.) And worse, many of the companies I've dealt with on Alibaba say they have a product that meets my requirements, send me a sample (that I pay for) only for me to figure out that the product does NOT meet my requirements.

This has cost me a lot of money and time. I'd really appreciate any advice. I am always willing to pay for someones time if they have a lot of good information on this topic.

Note: I am looking for espresso cups coated with polymer for sublimation purposes.

Answer

Stanislov Krapivnik answered

I'm more than happy to go over this on a conference call in greater detail. I can't answer a large portion of your question, simply because I do not have the information.

So lets start from the very beginning: if 10.000 units of something relatively cheap as a commodity such as ceramic cups is an absurd number, are you sure you need to be sourcing them in the first place?

What are these cups for? Are you planning on selling them? Giving them away as a one off at a charity? Without this kind of information it is difficult to do a GAP analysis on your issue. Seriously, are you sure you even need to source these from any manufacturer and it would not be simpler to go through a centralized distributor?

If you are interested, give me a call and we can go through this in more detail. I have 12 years of sourcing experience, including from low cost countries.