how to select the best manufacturers

Disclaimer: This article is written by Primarose company,  one of the leading brass and silver jewelry manufacturers in Thailand. All information is based on our 20 years of experience. 

To answer this question, we produced a 3-part series, including (1) where to find manufacturers, (2) how to select the best ones, and (3) how to calculate the total budget. In this article, we will focus on part 2 “how to select the best ones”. If you are interested in other parts you can check the links below. 

1. where to find manufacturers
2. how to select the best ones
3. how to calculate the total budget

The obvious myth is that most people try to find the “best jewelry manufacturers” via the internet. From our 20-year experience, most people seem to not find the desired answers online because if other competitors/designers meet the real good ones, they tend to keep those good manufacturers secret for their own usage.

Therefore, many names you saw can be for just advertising purposes. However, customers can check before making the first purchase with any new manufacturer whether they fit with customers’ needs. In this article, we collected all aspects that you should consider before making a move.  

Product Fit

This might be one of the most significant aspects that you should find out before choosing. Customers should make sure that the manufacturer can fulfill their needs as follow. 

Material

Please make sure that manufacturers accept the material that you need. because each type of material requires different procedures. Therefore, most factories prefer just a few types of material so that they can apply only one process.

If you are dealing with valuable materials such as silver or gold, please be careful that the proportion of valuable material reaches the minimum requirement. For example, it requires that sterling silver jewelry comprises at least 92.5% of silver. Hence, it is very important to know whether targeted factories pass the minimum requirements. If you are interested to test jewelry by yourself, please read our article here, 3 main effective methods to check 925 sterling silver. 

For other requirements such as plating or gemstones. It is better to dig deep in detail at the first meeting. For example, can they provide gemstones that match your needs in terms of shapes, shades of colors, and sizes? Do the plating matches your requirements in term of thickness, and shades of gold (14k, 18k, and so on)? Do they guarantee that gold will not fade away within a specific time period after plating?    

Finally, If your targeted customers have sensitive skin, How can you know that jewelry doesn’t contain harmful substances such as lead and nickel? In Europe, there are the most strict laws about dangerous substances to follow. Please make sure that the products follow the standards of your targeted customers’ countries. 

Product Type

From our experience in the industry, many factories have their own specialization, although many of them will say that they can do almost everything.

When it comes to products with special requirements, such as multi-layer lockets with special locks, springable or super thin products, products containing special mechanics, fancy-shape gemstones with specific colors, and so on, there are just a few factories that can fulfill these requirements for you.  

Quality

Please beware that the word “good quality” is subjective. Every factory will tell you that its quality is good, but the word of its “good” may not match yours.

One of the most common defects is called “orange surface”, which usually occurs on a large smooth surface. If your products contain many patterns or are small/medium pieces, they will be harder to notice.

For other defects that you may not be aware of, you can read our article here, 6 differences between good and bad quality of jewelry that factories may not tell you. 

(ORANGE SURFACE: Thank you for the picture of defects from ganoksin.com)

Some customers may accept lower quality. There is nothing wrong with it as long as the prices are fair to customers, in other words, if you set the bar of quality lower, you should get lower prices in return. 

Another issue that customers should be aware of is the consistency of quality. This is difficult to find out whether manufacturers can provide consistency for you until you order a big first batch. However, please make sure that they at least have a Quality control team.  

Factory Fit

We divided the “factory fit” into 2 issues which are:  

Compulsory

Compulsory issues require a factory to follow the laws of at least the country where it is located. Some of the common laws are related to using child labor and paying at least the minimum wages to foreign workers. 

Illegal factories tend to sell cheaper, and it makes sense that they will not tell the truth to customers. Hence, there are always some customers using their services.

There are some risks involved in using these illegal factories. For example, if the factories are shut down, it would be wasteful in terms of time to find new ones and money to pay for the new molds.   

Alternative

From our experience, most customers tend to not care much about this aspect. However, if you do care about biodegradable packaging and charity, there are some suitable factories for you but the number is very low. 

Budget Fit

There are 3 main types of costs related to the whole process, but you should compare only 2 types before selecting manufacturers because the third one is the shipping cost, which is supposed to be approximately the same in the same country.

This section will provide you with a rough idea of which one of your targeted factories provides the most worthy price. For detailed information on the total calculation of the entire process, you can read part 3 of this series “how to calculate the total budget”

mold 

This is a little bit complex because each mold’s cost is different. Even the mold costs of the same designs but different making processes are different. Therefore, customers should use the same design with the exact production process to compare prices from different factories.

The standard mold cost for a simple not-large casting product, excluding rings, tends to cost around 50$ per design. 

product price

If your material is non-valuable such as brass or pewter, it seems to be easier to compare the prices directly. However, when it comes to gold or silver jewelry, please be aware that the raw material costs fluctuate every day. Therefore, please compare the prices within the same time period. 

Another issue that needs to be concerned is quality. It is not strange that higher-quality products are more expensive than cheaper ones. 

The final issue is quantity. The more quantity, the more opportunities that the prices will go down. 

Therefore, we recommend ordering just only a small batch from different factories to compare both prices and quality.

Operation Fit

Work methods seem to be inferior issues compared to price or product issues for many customers. In reality, it is more important than most people think. There are many aspects to consider operation fit as follows.

Minimum/maximum quantity for production

Most companies are now considering “50 pieces/pairs” as a “minimum quantity”. Some companies (such as us) offer a lower minimum quantity than that at around 30 pieces/pairs (flexible). However, some factories can offer just only 1 piece/pair as the minimum requirement with the mold cost being 2-3 times higher than usual.

Not every factory matches your business size.

On the other hand, if you are a really big player who orders 10,000,000 rings per month, for example, and need a short/medium production time, there will be just a few large factories that can fulfill your need. If you are a super large buyer, I recommend you to find factories in China as it is famous for large quantities. 

Production time

In general, production time can be diverse, depending on many factors, including

Order Size/Variation:

The production time often has a positive correlation with the size/variation of the order. The bigger size, the more time is required.  

Product Types:

Do your products require more steps to be produced? For example, products that have complex gemstones and plating need more time than simple ones.  

Festivals:

please beware of a few months before any festival periods, such as Christmas. These periods make production delayed due to the high demand for products. Some countries also have special long holidays such as Thai/Chinese new year week. 

Therefore, please confirm the production time again for your specific order. The time periods that are indicated on many companies’ websites are not accurate enough because of the factors mentioned above. 

After-Sales Service

We are not talking about how nice the sales team service you, but we mean if unexpected situations happen, such as errors of products that happened due to vague communication, or due to the fault of both parties. 

In these cases, will the manufacturers edit the errors for free? Who will be responsible for the shipping cost?

These are important issues that should be taken into consideration.  

Intellectual property protection

This is one of the complex issues. From our real experience, we used to serve a customer who came to us because his previous manufacturer sold his exclusive designs, no matter with intention or because of misunderstanding.

Please make sure that your targeted manufacturers have some methods to separate your exclusive work with ease. In our cases, our company will provide a special product code for each exclusive design to separate them from being visible on the website and in the showroom. 

Moreover, please make sure that your files, including CAD jewelry files, will not be leaked. Please ask them whether they and their subcontracts upload your files to third parties sites. 

Finally, leaking can happen because of some misunderstandings. Please confirm with the sales team every time before production which products are exclusive.