We’ve been in contact with a Brazilian manufacturer of Next Big Thing-like products. We suspect that their NBT is of superb quality – far better than what we’re looking at from Vietnamese and Chinese manufacturers. We suspect this for three reasons: 1) it looks better, 2) people say it’s better, 3) it’s incredibly expensive. If we were to go with this Brazilian manufacturer, the retail price of the NBT would end up at least four times higher than we had originally planned.
So, while we’re not ruling anything out yet, we think it’s unlikely we’ll buy from them. We do, however, very much want to see their product – to find out whether their price is justified. If it is, then maybe we can use it to consider how the Vietnamese and Chinese products can be improved.
As such we’ve been in negotiations with them – from our end, with the main goal of getting a free sample. (Hey, we said their stuff was expensive, didn’t we?) Obviously we can hardly admit that to them. At the same time, well – manufacturers are happy to give out free samples to people who are credible potential buyers. We… are on a Gmail address, we don’t have a courier account (which is important, as we’ve found), they’ve never heard of us, and of course half the time we have no idea what we’re talking about. Which is to say, we’re not sure how credible we seem.
So our communications with our contact at this company (who we’ll codename, mm, Cerulean Centipede) went well at first. We seemed to be getting on well; she gave us product details, pricing information, an invitation to visit production facilities, and agreed to send over the sample. She asked for our courier account information (so that we would pay for shipping). We, well… shipping from Brazil costs a lot. We said as much. As we found out, this is not what’s done. Since then Centipede has been far less prompt with her replies to our messages. We have since agreed to pay shipping through a courier account. Which, sketchily, is in someone else’s name. (He gets shipping discounts, and we’re paying him back for the use of the account, but – it might not come across well.) These things are potentially concerning. Let’s just say word hasn’t come back from Centipede yet.
Then again, in these kinds of things all parties have credibility issues. In the end, whoever we deal with, we’re going to pay them a large sum of money, which will be 50% of the cost of a large number of NBTs, which they will make and send to us – after which we will pay them the remaining 50%. That is likely to be how it will work. As you can see, both parties have good opportunities to take the money (or NBTs) and run. Trust has to go both ways. And there are some frankly suspicious things about this Brazilian company’s product. Maybe it’ll all amount to nothing, but: we’ll keep you updated.