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Comment by howdytooty | Hacker News Reader

Waiting for a bad experience with an American company so that they can swear off all United States based manufacturing and move everything to friendly Mexico.

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In this case, it's reasonable. There are many reasons to avoid China, very few of which are intrinsic to China. Manufacturing in the US means your manufacturer is in the same time zone and speaks the same languages. You both have the same understanding of contract law and a court system that you are both familiar with. Traveling to the factory takes less time.

Honestly, I'm not sure why their made-in-china pens cost $50 each. It's a five cent block of aluminium that's been hit with a laser. That probably costs $1 to make in China and $20 in the US (worst case). Selling it for $50 still leaves plenty of money for the designers.

Anyway, their decision is reasonable. Hiring people in your own country is easier than hiring people half the world away. If two Chinese guys wanted to make a similar pen, I'm sure they'd be successful in China.

It's two blocks of steel, which have been milled, then turned, then one of them is laser-etched (and possibly painted), and they are finally both finished. Oh, and there's the screw-in part at the top. And it's being done in a relatively small run, which factories hate. The tooling cost is spread across 5.5K pens, not 5M or more. And Kickstarter takes 5%, Amazon something like that as well.

Then you have to ship to yourself. And then re-package and ship out to your customers. And be ready to deal with people complaining about them. And some will get lost in the mail (not your fault, but if you want to be awesome, you treat it as if it is). And you have to pay yourself. And the person un-boxing and re-boxing the pens. And you worked on it before there was a Kickstarter for it, so you should probably pay yourself for that time.

And maybe, maybe, you want some money left over so that you can afford to front the cash for your next run, instead of always counting on Kickstarter projects. It's not always easy.

Back in the day, several of us wondered why they seemed so bound and determined to do it in China: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3037108

I always thought cw was a native Chinese speaker.

In the US, you have more legal options. IIRC (and I'm not a lawyer), in China you are unlikely to be able to sue for more than what you paid. Chinese law can seem a lot more laisse faire compared to US law, unless they think you are in debt (and then you get imprisoned). Actually, it's not always laisse faire, it just looks that way because some things aren't enforced, and other things are - it's different, and your supplier knows the law better than you.

From reading http://www.chinalawblog.com/, it seems one solution is to include an arbitration clause. You can take them to arbitration in the US, using US law, and get the decision enforced by arbitration treaties. But you'd want legal advice for this - if you mess up, the you can end up in a no-man's land where the Chinese courts refuse to see you (because you've specified a foreign legal jurisdiction), and refuse to enforce a foreign ruling because it's not in their jurisdiction.

Also, you want some things in Chinese. If anything gets used in a Chinese court, it gets translated to Chinese. If the other party manages to influence the official translation (or the official translation is just wrong), it's not going to be fun trying to change the courts mind.

Whatever the case, working with a Chinese supplier requires a good OEM agreement, written with the advice of a lawyer who knows the ins and outs of Chinese OEM agreements. It's not easy, but it's better than your supplier seeing you as an easy mark.

China is also notorious for "creative interpretations" of contracts that just happen to favor the Chinese company.

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