The least dramatic story
Suppliers like to tell you about the rescue. The rush order that shipped in days. The disaster that was averted. The impossible deadline that somehow got met.
Seven years, one customer
We have a customer in Russia who has been ordering from us since 2019. In seven years there has been no rescue, no disaster and no impossible deadline. He started with a first order of a few hundred pieces. He now orders around 10,000 fully custom bags a year. Seven years. No dramatic story to tell. He just kept ordering.
Which is the point
We have thought about how to write this one up, and there is nothing to dress up. Nothing went badly wrong, so nothing had to be heroically fixed. That is the entire account. If you are evaluating a supplier, the rescue stories are the least useful thing you will be shown. A supplier who can describe a dramatic recovery has, by definition, been somewhere that needed recovering from. Sometimes that is genuinely bad luck. Often it is a process that does not hold, told from its best angle.
What buyers actually need
What you actually want from a supplier is boring. You want the sample to arrive when they said. You want the bulk to match the sample. You want the second order to be as good as the first, and the twentieth to be as good as the second. You want to stop thinking about it. None of that produces a good story. All of it produces a customer who is still there seven years later, ordering thirty times what he started with.
What this means if you are placing a first order
Start small. A first order of a few hundred pieces is a real test, and we would rather you ran it than took our word for anything. Our starting point is from 50 pcs*, so a trial does not require a commitment you are not ready to make. Then judge us on the unglamorous things. Did the sample arrive in the window we quoted: 7-15 days? Did the bulk look like the sample? Did we tell you when something needed changing, or did we let you find out? Those questions are answerable within one order cycle. Seven years is just the same answer, repeated.