How I Successfully Negotiated With My Manufacturer

The number one lesson I learned when working with the manufacturer is that you should never trust them to offer you ideas. For example, as a small business with demand in the hundreds of units, as opposed to hundreds of thousands, we cannot afford to go out and make 300 cases of each phone as this would result in a huge amount of useless inventory. What’s more, originally we were under the impression that we would have to pay for a mold to be made of every phone case type with the medicine box on the back. We were quoted $6000 per mold, meaning that this single cost could have put us out of business. It wasn’t until I asked the manufacturer if it was possible to only create a mold for the pill box, and then just use industrial super glue to attach it to cases the factory already produced, that we figured out that we would only have to pay for one mold, the price of which I negotiated down from $6000 to $1300. Additionally, using this logic, I was able to figure out that since the overwhelming majority of the preorders we got were black, we could pay for the 300 cases worth of material the manufacturer mandated as a minimum, use only half of it, and then reserve the remaining half to make different phone cases for different models. Since the factory already produced a large amount of black phone cases from the same color material as our AuviQ holders, this meant we were able to drastically expand our offering to consumers, from only iPhone 13s and 14s to many, many more.