With Chinese President Xi Jinping traveling through the United States this week, meeting with American business leaders and slated to visit the White House on Friday, Business Report recently sat down with some Baton Rouge area manufacturers who shared their tips and experiences in outsourcing to China.
Ned Pearson of Pearson’s Travel World in Baton Rouge became personally involved in Chinese-sourced manufacturing in 2012 with AudioBomb, a company he started that sells pool-safe speakers and headsets. This summer he launched a brand of backpacks called Southern Authority that also will be manufactured overseas.
These days Pearson has factories that he works with regularly, and Chinese firms looking to do business will actually seek him out. But when he first started, he just went looking for connections on Alibaba.com. He says the popular site is “a great resource, if you know how to weed out the bad people.” By the same token, Chinese suppliers will research him on LinkedIn and the like to make sure he’s legit.
Pearson recommends only dealing with Alibaba’s “gold suppliers,” the site’s premium members that have been verified as legally registered and operating businesses. He says some suppliers will try to “gouge you” on shipping and handling costs.
“You get two, three, four five estimates,” he says, “and some of these idiots will just highball you.”
Pearson also has “ground troops” in China—associates of his Chinese partner in AudioBomb— who will inspect companies to make sure they’re real manufacturers. Sometimes companies will fly out to see him. But he still makes multiple trips to China every year.
“It’s almost impossible to do it all over the Internet,” he says. “You have to be there in their face to get it done right. … Always get a final sample. Because I can promise you, it’s not correct [the first time].”
Edward Comeaux, owner of Comeaux Caps in St. Amant, has been doing business in China for more than 30 years. Back when the Gonzales/Baton Rouge area had a thriving “cut and sew” garment industry, Comeaux was a major domestic manufacturer.
But the local workforce began to prefer office or retail jobs, he says. Meanwhile, cheap goods from China, India, Sri Lanka, Vietnam and other nations were making their way into the domestic market with little impediment from the U.S. government.
“We had to learn to compete with the importers,” Comeaux says. “Therefore, you learn to import.”
And there was definitely a learning curve.
Read the full feature, and send your comments to editors@businessreport.com. Â
