Made in China; Global Catch 22
IBC Shell has been manufacturing products and packaging overseas for our clients for 19 years, and we have become expert in the very odd couple of expectation and reality.
With diligence and perseverance we earned an exclusive PHD in:
Culture Shock and Performance Expectation.
I would like to share some of that experience and information with you. Hopefully it will be useful.

What do you want?
You want a design acumen that will transform your ideas into physical reality, and you want the quality that’s in your mind’s eye, and, naturally, you want it at a price, and you want it when you want it. I guess you want what you want.
Guess what?
There’s an even chance that you probably didn’t get what you wanted, possibly aren’t getting what you want, and may not, perchance, get what you desire going forward.
'Want is often a verbal incongruity that collides with reality.

Performance anxiety:
Whether your program involves 12 color print on a recyclable substrate, mirror polished wood vessels, a diaphanous fragrance package, stainless steel guitars, leather balloons, or titanium stemmed glassware, you must make absolutely certain that your supplier is capable of providing the product within your quality and performance framework.
As with every endeavor your foundation plan must be well established or disappointment will ensue. So why not forget about painting the house, and begin concentrating on the basement.

Don’t launch a project without contingency planning and predictable downtime for discontinuities; even holidays.
Discord frequently occurs with Asian manufacturers, often due to linguistic and cultural dissimilarities. However, most problems are usually traced to poor planning, insufficient engineering, a lack of pre-production analysis, or improperly monitored QC standards. Often the product or packaging design is inadequate or imperfect, and the deficiency is blamed on the Asian manufacturer. Defects recognized during the production sequence are vexing, often calamitous. Furthermore, primary factories customarily outsource to smaller factories to save money and capture production time. This practice usually sacrifices quality and can sabotage a program.
Our best practice manufacturing blueprint is cemented in longstanding relationships between ownerships that recognize and digest the path to quality and performance. Ninety percent of our production emanates from the IBC Shell Design and IBC Shell Packaging teams. Therefore, together with an independent testing lab and our third party QC assurance team we must represent the bridge to reality. Regarding product engineering specifications, QC standards, and performance dates, our procedure is to translate and transmit the data in the proper dialect. QC and engineering guidance must be tailored specifically for each program and, frequently, milestone tracking requires resident factory presence. Printing schemes and digital files can be developed domestically, and factory prepress approval plus continual on-press management serve as your redundant safety net.

Coming to your local neighborhood:
It’s an economic reality that manufacturing migrates to low cost, less economically evolved, cheap labor regions. In the past, innovation and new realities have stayed at home within developed societies, but now we have become increasingly aware of the imagination and neoteric ideas emanating from these low cost manufacturing regions. Nascent well educated middle classes in Asia, hungry for more meaningful and better paying jobs, have spawned this outcome.
Incidentally, this is the emergent middle class that will eventually purchase all of the merchandise that we no longer produce. Think China and India.