On this episode of DTC Pod, Kian joins Blaine & Ramon to discuss the playbook for working with manufacturers to bring products to life. They cover identifying manufacturing partners, how to vet a factories quality, how to establish buying credibility, getting product samples, building your spec sheet, negotiating price and volume, building relationships with your manufacturing partner, pre-shipment samples, tips for your manufacturing agreement, sharing costs, production cadence, avoiding shipping disasters, scaling supply chain, and tips & tricks from a life time working with the biggest names in the sourcing and manufacturing world.Highlights:6:35 - Face-To-Face boosts salesAnd like to your point, doing it in person face to face forces you to build relationships. And honestly, like if anyone's listened to much of my content before, I always preach the importance of you get the best results in this business from building relationships, right? Because as a result of a better relationship, you get a better price, you get a better credit terms, they offer you new products that you're working on, they give you good information about what your competitors are doing.7:30 - What not to do when sourcingAnd where people have really made mistakes is if they just go, they're looking for a product, let's say blue light blocking glasses, they go into alibaba.com and on the website all the products look the same and they'll see it for like, $3 and $4 50 and $7 and $1 80. And they're like, what's the difference here? Because this looks like the exact same product. This is $1 80 that was $7, right? Let me go for like the cheaper one. But in actual fact, like when you're using alibaba.com, the purpose of it is to find the best suppliers, not to find the lowest price. And once you find the best suppliers, then you can start to negotiate the price down.This episode is brought to you by:OpenStore- Visit https://open.store to get a free, no-obligation offer for your e-commerce business from OpenStore in 24 hours.Recharge- Visit https://rechargepayments.com/dtcpod to see how over 15,000 commerce brands power their subscriptions Have any questions about the show or topics you'd like us to explore further?Shoot us a DM; we'd love to hear from you. Want the weekly TL;DR of tips delivered to your mailbox?Check out our newsletter hereFollow us for content, clips, giveaways, & updates!DTCPod InstagramDTCPod TwitterDTCPod TikTokKian Golzari - Global leader in product sourcing & development, manufacturing, and supply chainRamon Berrios - CEO of Trend.ioBlaine Bolus - Co-Founder of Seated