Sourcing
5 October 2026
Most bad sourcing stories do not start with a disaster. They start with a deposit sent to a supplier nobody actually checked. Here is the checklist we would use if we were buying instead of selling.
"ISO 9001 certified" means nothing on its own. A certificate is only as wide as the scope printed on it. A factory can hold a perfectly valid ISO 9001 certificate for one product line and not be certified at all for the product you are ordering.
Ask for the certificate number and check the scope line. Then verify it yourself in the issuing authority's database — for China that is cx.cnca.cn (National Certification and Accreditation Administration). If the scope says something narrower than what you are buying, that is not fraud — it is just information you should have before you build a marketing claim on top of it.
This single question separates factories from trading companies faster than anything else. If the answer is "our partner factory", "our cooperative factory" or "the mould shop", you are not talking to the manufacturer. If the answer is "we do", ask how many moulds they currently hold — a real phone case factory can answer with a number, and it will be in the hundreds.
Trading companies give you a registered office, often a floor in an office building. A factory gives you an industrial address in an industrial zone. Both are easy to check — satellite view settles it in ten seconds. Ours is No. 6, Hebeiling 3rd Road, Guanjingtou, Fenggang Town, Dongguan.
Plenty of factories run rubber and silicone compression presses and mould phone cases as a side line. There is nothing wrong with that, but the QC culture is different: compression moulding and injection moulding fail in different ways. Ask which machines run your product, and ask for a photo of the machine, not a photo of the factory gate.
A supplier who sends free samples to everyone is either enormous or not treating samples seriously. Pay the unit price. What you are testing is not the case — it is the speed, the packing, whether the colour matches the swatch, and whether they ask you the right questions.
Once you approve a sample, that sample becomes the contract. Keep it. Photograph it from six angles with a scale in frame. Colour tolerance and dimensional tolerance should be written down before the bulk run, not argued about afterwards. A supplier who resists putting tolerance numbers in writing will use that gap later.
A per-style MOQ of 50 pieces is not arbitrary — it comes from the colour-change cycle on the machine. Ask what the MOQ is for a new colour versus an existing one, and what it is for a new mould. Those three numbers tell you more about the factory than any brochure.
This is the question most buyers forget, and it is the expensive one. If you buy DDP, the supplier is nominally putting the goods on your market — which in the EU drags in GPSR responsible-person duties and, in Germany, packaging register obligations. If you buy DAP, you clear the goods and those duties land on you. Neither is wrong. Not knowing which one you agreed to is what costs money.
RoHS and phthalate reports are cheap and easy to obtain. What matters is the sample description line. A report for "silicone component" tells you nothing about a TPU phone case. Ask specifically for TPU and PC, and check that the report is recent enough for your customer's compliance file.
Your first order should be deliberately small — 50 to 200 pieces per style. You are not buying cases, you are buying a sample of their process. Did they confirm in writing? Did they hit the date? Did they tell you about the delay before you asked? The factory that behaves well on 300 pieces is the factory you can trust with 30,000.
Ask directly: "If a batch arrives with a defect, what is your process?" A vague answer is an answer. A supplier with a real process will mention a claim window, photo evidence, and an RMA number. Ours is written down on the returns page for exactly this reason — you should be able to read it before you ask.
If you plan to put "factory-direct" or "certified" on your own product page, make sure the paperwork behind it exists and that you can produce it when a marketplace or a customer asks. Advertising law in Germany is enforced by competitors as well as authorities, and a missing document is a much cheaper problem to solve before the listing goes live than after.