I started a baby clothes business two years ago. It took me a year to develop the clothes, send to production and receive the final product. I received the boxes a few weeks before I went on a 6-months-exchange program. It was a very busy time for me. But I counted the clothes and checked if everything was delivered correctly. I looked at the buttons of a couple pieces but not every single one of them (380 units). There were some issues like the manufacturer used the wrong size of wood buttons and a couple clothes had the wrong color thread. But we reached an agreement over this.
These past months, I’ve been focusing on the marketing aspect. Yesterday, I started taking pictures of the products to put on the website. As I opened the snap-buttons of 5 (out of 14 pieces), it came apart. So I started opening all the buttons of all the pieces. Now 50% of my product is damaged. I contacted the manufacturer and she is not in the private label business anymore. She said she delivered everything over a year ago, but that she will talk to some of her contacts and see what I can do.
I can’t sell the undamaged ones because I fear I might cause harm to someone if a button eventually comes apart. I don’t know what to do. I have no previous experience in this field. If anyone has any word of advice, I’d appreciate it!
Yup, early on you’re gonna be finding workarounds for plenty of mfg defects. Anyone in hard/soft goods has plenty of stories about doing it. It’ll cost you a bit extra, but on your first production run you’re really trying to figure out if you CAN sell your product (do people like it? Can you market it effectively? Is the pricing right?) So chock this up to thinner margins, find a local seamstress to fix them, and focus on the experimentation aspect of launching a new product. Just fake it till you make it!