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!
I started out typing advice but my honest reaction is fold.
You aren’t cut out for this and could potentially kill a young child with your product.
Not doing a QA check on goods you ordered to your design from China isn’t just basic it’s fundamental and has cost you everything this time.
The correct course of action with so many glaring issues on day 1 was to reject the delivery. The corrector action was to hire QA before the goods left mainland China. If the manufacturer was happy to do things like use the wrong colours and materials to get it shipped you could have guessed at the quality of goods.
3 weeks was plenty of time to deal with this. You chose to bury your head.
This is all going to sound really harsh but I’m trying to be on your side OP. Right now you have lost a bit of money (shouldn’t be more than $5k max). If you go ahead and kill a child you’ll lose so much more.
Given your nature is to be non confrontational and let things slide you’ll pay a fortune to get your product fixed and it still won’t be 100%. You don’t even know if it will sell yet and the journey of mastering e-commerce is harder than the YouTube videos make out.
My 2p. Chalk this up to a misadventure
No one will buy them anyway. Super saturated market and the kings of the industry will crush them. This is why 80% of Shopify stores fail in two years.
^^^For anyone else thinking of accepting goods not as specified.
Dealing with China on small lots is dancing with the dragon. Vendor likely guesses this may be a 1X order and will never get another from you. There are good vendors, they do exist. But even good vendors may try to slip something past. Usually on a later order after you establish your niche and desperate for more merch.