Made2B, an online startup for customised products, launches a new service to print custom phone cases at no minimum quantity. Consumers are now able to order personalised phone covers direct from the factory floor.

Shenzhen, Guangdong -- (SBWire) -- 06/13/2017 --Entrepreneurs and business owners, who source their products from China, know how difficult it is to acquire goods at low quantity. When sourcing smartphone cases, factories often require a minimum order of 10,000 pieces or more. A new startup in Shenzhen believes it can solve this real-life problem and reduce the order amount to just 1 piece.

Made2B.com points out several reasons why factories don't accept small orders. "The communication costs are very high to obtain one order," says CEO Mr. Mash, "For factories, 50 email conversations result in just 1 piece ordered. There's simply a very high overhead as a result of inefficient communication and preparing manual quotations."

Secondly, factories today aren't designed for small batch production. Setup times are time-consuming and costly. "This doesn't mean it's not possible, but factories have to believe in small batch production first before they'll redesign their production processes," advised Mr. Mash.

Made2B have discovered that a lot of overhead can be easily saved by allowing customers to design the products themselves. This, in fact, means that they're joining the design process that normally would've been done by the sales staff. "It takes many emails back and forth for a customer to finally confirm a design to be satisfactory," said Mr. Mash.

This is why the company has developed proprietary technology to allow customers do design products online exactly the way they like it. In the beginning, Made2B thought the customer would find this cumbersome and interpret this as a sign of batch service. Yet, the opposite has turned out to be true. Mr. Mash informed, "Customers love to design products and find it in fact just fun to do".

When orders come, the specifications are perfectly ready for in-house staff to start the production. As there's no need for further communication, they're able to produce the product in a matter of minutes. "Many of our customers design the product and order just one prototype. Afterward, when they're happy they return to order a few hundred pieces to start with," says Mr. Mash.

Made2B is now ready to expand with more smartphone models and is looking into expanding its product range to other categories.