MOTA 3D Printer and Tekma3D Printers Cancel Kickstarter Campaigns

[Feign]

Well, when outsourcing manufacturing to anywhere, not just china, you have to invest a large amount of your savings back into quality control. For every 10 iPhones that come out of Foxconn, one goes back to China before the customer has the dissatisfaction of getting a defective iPhone. The returned phones tend to get recycled if they completely fail to turn on, or are rebranded and sold on the cheap if they only have moderate hardware defects. (this is incitentally why many Chinese knockoffs can have identical components to quality goods, but still have vastly worse quality.) Thinking you can send off your order to the big foreign factory and have the product shipped right from there to your customers is a spectacular way to ruin your reputation forever.

EDIT: Also, crowbar brings up one of those reasons outsourcing manufacturing is a good idea, even if not out of the country. If the QA is part of a seperate company for whom the factory works, then they can demand better quality or threaten to go to a different factory. If the QA process is in the same company as the factory, then the pressure is in the other direction, and the factory can bully their in-house QA into letting defects slide to make their numbers look better.