The manufacturing work is for custom dice that will be included with our Daily Acts of Leadership cards.
It’s been an eye-opening experience, so I thought I’d share a few random observations:
1️⃣ Finding a manufacturer: I connected with our supplier via Alibaba. Much like eBay or Amazon, it has a reputation system. Our manufacturer had a large number of positive reviews and a high rating, which gave me some confidence to proceed.
2️⃣ Price per unit: The “quoted” prices on Alibaba typically assume large orders (1000s of units). Since we’re making a smaller run (a few hundred dice), we had to pay more per unit. This was manageable for our initial run, with potential savings as we scale up in future.
3️⃣ Working with Amber: The rep I’ve been working with (Amber) has been excellent—responsive, professional, and quick to resolve minor issues. Excellent English too.
4️⃣ Design & specs: We provided the manufacturer with basic specs and our custom symbol designs as a digital .ai file. I also learned something new about colour systems—physical product manufacturers typically use Pantone, not HEX/RGB like we do for digital. And converting between the two is not as straightforward as I’d have expected!
5️⃣ Holidays & timelines: Managing two different holiday periods—our Western Christmas/New Year shutdown and China’s upcoming Lunar New Year (late January 2025)—added complexity. I was replying to a few manufacturing messages on Christmas Day to keep things moving 😬
6️⃣ A leap of faith: It’s challenging working with a manufacturer overseas—you can’t easily visit or inspect products firsthand. Requesting lots of photos and videos along the way helped. We spotted a few minor quality issues in the initial production batch, and the team remade our order without any hesitation.
7️⃣ Shipping: Once the dice were finalised, shipping was impressively quick. Six days after giving shipping approval, 500 dice made it from Zhejiang Province, China to Fremantle, Western Australia.
The end result? We’re stoked with the quality. They’re as good (if not better) than similar products from established brands we’ve been using as a benchmark.
Now, we’re just waiting for the final components of the Daily Acts of Leadership cards to arrive, so we can start shipping out pre-orders in the coming weeks.
Want to learn more about the cards or grab a pre-order? Click below 👇
Impact Society
Random Acts of Leadership
US$35
New
New. 52 cards to inspire small, daily leadership actions that build trust, boost team engagement and enhance leadership skills.
