I was talking with the boss of a trading company in Suzhou (Jiangsu province) earlier this week. I was actually doing an inspection for one of my clients from Canada. We were talking about the North-American market, and she told me that importers there have gotten much more nervous with the crisis.

What happens? Sales go down in stores. Retailers have excess inventory in hand, and don’t see sales picking up in the near future. They pay attention to discrepancies on the orders they have given, and they take them as excuses to cancel the styles they don’t want to buy. As a result, importers feel a lot of pressure to avoid all the discrepancies that used to be accepted by their customers.

The discrepancies I have in mind can be split in two categories:

• Late shipping (delays are always noticed by the retailers)
• Substandard quality (sometimes poor quality is not noticed, with the exception of packaging)

The factory where I was doing an inspection had kept working during the 1 Oct. holiday and the Moon Cake festival. So they knew the importance of on-time shipping. Ironically, here is what happened:

1. The hurry to respect the schedule created some quality issues
2. The goods were rejected by the importer (and have to be re-inspected) because of very visible workmanship issues.
3. And this, in turn, created delays.

To sum up, excessive focus on timing can be counter productive for quality AND timing itself.

I can’t complain about the tendency of retailers to cancel orders based on unmet specs. It forces some importers to start doing quality control. The importers who are simple intermediaries (finding suppliers in China and breaking bulk for retailers) have a tougher and tougher life, as they should.

Ensuring specs and timing are met will become more and more of an order-qualifier. But managing quality issues requires experience and a long-term commitment!