China

“Life was very happy in a sense that you don't have to be jealous of each other. You don't have to be wanting things you could not have.”

“China at that time already started exporting fashion, and they would have those rejected fashion, and they put them on sale near the, you know, bus stations.”

“Particularly in that part of China, which is very entrepreneurial, there are villages that make nothing but buttons, or a village that make nothing but candlestick.”

“At that time, China did not have a home fragrance industry. To produce that kind of oil, you need a chemical compounding facility, and they were not used to that. They used to sell their cinnamons and their jasms overseas. The French and the U.S. Will then tur…”

“I had several product problems like that that came from a manufacturer trying to improve his margins, and you know, this is something that in the manufacturing world people call quality fade, And it's a big problem when you manufacture through China.”

“And they found about 20 different factories scattered around China that were all creating fake counterfeit TRX suspension trainers.”

“And they found about 20 different factories scattered around China that were all creating fake counterfeit TRX suspension trainers.”

“A manufacturer trying to improve his margins, and you know, this is something that in the manufacturing world, people call quality fade, and it's a big problem when you manufacture through China.”

“She was a doctor, and she effectively had to give up her credentials, because when she emigrated to the U.S., no institution in the U.S. Would recognize her credentials from China, and so as a result, she Kind of had to go backwards. So she worked as a waitres…”

“Even to this day, most of the original Manufacturing components, the rods and the net material that we use, we're using the exact same manufacturing partners. They've come a long way, the whole way through the whole journey. We've never deviated from that, but…”

“We were still doing the bulk of the manufacturing in the U.S., and that gave us very rapid turnaround, but now we could also do high volume things at as low a cost as anyone else was doing anywhere. So, because we were a little bit early there, it was an advan…”

“I was frustrated because at that time, China did not have a home fragrance industry. To produce that kind of oil, you need a chemical compounding facility, and they were not used to that. They used to sell their cinnamons and their jasms overseas. The French a…”

“When we grow up, there was absolutely nothing. Everyone wore the same thing. Everyone would be eating the same food. Everyone had the same small apartment. Life was very happy in the sense that you don't have to be jealous of each other. You don't have to be w…”

“And that paintbrush now is going around. That's the thing that is converting China. That is the one single product because they've never seen it before.”

“When we first started the business, a hundred percent of our supply chain was in California. And then of course, as we started to grow and I decided, okay, look, this is actually going really well. I want to go into eyeliners, eyeshadows, all these, I want to …”

“The free to play business model was already having success in Korea in particular, and then starting to have some success in China.”

“We do everything in the U.S., A lot of companies buy cans. A lot of the can manufacturers are in China. We don't do any of that. We do everything locally.”

“Even to this day, most of the original Manufacturing components, the rods and the net material that we use, we are using the exact same manufacturing partners. They've come a long way, the whole way through the whole journey. We've never deviated from that, bu…”

“And we skipped apart guy, which is in 2008, we decided to build our own factory in China because we weren't satisfied with the quality. So I invested about five million dollars in building a Chinese factory.”

“We used to file lawsuits against the importers and the retailers that were selling the knockoffs. It really wasn't possible to go after the manufacturers in China, and we were quite successful in those lawsuits for quite a few years.”

“It was the end of March where finally China opened up. We got a shipment of bags. We post a bag drop in the middle of this crazy pandemic... And they sold out in seconds.”

“The other thing was about a quarter or a third of our usage at the time was in China. And China decided that the Great Firewall would block WordPress.com.”

“They have that infrastructure in place in, in places like China and Taiwan that we just don't have here anymore. And so it is so hard for us to be actually successful because we do not have the infrastructure to actually make stuff anymore.”

“And at the time before the pandemic, you would pay probably about, I would say, 10,000 dollars a ton in China for that Melbourne layer, you would pay about 17,000 dollars in the United States for that Melbourne layer.”

“It was selling for a 120,000 dollars a ton in China. Wow. And it was going up every day”

“I had to become an expert in sonic welding because there just aren't any experts in sonic welding where you could go in China or you could go in Taiwan. And like, there would be just like, there's people that, you know, are experts in plumbing. They're experts…”

“Couldn't do it in Finland. You couldn't get the quality and the materials and the parts in any Western country, really, unless you paid a lot.”

“In places like India, in places like Russia, in places like China, in places like Africa, our lead time for sort of our insights is one to two years at times.”

“In twenty-twenty, it turned into a structural importer of grains. That means that the world's sort of largest economy went from being self-sufficient in some of these core grains to being insufficient.”

“We learned that our first factory had actually patented our Saturnal design in China, so that was something we had to deal with.”

“China is planning lunar missions for exactly that reason.”

“So everything was, you know, the quality was great, the craftsmanship was great, but everything else around it was a nightmare. I almost tanked the business with it.”

“This was, you know, something I'm like, I've never seen some, so much quality and so much detail before. It was probably one of the best factories I've ever seen. Better than ever, anything I've seen in Italy.”

“In 2013, there were a couple of key events that happened for us. One is we had started to manufacture in China, and we really wanted to understand are the factories we working, we're working with in China, high quality. And myself and a few of us went to China…”

“Where it turned, Guy, was in 2018 the National Security Council and the National Space Council declared that the moon was now of strategic interest. China was coming on strong, and the U.S. Needed to set the norms and behaviors of how we live in space. And wor…”

“The very recent history, it's only been India and China. India being the latest and the, and you saw the recent Russian mission to the moon failed on the way.”

“To be clear, we've had people from China, CCTV, tell us to go to Xinjiang and talk about the culture and the food.”

“But we also had people from the State Department tell us, hey, why don't you make videos about China and how bad it is?”

“But for now, I think we're sort of firmly in in Vietnam and India with still a little bit of production in China.”

“The U S has to lead and say, we need to set the terms of the race. And it's actually a race to the responsible and conscious deployment of technology that in its effect strengthens your society relative to other ones. That's the true competition.”

“Yeah, something like 95% is mined or processed or refined in China. So some of it gets extracted, let's say, in Australia, but then it gets shipped to China to process. So that's right.”

“We have never seen this kind of thing before, and there was no e-commerce in China. Only each net.”

“There's an inherent cost structure by making the United States that is forever going to make it more expensive than, let's say, Manufacturing in China, but you can close the gap down massively if there was volume and commitment there.”

“If you go to China today and you and I want to launch a, let's say, a jacket business, we can go order a 100,000 jackets in pink and 250,000 jackets with a hood in orange, and we can do a turnkey, just write the order. You can't do that domestically. Couldn't …”

“And to be clear, if you make stuff in the United States, you get the human rights benefits, the environmental benefits, the worker safety benefits that are baked into domestic law in a way that if you make it somewhere else, like Bangladesh or China, there are…”

“I found that these Egyptian cotton sheets that they were selling me were woven in China. They just named a plant, a cotton plant in China, Egyptian cotton, so that they could call it that.”

“The cookware, most of the cookware is made in, in China, actually. Our wood products are made in Slovenia. Our eco-friendly aprons here in LA.”

“We studied this, and we found out that what it would cost us to ship the product from overseas to our warehouse is what it would cost us to assemble it locally.”

“Look, I'm, you know, we've invested so heavily and their family, like, I'm not running away from China. It's not that easy. We've done too much.”

“I think they started at like seven cents a scorpion, but as I got more popular, And I wanted to order more. The price rapidly increased.”

“Cans now cost 11 cents. We were paying 40 cents for a can during COVID. We were shipping containers Of essentially air, empty aluminum cans all the way from China, just so we could fulfill the demand.”

“And so we can make generic pills here in the United States cheaper than what we can buy them for from India or China.”

“We pay, oh, it's, we almost double our product costs in tariffs. We have our costs, and then we double it.”

“And each reader cost you how much? 97 cents.”

“We used to, past tense, lead the consumer robotic floor care industry. We don't anymore. China does.”

“And we determined that the only advantage you have making it in China is wages, right? It's about a 30% advantage in cost of product. Well, we felt like between freight and quality and a series of other things, we could make up that difference.”

“If you ask me, am I concerned about a hot conflict? I'm less concerned than most. But depending on the actions of the leaders, We may cause the hot conflict, and so I am of the opinion that we all must be more long-term minded if we can. We ought to have a mor…”

“And it took about six to eight weeks, and I, we shipped a 192,000 orders from China, direct to customers in the U.S., and then that really, you know, that year we were projected to do two million dollars for the year.”

“Due to the tariffs on, on China, the price of monk fruit went way, way, way up, and it was like an extra 85,000 dollars a pallet for us to buy monk fruit.”