Thanks for your comments. This is always a very interesting subject to me as I have been interested in quality, what it means and the myth that quality is only available in certain parts of the world. If that were true then Japan would never have evolved into what it is today which is not the same perception of the Japan of 40 years ago. China is on that same trajectory.
Cool Lights has many happy customers on this site who will tell you they have never been left in the lurch for service if there was an issue and they told us about it. We simply execute in China with contract/OEM manufacturers, as this is where we can make it happen affordably and that's what our customers want. Cool Lights is not a trading company and we don't sell the same products as "dealers" of generic Chinese equipment do. All of our equipment is either of our own design or has our own signature improvements over what others sell. As far as quality goes, we are extremely happy with the reliability of what we sell and we do warrant everything we sell with the same kinds of warranties as other competitors do. Sure we have issues occasionally, who doesn't with new products. But we stand behind them and they just get better and better.
Product reliability is really a maturity that is born of pride of work, experience and revisions, not the country where something is made. Those attributes can be applied anywhere in the world. Much of what people complain about in products that aren't reliable can be boiled down to a combination of any or all of the following: issues surrounding laziness, dishonesty, ignorance of customer expectations, lack of thoroughness, bad supervision, lack of revisions to fix issues or perhaps not a well-thought out design--which could literally come out of any part of the world, not just Asia. Nothing is completely perfect and certainly not on generation one so you learn if you want to improve your position vis-a-vi other competitors.
If there are products that are substandard coming out of China, that is just a lack of experience or understanding of what quality is, being isolated from end customers and their comments, and in general, ignorance about what other markets expect (which by the way, is defined differently in different parts of the world). That can easily be fixed with supervision, education and exposure to the end customer, as education and exposure to new ideas can also fix generalizations and prejudices, for those so inclined. I personally feel that generalizations and prejudice are pretty dreary so I avoid them because those all tend to become your reality.
By the way, did you know that many of the subsystems used in extremely complex equipment like cameras are coming from China now? Computer motherboards too. That's right--Taiwan and Japan are the brains of Asia and China is pretty much the muscle these days, executing the manufacturing for well known factories. Its all anecdotal where something is really made and you cannot ultimately know that as its normally considered proprietary. If for no other reason than that competitors would try to run with the information and stir up all kinds of trouble. So they can do cameras or motherboards in China but they can't do lighting?
We do it the right way and that's my reality (somewhat enlightened since I've been over here in China going on 4 years now). No matter where you make something, its all about careful design, planning, listening, knowing what market expectations are, revisions as necessary and above all, supervision. That's how you get to maturity and quality. I am after all, not living over here for the culinary experience alone.
Originally Posted by Richard Andrewski
