Die-Cast Facility Visit – Clipless

While it is easy to specify an exotic material with the strength properties needed, and specify a manufacturing process that will deliver the required tolerances, the reality of manufacturing means you don’t have all of the choice in the world. Exotic materials and high precision tolerancing is expensive, and this product had to compete with the cost of a belt-clip.

A balance must be struck between what you know will work, and what you can effectively do with a supply chain willing to work with you. In our case, the small size of the initial production order and the overall low-cost of the unit meant it was a challenge to make the order desirable for our manufacturing partners. We communicated extensively with our partners in China, learning a lot from a visit to their die-cast facility and ultimately changing our design to suit what they were able to do for our target price. Dylan put together this little movie on his manufacturing liaison visit in China, late 2013.