Another Reason Why Made in the U.S. Kicks Ass–Insights from China

We get a lot of wholesale inquiries every week from retailers all over the world wanting to carry our products in their online or brick and mortar stores.  For the longest time, the only inquiries we always ignored were the ones that were from China.  Why on earth would someone from China want to buy our products at 6, 8 or even 10 times the cost of what they could spend to make it in their own country?   By the time our diapers reach them, after all the fees and shipping costs are in, they might have to sell our diapers for $30 a piece.  Who can afford that in China when most people only get paid a couple dollars per day (from what I’ve heard)?  We did wonder if they were just trying to get samples to knock off.  But that’s already happening anyway, so that couldn’t be the reason why.  A couple of retailers were really persistent and kept following up on their application even after my husband (who screens all wholesale inquiries) has already politely declined their applications.  Curiosity finally got the best of him, so he decided to ask them lots of questions to get to the root of why they really want to buy our products.  Their answers were far from what we expected at all.

Apparently in China, because of their one-child policy, most babies are really treasured and pampered.  An average middle-class household brings home about $1,200 per month, and approximately 50% of that is spent on the child.  $600 per month to spend on babies is a lot of money even here in the U.S.!  In most cases, there is no rent or mortgage to pay because the family usually lives with the grandparents, who also take care of the child while the parents work.  When asked why they would want to spend 10x the amount buying our products versus buying a similar product that was made in China, they said that most of the educated and wealthy people in China perceived products that were made in the U.S. as being the safest for babies.  None of that lead and melamine-tainted crap that’s been all over the news.  And since they were only having one child anyway, they don’t mind paying top dollar knowing that the product they are using on their child is of the best quality.  With our products being mostly made here in the U.S., it is a very attractive feature for those from China, and a lot of other Asian countries for that matter.

I thought that was really interesting.  I know a lot of moms here in the U.S. are tripping all over the bargain $3-6-made-in-China diapers, that are nothing more than just knock-offs of U.S. brands, that they get to score on Ebay and other places online, when a lot of people in China themselves won’t even touch that stuff to use on their own children.