A good friend lived in China for a while and we totally misunderstand how Chinese manufacturing works. It’s very rare for a single entity to produces entire products on their own. The photos of factories are often the entire plant, and the business you deal with is an office and a manufacturing room within the big plant. One might specialise in engineering, another specialises in producing Mylar sheet. Another makes hardware like nuts bolts etc. Another will specialise in capacitor supply. So when they want some 36mm capsules, they go to the engineering business down the corridor and they make up 100 or a thousand or whatever is needed. They buy some Mylar, and probably have a jog to fit them together. If six months later, they need more they go to the engineering people and order more. They might have a new milling machine, or they might have a broken one, and suggest a different company down the corridor. This is why orders are always unique. Finding a supplier is difficult, but expecting every order to be unique is just not going to happen. I have imported some similar lighting products from 7 independents suppliers. Every order has the exact same little bit of mould mark on the casings inside. The holes are different, the colours slightly different but the source is clearly the same. Any overseas customer has no idea who is making their order and the next one could be from somebody different.
