How to vet a white label pet product supplier you have never met

Ask for a legal name, a registration number and a place. For us, SimbaGo Tech is run by SimbaGo Limited, Hong Kong (BRN 80916271), and built by the engineering studio 2pizza.team. We are also building our own pet store, SimbaGo in Bali, on the same stack.

A company with nothing to hide gives this in the first reply. A company that dodges it has told you something already.

Ask for a name and then test it. Our questions go straight to me, Ivan Bolonikhin, and I reply within one business day. Send a question and time the answer. A promise about response time is worth the speed of the first reply.

Anything that matters to your decision should be on paper before money moves.

• The certificates for your market.
• The one-page spec sheet.
• The minimum order and unit price by quantity.
• The sample cost and delivery time.
• What the app can carry in terms of your brand.
• The first-batch lead time.

That is the content of our quote. Ask any supplier for the same list.

Ask which features are confirmed. For our collar the list is steps and distance, active time, calories, sleep, a pet profile and a QR pet ID, with no shock module. The things I do not list as confirmed are GPS location, a light, voice playback, sound and vibration cues, a branded app and a data connection.

A supplier who answers yes to every feature you name is not making a promise. They are agreeing with you.

Samples exist for this. Two collars with a mock of your logo, with the cost and delivery time shown before you pay, and no obligation to order afterwards. If a supplier wants a batch order before you have held the product, think hard.

Honesty goes both ways. Our website does not publish a price, a minimum order, a battery figure or a lead time, because they depend on your order or come from the factory's sheet. You get them in the quote. The pictures of the app on the site use example data and say so. The photographs of people with dogs are marked as AI images.

I would rather you see these limits now than discover them later.

Send the same list to both and compare the answers line by line. Compare the quality of the replies as well as their content. A quote with gaps is a quote that you have to chase, and chasing is how projects slow down. The list I use is in Twelve questions to ask a smart collar supplier before you order.

When a requirement you cannot drop is answered with a vague reply, when certificates for your market cannot be confirmed in writing, or when the numbers in a quote do not add up. Walking away at the quote stage costs you a few messages.

A great deal. Is it from a person or from a form? Does it answer your questions or repeat a script? Does it name unknowns? Our reply comes from me and carries the quote, the sample cost and the delivery time for your country. If a supplier's first reply says nothing, their tenth will say nothing too.

Keep the replies. Put them in one folder with the dates. If you later disagree about what was said, the folder settles it.

A call is useful once you have the written quote, to ask what the paper did not answer. I answer questions by email within one business day, and I am happy to talk when it helps. I would not make a call a substitute for writing, because what is said on a call is easy to forget and hard to prove.

As for visits, they are your decision and your budget. Samples let you judge the product first, which is cheaper than a flight.

Distance is normal in this trade. Most of what you need can be checked from your desk: the documents, the speed and quality of replies, the samples. Ask the supplier how they handle time zones and what hours they reply in. Ours is one business day, and the samples ship to your country, so the product comes to you and you do not need to go to it.