Fabule Fabrications visited a number of factories during our participation in HAXLR8R, a hardware startup accelerator based in Shenzhen, China. During a three-month period we designed and prototyped a cute and deeply adaptable lamp, lining up component sources and manufacturers as a part of this process. Emerging from this program, we’d like to share some of our experiences visiting various factories and learning how many of our everyday things get made. This is the third in a series of posts on this topic, about how we found a factory for Clyde’s enclosure. (Our first post brought us to Jetta, who makes Makerbots, Furbies, and other consumer products. Our second post was about a factory whose working conditions we didn’t really like.)
We found our factory nearly by accident, and it never would have happened if we weren’t located right in Shenzhen. We hadn’t yet decided on a factory for the injection-molding that we’d need for Clyde’s plastic body. But, we needed to find a lens so we could lay out our high-power LED board to the correct proportions.
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