Yeah that’s right. Establishing proper communication is certainly important and identifying the right partners at the initial stage is critical. With the luggage company, the most important partnership was between the product development and the manufacturing units- since the final product is a Bag which is both a utility and fashion commodity, everything needed to be executed to the T. Also the chinese manufacturing companies are super efficient and advanced. Although initially the founders had to visit the manufacturing units and establish a deal and build relationships, but from then on the processes we pretty straight-forward- Founders came up with a design idea, sent the designs to the manufacturing unit, they discussed a bit over the phone about specifications, and within a couple of weeks or so, samples were sent to the US. They tested their products and if happy, went for a Minimum order Quantity to initially test their ideas in the market. The co-founder travels to China once before the product line launch to just check if things are in place.

Warehousing the products is another important aspect and again it boiled down to selecting a good partner (probably referred by an industry expert). Here as well basic communication was through email and phone, the founder visited them them just once, from the information i have.

Majority of our day to day efforts went into Branding and Marketing, Sales, Tracking- we had to come up with strategies to sell the products also identify right channels and partners( for offline/online sales) .

Yes, we had quite a few hiccups due to miscommunication with our partners, and it was very important for us to accurately communicate our needs and make sure the third parties are sticking to our timeline – toughest part. But, the trade off is a lean model without too much money in the game (equals to lesser risk), which gave us space to grow organically.

Thank you Jayasurya for the resourceful words. It is very interesting that you mention about your experience with the American Company. It is something I have seen being in vogue in UK as well, albeit a bit slowly. Most of the entrepreneurs here/ investors here expect first hand experience in the sector for any investments to come through. At the same time, operationally some companies do respect cross sector innovation which allows them to perform better.

– Having seen outsourcing first hand, I can certianly see a lot of benefits in maintaining a lean structure in a company and reduce overheads. Also you can write off a lot as supplier costs.

– On the flip side of course is about being very very specific about needs from the development company. Since time is being billed, communication needs to be at its best with very little room for speculation which makes it both easy and hard. This forces the designers to think and ensure that coders work on what they are best at – coding.

I do believe it is a delicate balance to make oursourcing work and it needs a good balance with internal resources.

I am particularly impressed and intrigued with your experience in the travel company and them outsourcing most of their activities. I am very curious as to how their communication model was, the level of management involved and how they ensured that the designs were well communicated. Can I pick your brain on these on any particular thoughts or processes you might be interested to share?

For example , I’ve worked for a start up in the travel luggage sector based in New York . Here the company outsourced the manufacturing to a Chinese company, shipping and warehousing to a Warehouse in California, The e-commerce website was built on Shopify, and they also sold on Amazon and other such sites. Their in-house activities were Product development and design, Marketing and branding , and of course finances (which was simplified by big-commerce, a software for tracking cash flow and related stuff). The founding team’s previous experience helped them in choosing right partners for all their activities but owing to today’s level of information and transparency provided by the internet , it’s relatively much easier for even inexperienced entrepreneurs to enter such fields. To be honest, the founder of the luggage company was previously into real estate!

Of course managing all the partners and the flow is definitely a task and the founders have to also bear the risk of initial investment of time and resources. So it’s important to know your partners well (through references or people who have worked with them before).