Over the years in international trade, I’ve become increasingly convinced of one thing: discussing quality a hundred times over a screen is no substitute for letting a customer touch the product with their own hands.
Last month, Peter, a client from Malaysia, sent me a message saying he would be coming to China on a business trip soon and wanted to stop by our pipe wrench factory while he was here. We’ve been working together for nearly two years, exchanged dozens of emails, and sent several rounds of samples, but he had never visited before.
He said, “I need to see how you make them. Trust but verify.”
I replied, “Come. You won’t be disappointed.”
I took him to three different areas.
In the raw materials section, he picked up a piece of steel and said, “I’ve been buying your products for two years, but it wasn’t until I tried them myself today that I realized why your pipe wrenches never break.”
In the machining shop, he lingered for a long time at the gear-cutting station. He watched the gear teeth being machined, then ran his fingernail along the jaws of the wrench. He nodded without saying a word.
In the finished goods area, he grabbed a pair of pipe wrenches, clamped them onto a pipe, and gave it a few firm twists—repeating the process three times. Then he said, “No slippage, great feel—you’ve really put some thought into the handles.”
At lunch, he suddenly pulled a purchase order out of his bag: “I was planning to place this order next quarter, but I’ll place it now.” The quantity was 20% higher than expected.
He said he’d visited factories in Germany, Taiwan, and India. “We’re not the biggest,” he remarked, “but we put our hearts into it.”
Before leaving, he took two old pipe wrenches that workers had used for half a year, saying he wanted to show them to the foremen on his construction sites.
Whether a pipe wrench is good or not, a customer can tell just by giving it a couple of tugs. We welcome industry peers to visit our factory—seeing is believing.