One of the main difficulties at the start was finding suppliers. The first candidates for cooperation were Chinese and South Korean lens manufacturers. But we rejected their Japanese colleagues after the first meetings: they offered a small selection of colors and lens designs due to the conservatism of their main audience.
In South Korea, we negotiated with a manufacturer of fourth-generation hydrogel lenses, the most comfortable on the global market. The negotiations had to be curtailed after February 2022, when the potential supplier took a break.
As a result, we settled on Taiwan
It is there that there is a large engineer database concentration of advanced enterprises that produce high-quality contact lenses. The reliable suppliers production is fully automated and uses nanotechnology.
It took a year to find partners. It doesn’t seem like much… But in some cases, every minute counts. In the end, it was all worth it: we started collaborating with the Moody tint brand — #1 in Asia.
Another difficulty was the difficult negotiations. Sometimes they lasted for several months. The thing is that the tactics developed during cooperation with Western suppliers were completely unsuitable for partners from Asia.
The Asian market is about a position of strength
Western partners taught us that if they are interested in a new market, they are ready to give a lot of bonuses: trade credit, advertising materials, furniture for stores, and so on. In Asia, everything is different: manufacturers reliable suppliers do not make concessions, they want to receive prepayment and are ready to discuss the deal when you have provided them with all the permits.
Fuckups are our everything! But they temper us and allow us to grow
Of course, mistakes reliable benefits of trello integration with whatsapp suppliers happen at work. And our company has not been spared this. For adb directory example, our problem was long-term planning. We lost several months because we could not come to a single strategy. And so we concluded that for a startup, long decision-making costs not only money, but also wasted resources and effort. Now we have taken this mistake into account and switched to working in sprints, thanks to which we achieve effective results many times faster.