After working in China Manufacturing for 12 years, visiting and evaluating factories has become second nature. I forget sometimes how interesting it is after doing it for so long, but it is interesting. Knowing how the products we use every day are made is pretty cool. It's good to respect the hard work that goes into the everyday items we take for granted.

With that in mind, I saw the opportunity to show you behind the scenes with my recent visit to a "cheap sunglasses" factory in Shenzhen, China. Cheap glasses are an item we all use without thinking about where they came from, and even disparage their quality without a second thought. However, visiting a factory that makes them, you see that it takes quite an operation to pull-off, and you meet good people who work hard to put a product out that many of us enjoy. For many of us, what would we do without inexpensive glasses? All it takes is losing one pair of Ray Bans before you realize the value of being able to pop in almost any store anywhere and buy a cheap pair to get your through the rest of your vacation, and not have the stress of the investment you make in an expensive pair.

So, a day in the life of a manufacturing engineer. Usually starts with delivery Mcdonalds, then out the door, hiring the Chinese uber, and out of the city to factory country. Here are some pics of the trip. It takes about 1-2 hours to get to factory zones, where they're everywhere you look. We went to Heng Gang, which is a small factory district where about 80% of the low-mid grade glasses in the world are made. Pretty weird.

Dididache is like uber. This 30km ride was about $20usd

bye bye home

Leaving the city. Shenzhen city, especially around the bay, is a young city, spread out, green, low smog, great weather, nice place.

There's a mountain range just north of the city and to get to the burbs and up toward Dong Guan and Guang Zhou you have to take one of the tunnels. It's still Shenzhen metro area on the other side, and it turns into city centers surrounded by and full of factories. It's where Foxconn makes the Apple stuff that you belong to. The mountains are quite pretty. Apparently there are state parks with hiking trails. I've always intended to check them out, but well... no.

Tunnels!

South China is full of places like this; population centers with factories interspersed with shopping malls and restaurants. Here's a picture of the factory entrance and a couple shots of the surrounding neighborhood, including the restaurant where we ate lunch.

Rocket and Sully love KTV
Even small towns have plenty of flashy karaoke bars. Many business deals are made after hours of drinking bai jiu in the ktv bars. Some are pretty filthy, but others are nice, complete with marble staircases and full auditoriums chinese pop stars play on the weekends. I could do a whole post on the Chinese KTV culture. I could do a lot of things. But I digress.

Manufacturing 101

When you visit a factory, here's the agenda:

• Introductions
• Look at their product samples
• Tour the Factory
• Sit-down discussion - They tell you about the factory, you tell them about your product, and then plan next steps
• Lunch - they really, really, really want to take you to lunch. For some reason it's very important. If you don't like Chinese food then just stop reading right now.

Depending on the complexity of the project and size of the factory, this whole process could take you half a day or a full day.

The factory floor

This is a relatively small factory, but they can still put out a million pairs of glasses per year. That's called capacity. You always want to know the capacity of the factory and if it's enough for your needs. Similar to how I need to know my wife's capacity to listen to my bad jokes.

They make a lot of different kinds of glasses

These acetate glasses start from the raw material and get machined out to the rough shape

They use buffer machines like this to smooth and polish the rough shape

To get the metal inside the plastic, they use a machine like this, which holds the arms of the glasses, called "temples", inside a fixture that heats and semi-melts the plastic, then a ram shoves the metal into it.

buffing, sorting, assembly, and packing stations

Metal Frame stations for steel and titanium, fixture shelf, and inventory room.

Eye gouging machine for unruly employees.

Here's a checklist of information and qualities to look for at a factory:

• Cleanliness and organization: Does the material flow between stations make sense? Is the factory well-lit? Are there piles of crap everywhere?
• Equipment: What machines do they have and how many?
• Tooling and fixtures: This is important. Regardless of the product or machine process, every part is different and the machine will need a specific fixture or tool made for that product. The quality and precision of a factories' fixtures and organization of those fixtures is a sign of their capability.
• Materials: What materials are their products? What raw materials do they buy and from where?
• Certification: Do they have paperwork for their material and equipment?
• Quality Control: Every factory should have a quality control laboratory where they have test fixtures and equipment. Some may have them just for show, so it's important to see if they are actually using it while you're there.
• Evidence of their current business: Is the factory busy(could be suspiciously quiet or actually too busy)? Do they have nice product samples? Do they make products for brands you recognize?

The answers to these questions could be good or bad depending on your needs. On the extreme ends you have high price, best quality and then you have low price, low quality. Usually you want something in between. Sometimes price is more important than quality, and you can let a few things in the above list slide. But if there is no room for error, you have to pay the price and you need a factory that has everything and knows it. They'll charge a premium.

Of course these are just the basics. I could speak volumes on any of the above items. If you have any questions or want me to elaborate, just ask!

and then... lunch. In this case it was some delish hunan food. The factory is not happy with your visit if they don't witness you eat enough food to last you for the week.

some pork ribs, garlicy chicken, tofu, pretty good

Well I hope that was informative and gives you a new respect for your glasses. I'll add one more thing, you may look at this factory and say yeah it looks kind of messy and dirty, it makes sense that they're making low-end glasses. I'll tell you this, Ray Ban's factory is 95% the same. They're using the same machines, same process, same level skilled workers. They spend more money on quality control, keeping bad parts from getting out the door. They may have a couple of fancy processes but in the end, for most commodity type brand name products, you're paying for the name, not the work that went into it. High tech products are different, but that's for another post.

The end.