The Person Behind the Factory

Polished Words Do Not Solve Problems

That sentence is not a slogan written for this website. It is how the person who runs this business describes his own working style, and friends gave him a nickname for it long before there was a factory to run: the conversation killer. He says the thing that ends the discussion — the real problem — before he has considered how it will land.

In most industries that is a flaw. In manufacturing it is the whole job. A buyer does not need to be agreed with. A buyer needs someone who has seen the problem before and will say so while the tooling can still be changed.

Everything else on this site comes from that disposition: the page that tells you when die casting is the wrong process for your part, the quarterly index that publishes our real factory rates, the case studies that open with our own reject rates. None of that is a marketing decision. It is a personality, and it is worth knowing whose.

Thirty yuan. In 1996 he left technical college in Guangzhou for a job in Shenzhen with thirty yuan in his pocket — not enough to finish the journey. He borrowed thirty more from a classmate in Dongguan to keep going. His new boss advanced sixty for the work uniform. He could not afford a sleeping mat or a washbasin, so a roommate in the dormitory pressed another thirty into his hand.

The job paid six hundred yuan a month with room and board. The work was heating-core assemblies for hair dryers: print the drawing, paste it to the mica sheet, saw the shape out by hand, then build the winding to the voltage and safety standard of whichever country the product was going to. That is where the habit of reading a drawing before quoting on it was formed — on the bench, one part at a time, for export markets whose standards were not negotiable.

Twelve Years on Your Side of the Table

From 2005 he spent twelve years with Termozeta — and the important thing about Termozeta is what it is not. It is an Italian appliance brand that owns no factories. Every product it sells is made under contract by someone else. Running its China side meant specifying the parts, choosing the factories, auditing them, arguing with them, and carrying programs from drawing to shipment with no plant of his own to fall back on.

That is the same job as the person reading this page. Twelve years of sending drawings to Chinese suppliers and living with what came back. Twelve years of being told a tolerance was fine and finding out at first article that it was not; of quotations with a line item nobody would explain; of a tool that needed correcting and a supplier who took three weeks to admit it. Every argument this site makes about what a buyer should ask a factory was learned from the asking end, not invented at the answering end.

It also explains the shape of this business. He did not start as a factory owner who later discovered customers. He spent over a decade as a customer and then went and bought into the factory — because the thing that kept going wrong was never the casting, it was the distance between the person who needed the part and the people who made it.

Before that, from 2003, he worked at Severin, a German-owned appliance manufacturer in Shenzhen, beginning in supplier audits and production-line troubleshooting before moving into product development and project management. That is where the audit discipline came from; Termozeta is where it got twelve years of use. The supplier selection guide published on this site is that checklist, written by someone who spent his career on the side of the table that needs it.

In 2017, when Termozeta restructured its China presence, he and a colleague founded YinFeng Technology Consulting in Shenzhen to carry that work forward. The relationship outlasted the employment, which in this trade is its own kind of reference.

Two Failures, and a Product Nobody Bought

In 2011 he co-founded Bohan Hardware in Dongguan — metal stamping, chosen because the process was simple and the equipment outlay modest. A low barrier to entry. They had projects, they had the skills, they had friends in the business. They lost money for a year and closed it.

A second venture, Ledor, ended differently and worse: a disagreement about how the business should be run, with the key people and resources increasingly on the other side of it. He left.

Then, after joining SunOn, his first product was a milk frother. A transparent Tritan jug so a customer could watch the foam form; a square body instead of the usual round one, on the theory that flat walls would disturb the flow and improve aeration. More than a thousand samples drew attention at the shows. The orders did not follow. He calls it the easiest mistake an engineer makes — designing the thing that is interesting to build rather than the thing the market was asking for.

None of that is here to seem humble. It is here because a supplier who has only ever succeeded has either had a short career or is editing. The most useful things he knows about getting a product into production were paid for with his own money, and a buyer is entitled to know which lessons were bought and which were only read about.

Representative application illustration — not a record of a specific customer program.

How the Companies Fit Together

Buyers who look us up find more than one name. Here is the structure, plainly:

Frequently Asked Questions