In a world where mass manufacturing trumps standards of excellence, quality is vital to our company. Yet, what does it look like to manufacture a high quality product? Specifically, what does it take to create a quality product while only manufacturing in America?

Defective Production

Manufacturing blips and blunders are a fact of life. Defects happen. A defect can have barely any impact on a business or a defect can take out multiple businesses at one time. For example, consider the saga of the Galaxy Note 7. This mobile phone was packaged and sold to customers with a faulty battery and USB-C controller. While these defects might sound small to some, the combination of the defects together was unbelievable. In fact, these defects diminished an entire generation of Samsung's Note product line.

Put yourself in the shoes of a small company who won a bid to manufacture a component for Samsung's Note 7. You’ve ramped up operations to take care of this mega-business and then you get the news about the defect. Devastation comes to your small business. You are left with a considerable amount of loss due to the errors of a separate component manufacturer. Sadly, this is a story told all too often in the world of manufacturing.

One thing that we have learned is that outsourcing production increases the risk of defects. We have found that, often times, contracted manufacturers make cost-cutting decisions that can severely impact the quality of the final product. Our products and our customers are too important to sacrifice quality.

Control Yields Consistency

Sometimes, manufacturing can be like cooking. You wash your vegetables and check your meats before cooking for your family, so your odds of becoming ill from food poisoning are far less like than when you eat take-out. Simply put, when you place control into someone else's hands, they are less likely to do as good a job as you would do yourself.

This is just one of the many reasons why we believe in in-house design and U.S. manufacturing. We inspect all of our raw materials as they are delivered to us. Because of this, we rarely encounter systematic issues that affect our products or our clients. On the rare instance that an issue does occur, we hear about it as fast as our customers can call to let us know! This allows us to isolate problems quickly and provide customers with replacements in a matter of days. We control every aspect of our product’s manufacturing in order to insure the highest quality possible.

Quality is a Commitment

Quality is not something that you can do halfway. In the article, 5 Ways to Improve Quality, the Inc. staff makes it clear that quality in any area of business boils down to a commitment.

We’ve made this commitment to ourselves, to our staff, and to our customers. It is the reason that we can confidently stand by our products with a 100% Satisfaction 90-Day Guarantee. We know that our products are quality made.

Customer Input

With every product that we design, we deeply consider the opinion of our customers. We want to know their needs, their likes, and their dislikes. From design to manufacturing, we strive to think of our customers and consistently put them first. Our customers can give us feedback on products that we implement in real time, which is pretty difficult to do when your manufacturer is overseas.

In his article with Industry Week, Jason Piatt discusses viewing quality from the customer’s perspective, “Use the customers’ perspective to define what the best-in-class product would be and meet those requirements while minimizing cost”. This is exactly what our Turtleback team aims to do with every product. Through this process, we have found that valuing the opinion of our customers always boils down to a higher quality product.

By putting our customers first, we can never fail.

Do you love products that are made in the USA? Is there an American manufacturer who inspires you? Or are you an American manufacture? If so, I’d love to hear from you, drop me a note at kenno@turtlebackcase.com