With the past 8 years’ experience of helping over 3000 clients to make their various private label products, I think selling private label products is a good choice for small businesses to make money. However, some people find it difficult when they never have tried private label before or don’t know how to find private label manufacturers.
So I write this article to share with you about private label manufacturers and services if you’re interested in private label products. Hope you can benefit a lot.
Why Choose Private Label?
Private label products are customized products with your logo on it them to distinguish them from unlabeled products. It is suitable for e-commerce startups to get a good profit by selling their own private label products for small businesses.
Good Profits
No matter on Amazon, Shopify, or offline stores, selling your own private label products is the most profitable way. For example, you can earn 30%-50% profit when you sell your own private label electric toothbrush, whereas you can only earn lower than 10% profit if selling the famous brand Philips electric toothbrush.
Product Control
If you sell private label products, you have the right to make decisions on products, like product design, packaging, brand or label. But when you sell products made by others or in stock, you cannot change products a lot to meet your needs.
Potential Development
If you make good profits from selling private label products, you can consider developing your product lines or categories. In this way, you can form your brand competitiveness through developing new products to retain your clients and attract more partners.
What Kind of Private Label Products are Suitable for Small Business to Start
High-profit products or products have a high price of similar branded products.
Low-value products, such as disposable tableware won’t attract consumers to remember your products, whereas high-profit products like private label makeup or clothing will attract consumers’ eyes and bring you more margin.
Simple products of fewer subsequent quality problems.
Quality control will be a potential risk for private label products, as your customers will leave bad comments if they get the products that have many defects or don’t reach the level of their expectations. In this case, you’d better avoid products that probably need after-sale service, such as smartwatches, electric scooters.
Products that are easy and cheap to customize.
Try to avoid high-cost customization products, such as plastic products that usually need $1,000-$2,000 to get a customized mold. But products like baby blankets will be much easier and cheaper to get your own customized patterns, even many manufacturers will agree to offer free customization service for your own design.
Domestic VS Chinese Private Label Manufacturers
After you decide on the products you want, you can start to search for suitable manufacturers. But before searching, you should have a basic understanding on private label manufacturers in your own countries and in China.
Domestic Manufacturers
- Advantages:
- Easier to verify reliable manufacturers and quality control.
- Standard manufacturing and labor work.
- No language barrier, no communication difficulty.
- Domestic manufacturers know better about the favor of local consumers.
- Faster shipping and shorter lead time.
- Disadvantages:
- Much higher labor costs and manufacturing costs.
- Much fewer manufacturers to choose from, especially some products you want but can’t find manufacturers in your country.
- Less types of products for you to choose.
- Limited private label services to meet specific demands.
Chinese Manufacturers
- Advantages:
- Much lower labor cost and lower manufacturing cost, $4/hour only for labor work compared to $20/hour in the USA
- Much more manufacturers for almost kinds of products to select.
- Full private label services to meet your needs on products.
- Disadvantages:
- Language barriers, although more and more Chinese can speak English, most manufacturer staff still can’t speak fluent English or even can’t speak English at all.
- Quality control is not convenient when your manufacturers are in other countries. Thus, you need to hire a third-party inspection or sourcing agent to help with quality control.
- The importing process is more complicated, and the shipping time will be longer.
Although almost all the products in your mind could be produced by Chinese manufacturers, some products are still not suitable to be made in China. For example, when you have high-quality requests for skincare or supplement products, I suggest you could directly search for related domestic manufacturers and do your private label.
In addition, products that are strictly under regulations or need FDA certifications are suggested to consider domestic private label suppliers, and you could save $5,000 per year for no need to pay for certifications or registration for these products.
How to Find Private Label Suppliers in China?
When you decide the Chinese manufacturers are more suitable for your private label products, we recommend the methods below to find your suitable Chinese manufactures.
Find your private label manufacturer on Alibaba
Online wholesale platforms are so convenient when you don’t have time or budget to come to China. There are many popular online platforms in China:
Alibaba is the most recommendable online platform for almost all daily consumer products, where you can find many different suppliers for each kind of product.
The other platforms are also popular, but either they are not so comprehensive like Alibaba or they are just more suitable for one certain field of business. For example, Made-in-China is more suitable for industrial products and Global Sources is more suitable for commercial products.
How to search for suppliers on Alibaba? There are two common methods. One is that you can directly type the product name on the first page and check suppliers one by one. The other is to submit your product information on Alibaba RFQ and soon or later many suppliers will contact and quote for you.
Even though Alibaba is a recommended comprehensive platform, still you need to pay attention. The following guides are suggested for your further reading:
Find private label companies in trade shows
Going to trade shows is the most direct and reliable way to see and check products and suppliers. You can see products with your eyes, you can touch with your hands and you can communicate with suppliers face to face to qualify if they have the ability to customize your best private label products.
There are two types of trade shows. One is the comprehensive trade show, where you can see many different suppliers showing various types of products. Canton Fair is the most famous and popular of this type, which is held in Guangzhou for two sessions in Spring and Autumn.
The other type is specially set for one certain product. For example, CIBE( China International Beauty Expo) is specially set for beauty products like salon products, make-up, oral care products; CIFF( China International Furniture Fair ) is specially set for furniture products, equipment, and accessories. When you just need one certain product, you’d better choose this type of trade show instead of going to the Canton Fair.
Hire a sourcing company to find private label manufacturers
As I know, many people want to make their best private label products but they lack experience of importing products from China and product customization. It’s too hard for them to search for the best manufacturer or follow up with production by themselves. Therefore, I strongly suggest those people get a China sourcing company, such as Jingsourcing to help handle all the importing and customization processes.
With the help of a sourcing company, you will get your product quotations from different reliable manufacturers, well know of all the costs of production, customization, packaging, shipping. Also, your sourcing company will help follow up production, quality control, product inspection, shipping arrangement and so on, until you are satisfied with your products and get them in your country.
Services & Solutions Provided by Private Label Companies
Private label manufacturers can provide a series of private label services for your business, like packaging solutions or label designing on products. This part lists common solutions for logos and packaging of your products for your reference.
Various methods to print logos on your products
Screen printing is the most common and widely used method for adding a private label on both product body and packaging. Most Chinese factories can offer screen printing services for free if you can buy more than $2,000/item. But if you really need a fancy pattern with gradient color, you can choose thermal transfer printing.
Laser printing, or laser engraving, gives your product a rather high-quality appearance. If you take a good look in the market, you’ll see almost every gift store is filled with items with laser-printed logos, words, or patterns. For mass production, it may cost you $0.1-$0.2/unit, depending on the quantity and size.
Woven labels are sewn at the edge of fabric-made items, like shoes, jeans, hats, and bags. This label looks better than printed logos. If your product is made of or partially made of fabric, it’ll be a nice try to add your logo on a woven label if your competitors don’t do like this. The MOQ is normally 1000 pieces with a unit price of around $0.1 for a small size woven label.
You can also click here to know more solutions for private label printing on your products.
Types of private label packaging
White cardboard boxes and corrugated paper boxes are commonly used as cheap ordinary color boxes. The white cardboard box is usually suitable for light and delicate products, such as earphones. We have customized an earphone white cardboard box for one of our customers at the size of 55*20*125 mm for $0.3 cost only. And if you need to pack heavier products, you can choose the corrugated paper boxes, which are also similar cheap as the white cardboard boxes.
The lid and base box is another popular packaging box and it’s suitable when you plan to make upscale products. Nicer packaging makes customers willing to spend more money on the product. Electronics products are mostly made in lid and base boxes. If you want to make your box more luxurious, you can add some good-looking materials insert, such as silk fabric.
The cloth bag is another cheap and popular choice for private label packaging and the most common ones are polyester bags and flannelette bags. Usually, cloth bags are used to package small sized products and make the product higher-grade.
Let’s take the flannelette bag as an example. It is light, flexible in packing space, usually used for packing digital accessories, jewelry, etc. One month before, we helped our French customer to source flannelette bags for his power bank. We helped put his private label design flannelette bag and it only costs $0.3.
The cylindrical paper tube is a good packaging choice for protecting products. It is suitable for products like tea, pencil, and other strip shape products. Last year, our company bought some tea from the tea wholesale market and we chose cylindrical paper tubes to pack the tea and stick “Jingsourcing” labels as our private label tea.
What If the Manufacturer Don't Have Private Label Service?
When you buy 500 pieces of wine decanters in one factory and buy 500 pieces of wine openers in another factory and plan to bundle them to sell, the manufacturers tell you that they cannot help you customize private label unless you order at least 2,000 pieces. What should you do in this situation?
Find a professional packaging supplier
I strongly suggest you find a Chinese packaging supplier to help with your private labeling. Because manufacturers usually only offer you plain white packaging for your products, especially when your order quantity is small.
But if you have your own packaging suppliers, even you only need the private label for 500 pieces, they can offer you several different packaging solutions for you to choose from.
You can find these professional packaging suppliers on Alibaba. Try to find these suppliers that come from Cangnan, Wenzhou. This place is the most famous packaging industrial area with long packaging production history, where you can customize all different private label packaging easily.
Find a sourcing agent
If you couldn’t find your satisfied packaging supplier, you can find a reliable sourcing agent to help you. Sourcing agents usually have their cooperated packaging or printing factory and they can help you with all packaging problems easily, like us Jingsourcing.
Our company is located in Yiwu, a good place with the best manufacturers and suppliers in the largest wholesale market in China. It has a large business area of more than 2.6 million square meters for 1.7 million daily consumer products, so fierce competition is unavoidable.
To compete with others, suppliers here would offer you a much lower price and MOQ for the same product to attract customers. But the price is not the only point you need to focus on, because other aspects like packaging and shipping are also very important. You can choose us to help you.
Thanks to this good place, we have accumulated abundant resources of manufacturers and products. We can help you finish every step in purchasing private label products, like selecting products, designing logos, customizing packaging and shipping.
The End
Private label manufacturers can offer good services for your products, so it’s very important to choose a reliable one. Thank you for reading this blog. I sincerely hope you will know how to select a private label supplier better.
If you need our team to assist you in sourcing manufacturers and offer private label methods for your products, please CONTACT US without hesitation.
Further reading about private label products:
Well written, clear and straight to the point. Thank you guys for this much helpful article.
A very good and detailed blog content. Learned a lot about how to find label manufacturers. Thank you for sharing!!
Thanks for your support, If you need any help, please contact us. And we will write more helpful posts, please pay close attention to our new post, thank you.
This is really nice post, I found and love this content. I will prefer this, thanks for sharing.
Thanks for your comment, Liam.