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China Worx designs and industrialises hardware for Western companies from inside the Chinese supply chain: industrial design, mechanical and electrical engineering, design for manufacturing, prototyping, supplier qualification, production oversight and quality control. One team stays with your product from the first sketch until it ships.
A common first question is whether a project needs a sourcing agent, a contract manufacturer or an engineering partner. Each is the right choice in some situations, including ones where you do not need us.
| Sourcing agent | Contract manufacturer | Engineering partner | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Core function | Finds and manages suppliers on your behalf | Builds to the drawings you supply | Owns the technical outcome from concept through production |
| Reads your drawings | Usually not | Yes, for buildability | Yes, and challenges them |
| Who catches a design flaw | Usually found at the pilot run | Sometimes, if it affects their yield | Before tooling is cut |
| Commercial incentive | Commission on order value | Margin per unit | Fee for engineering time |
| Right choice when | The product is defined, standard, and needs no engineering judgement | Your design is production-ready and you already have quality control | The product is new, the tolerances matter, or the last attempt failed |
If your product is well understood and your drawings are proven in production, an agent is often the cheaper choice. We are most useful when a product is new and needs engineering judgement between the specification and what a factory will produce.
Capabilities
We review the concept, constraints, target cost and volumes, and give you a clear view of what is realistic before anyone spends money. Target cost is the constraint most often set without reference to physics. A housing tolerance, a certification requirement or a chosen component can put a target out of reach on its own, and it is far cheaper to discover that in week one.
Form, ergonomics, materials and finish, developed for real production. Every surface is designed to come out of the mould cleanly.
Enclosures, mechanisms, tolerance stack-ups, material selection and thermal behaviour. This is where GD&T and general-tolerance callouts stop being paperwork and start determining whether parts assemble on a line in Bao'an.
Schematic and PCB design, power architecture, EMC-aware layout, and component selection made with the supply chain in view, including whether a part will still be available in five years.
We start DFM on day one, where it removes cost and risk from every line of the bill of materials through part-count reduction, tolerance relaxation where it is free, process selection, and second-source qualification while changing the design is still cheap.
Functional prototypes and design iteration, validated against your requirements before any tooling is committed. Steel is the point of no return, so we learn as much as possible before it.
Sourcing, auditing and qualifying factories and vendors in person, against your standards. Beyond the certificates, we assess whether that specific line can hold your specific tolerances at your specific volume.
We stay on the line through production. Inspection, testing and shipping to your door, with documentation you can hand to your own auditors.
The industry vocabulary here is worth pinning down, because schedules are quoted in it and the gates mean different things to different suppliers.
| Phase | What it is | What it proves |
|---|---|---|
| Proof of concept | Breadboard or rough mechanical mock-up, often not to form | That the core idea works at all. Nothing about manufacturability. |
| EVT — engineering validation | First builds of the real design, usually soft-tooled or machined | That the design meets its functional requirements. Expect changes; this is what EVT is for. |
| DVT — design validation | Production-intent parts from production-intent tools | That the design meets specification and passes certification testing. Design should be frozen leaving DVT. |
| PVT — production validation | A pilot run on the real line, with real operators and real fixtures | That the process works: yield, cycle time and operator error rate. Not the design; the factory. |
| MP — mass production | Ongoing manufacture under inspection | That quality holds when nobody senior is watching. This is where quality fade appears. |
The gate that gets skipped is PVT, because by then the product works and the pressure to ship is enormous. It is also the gate that catches the failures that are most expensive in the field, because those come from the process rather than the design.
This is where many projects lose time, and language is only part of the reason. A drawing dimensioned to ISO 2768-m carries general tolerances that a European machine shop reads as a floor and some Chinese shops read as an aspiration. Geometric callouts under ISO 1101, such as flatness, true position and profile of a surface, are frequently the first thing to be quietly ignored when they are inconvenient, and nothing in the quotation tells you that has happened.
The practical consequence is that a specification does not fail loudly. It fails at assembly, months later, when a stack-up that was fine on paper does not close on the line. Our job is to make sure the intent survives: identifying which callouts are genuinely critical and which are habit, re-specifying so the critical ones are inspectable rather than aspirational, agreeing measurement method before production rather than arguing about it afterwards, and reading the Chinese-language process documentation that the factory actually works from, which often differs from what you sent.
Paying for a mould does not automatically mean you own it, and it certainly does not mean you can collect it. Ownership needs to be written down before the steel is cut, along with the practical questions that decide whether ownership means anything: where the tool is physically stored, whether it is marked as yours, what condition it must be maintained in, and what happens if the relationship ends. Ownership on paper only helps if you can also move the tool.
When a factory says it already has a certificate, that certificate is usually for a different product, sometimes for a different company. Under EU rules the party placing a product on the market under its own name carries the obligations of the manufacturer: the technical file, the declaration of conformity and the CE marking. That is you, as the brand owner. We build the technical file as the product is developed rather than assembling it in a panic before shipment, and we test against the directives that actually apply rather than the ones the factory has paperwork for.
None of this is legal advice, and for the regulatory specifics you should use your own counsel or a notified body. But the engineering consequence is ours: a product designed without knowing which standards it must meet is a product that will be redesigned.
We reply within one business day, and we work under NDA as standard. We will never name you publicly without your written permission.
We charge for engineering time and take no commission on your bill of materials, so components and factories are chosen on technical merit. The schedules we quote are ones we expect to hit. And because we enjoy seeing products ship, we stay involved until yours does.
Insights
Started early, DFM removes cost and risk from every line of your bill of materials. Here is what actually moves.
Read ProcessSchedules usually slip at tooling, long-lead components and the second EVT build. Here is where to look first.
Read QualityWhat a real audit looks at beyond the certificates: process control, operator skill, incoming inspection and whether the line can hold your tolerances.
Read TrustAn NDA is the starting point. What else keeps your design yours, from how you split a BOM to who holds the tooling.
Read