One of the most remarkable things about working in China is how much skill the workers have out there. I think the video below speaks for itself.

[Youtube link for those who cannot view embedded SWF.]

This guy works at the factories that sew the chumby bags. Apparently, he’s not their fastest employee. They have one who is about twice as fast, and he has been with the company for about seven years. I went to his workstation, but when I got there he was already gone to lunch because he had finished everything. And I mean, there were two enormous bins of finished cosmetics cases next to his workstation.

I think it’s also interesting to notice that the guy in the video above is listening to his iPod while he sews.

Another thing that’s pretty amazing is how rubberized tags are made in China. These are the tags you see all over clothes–chances are you are wearing a piece of clothing or you carry around a bag with a tag like this. I always thought that the tags were pressed by a machine.

I was wrong. All those words, colors, and letters–they are drawn by hand.

Amazing.

[Youtube link for those who cannot view embedded SWF.]

I asked PCH if they had any mechanized factories for this kind of stuff. They told me that they exist, but the minimum order quantity is enormous–hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions–because of the extraordinarily low cost of the product and the relatively high cost of the tooling for the automated process.

This is consistent with a comment someone made to me once about the McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. If you look at the bottom of one, it’s held together with screws. That’s because it’s cheaper pay someone to screw together that toy over the whole production run for it than it is to make a steel tool with the necessary precision so that it just snaps together.

There is a similar trade-off inside the Chumby hardware. There are four connectors on the internal chumby electronics. One had a best price of about $1 US, and the other three had a best price of about $0.40 US each–using the US-based vendors that I could source. PCH’s very talented sourcing expert (she has a reputation that is feared and respected by every vendor) managed to find me connectors that cost $0.10US and $0.06US respectively–saving almost a full $2 in cost. There’s one catch: these connectors don’t come with the sacrificial plastic pick and place pad that enables them to be machine-assembled.

The solution? Witness the man below.

On every chumby, he hand-places these connectors, for about a nickel per chumby.

Thanks to him, chumbys are $2 cheaper–which frees up more money for us consumers to spend on $2 coffees at Starbucks.