Resources Sourcing guide
How to brief a manufacturer
A useful quote and a useless one usually come down to the brief. The six things to put in yours, in the order a factory reads them, plus the one line that saves you a week.
Ask a factory for "a bottle supplier, best price" and you'll get a number back that means nothing. The salesperson guessed at your volume, assumed the cheapest resin, ignored the certification you never mentioned, and padded the rest to stay safe. That quote is worthless, and the factory isn't the problem. You are, a little. You didn't give them enough to be honest with.
A good brief buys you one thing: a fast, honest yes or no. I've watched buyers burn three weeks collecting quotes that couldn't be compared, because every supplier quietly answered a slightly different question. You don't need a procurement department to avoid that. You need to answer six things clearly, in roughly the order a factory reads them.
Lead with the thing, not the budget
Start with what it is and what it has to survive. "A plastic housing" tells a supplier nothing. "An injection-moulded enclosure for an outdoor sensor, roughly 120 by 80 by 45 mm, has to take rain and UV for five years" tells them which machines it needs and whether one of their existing tools already fits. Function is what lets them route your job to the right line instead of the nearest one. Price with no product attached is a wish with a currency symbol.
Volume decides who wants you
A workshop that's perfect at 500 units a month will quietly stop replying at 50,000, and the good high-volume plant won't get out of bed for your 500-piece pilot. Both are being rational. Give them three figures so they can place you: units per order, units per year, and whether this is a one-off, a trial, or a standing contract you'll reorder every quarter.
Their minimum order quantity and their spare capacity both hang on those numbers. Leave volume vague and you've invited the padding right back in.
Get specific where it's cheap to
Here's where the right words earn their keep, and where most briefs go soft. "Food-safe" is a hope. ISO 22000 or BRC is something a factory can hold itself to. "Strong metal" is a hope. 316L stainless is a spec with a datasheet behind it. If a certification is non-negotiable, halal, RoHS, REACH, a tolerance band, a specific grade, write it in those exact terms. It deletes every supplier who can't meet it before they waste a week pretending they can.
And the quiet part, out loud: most certificate PDFs a supplier emails you are theatre until you check the number against the issuing body. Ask for the certificate number, not the pretty scan. Anyone real hands it over in a sentence.
Fixed, and flexible
The most useful line in any brief sounds like this: "The certification and the delivery date are locked. The material and the finish, I'm open to whatever gets me there cheaper." Good manufacturers almost always know a faster or cheaper route to your actual goal. They just won't offer it if they can't tell which of your constraints are real and which you typed out of habit.
The boring logistics still move the price
Packaging, labelling, where it ships, on what Incoterms. A pallet sitting in Rotterdam on EXW terms and the same goods delivered DDP to your warehouse in Lyon are two very different numbers, and the gap is entirely yours to pay. Your deadline moves the price too. A four-week rush and a comfortable twelve weeks are not the same order, however identical the drawing.
A brief you can steal
Writing this well every single time is a skill. Turning it into a document every supplier answers identically, so the quotes come back genuinely comparable, is a chore nobody enjoys. That chore is the part Zora takes off you. You describe the need in plain English, it asks a couple of follow-ups only where the answer changes who fits, and it hands every manufacturer the same well-formed question behind the scenes.
Want to see it run start to finish? Read Inside an EU sourcing search.
