The target price was clear. The quotations for a complete product were above it. Sending the same request to more factories was unlikely to change much, so we looked more closely at what we were asking them to make.
The product had five parts made from three materials. That gave us another starting point. Rather than treating it as one item to source, we considered the tooling, the manufacture of each part and the final assembly separately.
We identified individual manufacturers, mould makers and injection moulding specialists, then a licensed assembly plant suited to bringing the parts together under the relevant compliance requirements. The work became a production arrangement built around the product, rather than a search for one factory offering everything.
The commercial structure mattered just as much. We developed the supply proposal around several years of planned production, with Berg carrying the initial fixed costs and recovering that investment through future supply. That gave us a different basis for approaching the unit price.