Wooden Product Sourcing FAQ: MOQ, Sampling and Lead Times

Most sourcing problems that surface late - a missed season, a margin that evaporated, a batch that failed inspection - were decided at the quotation stage, long before anyone cut wood. The questions in this FAQ are the ones that determine whether a wooden product programme runs smoothly, and they are best answered before the first sample is approved rather than after the PO is issued.

1. What should I include when requesting a quotation?

A quotation is only as accurate as the brief behind it. When a buyer sends three lines and asks for a price, the supplier has to guess at every variable that drives cost, and the price that comes back is either padded for safety or optimistic and revised later. Both outcomes waste time.

2. How is MOQ calculated, and why does it vary?

MOQ is not an arbitrary number a factory picks to make life difficult. It is the quantity at which the setup work, material buying and quality control effort stop being disproportionate to the order. It rises and falls with four cost drivers.

In practice, MOQ is best treated as a design variable rather than a constraint. If a product needs a high MOQ because of a special species or a custom paint mix, one of three things usually fixes it: a shift to a standard species, a colour chosen from a standard range, or a mixed-container approach where several SKUs share one production slot and one shipment.

3. What does the sampling process look like?

Sampling is where a concept becomes a manufacturable product. In a well-run programme it happens in stages, and each stage is cheap insurance against an expensive problem later.

4. Do I pay for samples, and is it refundable?

Almost always yes to the first question, and the second depends on the agreement. A sample carries real cost - materials, machine time, hand labour, and often a jig that exists only to make it. Factories that offer free custom samples are usually either absorbing the cost into a padded mass-production price or planning to recover it another way.

5. What lead times should I plan for?

Lead time has three parts that are often collapsed into one number, and the collapse is what causes missed seasons. Sampling time, production time and shipping time are sequential and each has its own buffer requirement.

6. When do moulds, jigs and tooling get made?

Wooden products are often described as needing no tooling, which is misleading. They rarely need injection moulds, but they almost always need jigs, fixtures, templates and sometimes cutting dies. Those are the items that determine whether dimensions repeat from part to part across a production run.

Ask for the tooling list and its cost as a separate line on the quotation. A supplier who cannot itemise tooling either does not have a clear view of the process or is spreading the cost invisibly across the unit price - and neither is helpful when you want to compare two quotes honestly.

7. What payment terms are normal?

Payment terms in wooden product manufacturing follow the standard pattern in Chinese export manufacturing, with variation driven by order size, relationship length and whether custom tooling is involved.

Two things are worth confirming explicitly at quotation stage: what triggers the deposit, and what exactly releases the balance. "Before shipment" and "against copy of bill of lading" are different events, and the gap between them is where disagreements live. Get the wording into the proforma invoice rather than relying on a chat message.

8. Which Incoterms should I choose?

The Incoterm decides who books freight, who carries risk at each point, and which costs are inside the quoted price. It is the most common source of quote-to-quote confusion, because two prices that look different are often just different Incoterms.

9. What if I need to change the order after confirming?

Change requests are normal and manageable, but their cost depends entirely on how early they arrive. The further into production a change lands, the more of the work has to be undone, and material already cut usually cannot be returned to stock.

The practical discipline is to freeze the specification at golden sample approval and treat anything after that as a new project. It sounds rigid, but it lets both sides schedule confidently, and it makes the cost of a genuine change visible rather than something that quietly erodes the margin.