At Head-Lites, we believe night time safety is absolutely important and any product that helps your visibility is a good thing to have, no matter who's product you choose to invest in (we'd like it to be ours of course!). We love that more and more pet owners are concious about keeping their companions safe at night.
During our journey with this company, we have some amazing Head-Lites customers who send us notes saying "Hey, have you seen these guys? They've also got LED collars." We can barely keep up with what's going on in our market space that we appreciate all the helpful intelligence gathering our friends help us with. Over time we started seeing a pattern in the products that were popping up... "This one looked like the other one, but has a different name. Why this is a Kick Starter, I bought the same product from eBay 5 years ago..." Funny enough, on a weekly basis, we get price and product lists from oversees manufacturers wanting to produce collars for Head-Lites.
Here's an example of a product list we were emailed. Same stuff, different factories, different part of Asia.
Do you recognize some of those collars in the stores or websites you've been to? Upon inquiring about pricing, we were told each piece was $1 USD with a minimum order of 1000. Wow. This could change Head-Lites, no more smashing needles, no more breathing soldering fumes... but wait a minute... if our price is $1... imagine how much it costs the factory to make. Then imagine what labour costs might be, let alone the conditions. Then we'd be just like the other collars that propelled us to design Head-Lites... When you see the same product on our shelves in North America for $20 - $40, you're looking at something that costs less than $1 to make. Great business model right?
But is this model right for our local economy? Do you care...?
Something to think about... eh?