All Roads Lead to China:

Earlier this week I received an email titled Five Pitfalls of Metals-Based Sourcing from old friend Lisa Reisman of Metalminer (her husband Jason writes Spendmatters) where she laid out what she sees are the five essential mistakes people make when sourcing metals in commodity form. Misreading the supply market can result in the placement of [...]

With only 6 shopping days left before Christmas, it looks like Mattel is going to need to pull out all the stops to make up for the fact that their 2oo7 Lead Paint Barbie has cost the firm another 12 million USD. According to the Massachusetts Office of the Attorney General: Massachusetts Attorney General Martha [...]

We have all seen just how risky sourcing from China can be should one not have the proper systems in place, and during my time in China I have been asked a lot about how to  import from China. Sometimes the questions are coming from people who are just entering the sourcing space, and sometimes [...]

Going along on a topic I have covered quite a bit in the past, responsible sourcing, Ethical Corporation has written a painfully detailed article on Adidas’s recent supply chain woes and how they are handling them. You may remember my post on their labor issues earlier this year, and as you will remember I have [...]

It was about a year ago now that the first lead paint Barbies probably landed at Long Beach and began their un-QCed express lane to the Wal-Mart shelves… and since then, there has been a lot of debate about the role of brands in quanility control, and more than that, a lot of writing about [...]