Industrial Designer with a Pet products brand - AMA!

Something that I’ve seen with US or North American based factories is they will quote high for new work. The key is having an existing relationship with them or get to the right person and explain how you will bring them more work in the future. Sometimes tooling fees are the easiest thing to negotiate, if that’s your sticking point. If the product doesn’t require a lot of manual labor, it should be competitive in the US.