Views: 0 Author: Tonney Shao Publish Time: 2026-08-04 Origin: Abery Mold
In one sentence: In 2018, one of our long-standing American customers went bankrupt in the middle of the US-China tariff shock, owed us about USD 30,000, and flew to Shenzhen personally to ask us to accept USD 10,000 as final settlement — thirty cents on the dollar — and we agreed on the spot, not because it made short-term financial sense but because he had been our customer since 2009 and had been fair to us for the nine years before he ran out of options, and in the seven years since he rebuilt his business he has placed more than 200 mold and part-production projects with Abery Mold.
Item | Detail |
Customer | A long-standing American importer and product owner (identity withheld under NDA) |
Relationship start | 2009 |
The event | 2018: customer's business hit by the Section 301 tariff shock and broader US market pressures; forced into insolvency owing Abery approx. USD 30,000 |
His request | Fly to Shenzhen personally to explain, and ask us to accept USD 10,000 (30%) as final settlement |
Our answer | Yes — accepted on the day of the meeting, no negotiation, no lawyer, no lien |
What happened next | Customer founded a new company; we offered him our best pricing on his first re-launch projects to help him win business back from his own customers |
Result (2018 → 2026) | 200+ molds and production projects placed with us in the years since; still one of our top ten US accounts today |
Total relationship | 17 years and counting, spanning three US economic cycles |
I write these case studies to help serious buyers understand what kind of mold supplier Abery Mold actually is. Two of the ones I have already published — our stud finder rescue project and the Russian mold we remade for free — describe how we behave when we succeed and how we behave when we make a mistake.
This one describes how we behave when the customer is the one in trouble.
If you are a small or mid-sized American product owner, brand founder, or importer trying to work out whether a Chinese mold supplier will be a partner or a transactional counterparty, this is the story I would want you to read.
We started working with this customer in 2009 — right after the global financial crisis, which many people forget was already a hard time for small US importers of custom-tooled products. He was building a product line that used our injection molds, and over the next nine years he was one of the fairer customers we had at that stage of Abery's history. He paid his invoices on time. He gave us detailed product briefs. He forgave the occasional lead-time slip. He referred us to two of his own contacts.
Then 2018 arrived. The specifics of his business are covered by our NDA, but the general environment is not:
The US Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports landed in mid-2018 and rolled through several product categories over the following months.
Small US importers who had built their business models around Chinese-manufactured products absorbed 10%, then 25% cost increases with almost no notice.
Working capital lines tightened. Retail buyers pushed back on cost pass-through. Landed cost went up, sell-through slowed, and inventory got stuck.
Our customer was one of many small US product businesses that could not survive the compression. By the second half of 2018 he was insolvent. At that point his accounts payable to Abery Mold stood at approximately USD 30,000.
I want to be honest about how that felt at the time. USD 30,000 in 2018 was a real number for us. It was not a rounding error. If he had simply gone quiet, sent a lawyer's letter, and taken the write-off through his own bankruptcy process, we would have lost the entire amount and had no realistic recourse across two legal systems. In our industry, that outcome happens all the time. Chinese mold makers routinely eat five- and six-figure US bad debts every year, because chasing them through the US courts costs more than the debt is worth.
Instead of going quiet, he got on a plane.
He came to our office in Shenzhen. He sat across from me at the same table we use for RFQ reviews. He explained what had happened to his business, showed me the numbers, and told me plainly that he did not have the money to pay us in full and did not want us to find out through a lawyer.
He made a specific offer:
USD 10,000 as final settlement of the USD 30,000 balance
Paid immediately, from personal funds, not from any remaining business account
In exchange for a written release from Abery on the remaining balance
That is a 30% recovery. From a pure business-desk perspective, the answer is almost automatic: refuse the offer, register a foreign creditor claim, and take whatever the bankruptcy trustee eventually distributes. In most cases that number ends up somewhere between zero and ten percent, but on paper you defend the principle.
I said yes. Same afternoon. No lawyer.
I want to explain the reasoning honestly, because "we said yes because we are nice" is not a good business answer and I would not want a serious buyer to believe I run our company that way.
Here is what actually went through my mind at that table:
One — he had already paid us more than USD 30,000 in trust. For nine years he had been a fair, on-time, low-drama customer. The USD 30,000 was not the full picture of our relationship with him. The full picture was nine years of clean invoices and mutual respect. Writing off a portion of the balance in a single hard year was cheap compared to what he had already given us.
Two — he came in person. In seventeen years of running Abery Mold, I have never had an American customer fly to Shenzhen to explain a bad debt in person. Every other version of this story I have seen ends with a lawyer's letter, a silent write-off, or a company disappearing overnight. Coming in person is a signal of who someone is. Signals like that deserve a response.
Three — 30% in cash today, on a bankrupt account, is a better outcome than the realistic alternative. Small-supplier claims in cross-border US bankruptcies, filed from China, in practice recover very little after legal fees. USD 10,000 clean and immediate was arithmetically superior to the expected value of the "principled" path.
Four — the long game. He was 45 years old, in good health, an experienced product person, and had already told me that afternoon that he was going to start again. If he did start again, and if we had treated him fairly at his worst moment, we would be the first supplier he called. That is exactly what happened.
So the decision was not a charity decision. It was a considered long-term business decision made possible by the fact that he had already earned the right to be treated as a partner. There is a difference, and it matters.
Accepting 30% closed the old account. It did not, on its own, rebuild anything.
A few months later he came back with his first project through his new company. He told me openly that he did not have the working capital to place a normal-margin order. We looked at the project and did two things:
We priced the first three molds at our internal cost plus a token markup, on the understanding that once his new company was cash-flowing we would return to normal margins. This was not a permanent discount; it was working capital, delivered through pricing instead of through a loan.
We agreed to hold his tooling — i.e., we would not sell his mold designs, quotes, or samples to any of his known competitors during his rebuild period, and we would flag any inquiry that looked like it might come from one of them. This was informal but honored strictly.
His new company won its first contracts within months. Then it grew. Then it grew again. Since 2018 he has placed more than 200 mold projects and production orders with Abery, across multiple product families. He is one of our top ten US accounts in 2026. The USD 20,000 we forgave in 2018 has been repaid many times over in gross margin — but that is not why we did it, and I want to be careful not to rewrite the moral of the story after the fact.
The specific dollar amount in this story does not matter. What matters is the underlying rule we run Abery Mold by, which is this:
A customer who has been fair to us for years is a partner. A partner going through a hard year is still a partner. We behave accordingly.
In practice that means:
We do not treat long-term customers the same way we treat one-time RFQ buyers, and we do not pretend otherwise.
When a long-term customer's business is under real pressure, our default is to look for ways to keep them running, not ways to protect our short-term margin against them.
We will absorb real financial cost in a bad year to keep a good relationship alive, when the customer has already earned that treatment. We will not do it for a customer who has not.
We do not use bad-year moments as leverage. We do not "reprice" existing tooling, delay open molds, or hold shipments over payment disputes when a long-term customer is struggling in good faith.
We keep this discretion at the CEO level. Line-item finance decisions like the one described above are made by me personally, not by our sales team, and that is deliberate.
None of this is codified as a rebate program or a customer-tier benefit. It is a judgment call, and we hold ourselves to it case by case. It is also — I want to be transparent about this — not unlimited. We have declined similar requests from short-term customers or from customers whose difficulties came from bad-faith behavior rather than market conditions. The standard is fairness in both directions, over years, not a blanket policy.
Most buyers evaluating a Chinese mold supplier will never face the situation described here. But every buyer implicitly asks the question underneath it: if my business hits a hard year, will this supplier stand with me or work around me?
The honest answer for most transactional Chinese mold shops is: they will work around you. This is not a moral failing on their part; their business model is high-volume, low-margin, short-relationship, and it does not support absorbing customer trouble. If you are placing a single mold and never coming back, that model works for you too.
If you are building a long-term product business — a brand you plan to grow over five or ten years, a private-label program that will run for a decade, an OEM partnership where your future depends on your supplier's judgment — the question is different, and the answer we would give you is documented above.
If that is the kind of relationship you are looking for, I would like to hear from you personally. My email is at the bottom of this page.
No. This case study describes a specific decision made for a specific long-term customer with nine years of clean payment history at the time of the request. We evaluate each case on the customer's history, the reason for the distress, and the good faith of the request. We have accepted similar arrangements before and we have declined them.
No. The judgment described in this article applies to long-term customers with a demonstrated track record of fair dealing with Abery. New-customer terms are governed by our standard payment schedule and mold-warranty terms.
Because being a serious partner to a product business means being honest about how you behave when the relationship is under stress, not only when it is going well. The customer described here is anonymized, and the article was reviewed with him in advance of publication. He asked us to publish it because it may help other small product companies choose a supplier more carefully.
On a case-by-case basis, for existing long-term customers, yes. This is not a formal program. It is a judgment call made at the CEO level, always with a clear plan for returning to normal margin as the customer stabilizes. Please do not send an inquiry expecting this as a standing offer — it is not.
Our standard mold warranty covers design and manufacturing defects for the life of the tool under specified use conditions. For details, please refer to our terms of sale or contact tonney@a-mold.com for the current warranty document. See also our Russian customer case study for how we handle a design-fault remake in practice.
Tonney Shao is the founder and CEO of Shenzhen Abery Mold & Plastics Co., Ltd., an ISO 9001-certified injection mold maker and plastic parts manufacturer serving automotive, consumer electronics, medical device, industrial equipment, and consumer goods customers worldwide. Abery has built more than 3,000 molds since 2009 and operates a tooling and molding facility in Shenzhen, China. Tonney personally reviews every long-term customer relationship annually and every material commercial decision described in the case studies on this site.
Contact: tonney@a-mold.com · +86-13925214356
Case study published 4 August 2026. Customer identity, industry, product photography, and specific dates within 2018 withheld under a mutual non-disclosure agreement, with the customer's advance review and consent to publication. References to "the US Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports" describe the general 2018 US market environment and are not attributed to any specific product category of the customer.
