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I start college at Tetr soon and my first project is going to be a consumer product, I'm thinking of making a line of vegan leather wallets, have some designs already. Just so I dont go fully unprepared, I’m narrowing down on supplies and hitting two walls here: the minimum order quantity leather worksmen are demanding is way more than I expected, and the second they realize I'm young and small, the tone shifts and I stop being taken seriously.

For people who've been the small buyer: how do you actually get a supplier to lower an MOQ, or find ones open to small runs? And how do you get taken seriously when you clearly don't have volume yet? Trying to take some small steps before i start my sem, thank you in advance.

Every conference talk and LinkedIn post says DPP is coming and manufacturers need to prepare. Then you ask what specifically to prepare and the answer dissolves into "it depends on the delegated acts."

Here's my practical problem. The data that ends up in a passport, material composition, recycled content, substance information, repairability, lives in five different places at our company. PLM has a BOM that's mostly right. Substance declarations live in a shared drive. Recycled content claims live in supplier emails. Nobody owns the whole picture, and the gap between "we have this data somewhere" and "we can produce it per product, per unit, machine readable" is enormous.

Batteries look like the first wave and the rest of us follow at some point. So for anyone in categories likely to get hit early: are you actually restructuring product data now, or is the sensible move to wait until the requirements are concrete? Because I can see us spending a year building the wrong data model.

I do apologise in advance if this isn't relevant but I'm looking at moving to the US having worked in the UK for a good amount of time and was curious which places struggle the most with hiring engineers and which places are up and coming. I know I can search google for the most populated area for manufacturing but that doesn't necessarily mean they struggle to get engineers in. I'm multi skilled, electrical bias with experience in food and beverage industry and plastic moulding.

Hello fellow manufacturers,
I just opened a FDM printing and manufacturing shop in Houston. I wanted to take B2B route and wanted to reach out to Gas and Energy companies near me. Does anyone have any marketing advice?