OEM · ODM
Three ways to work with us, and three different things you are buying
Private label buys a lead time. A new shell buys a distinct appearance. Full custom buys the product. The money, the schedule and the risk differ in each case, and mixing them is how two sides discover in month three that they were describing different jobs. So the first conversation is about one thing only: which of the three you are actually after.
What each shape buys
Private label a model already in production
Your brand, packaging, manual and app skin on a product that is already running. No development and no new tooling — you are buying a lead time, not a project.
Cost: unit + branding + packaging. Development is zero.
Testing whether the category sells through your channel at all.
New shell on a proven platform
The board and the firmware baseline come from something already validated; the housing and the structure are designed around your form. The outside changes, most of the inside does not.
Cost: structure design + enclosure tooling + pilot run. Electronics reused.
You need a distinct product without paying for a new platform.
Full custom development
Appearance, mechanism, board, firmware, app and server, all built around a specification you wrote. Tooling, certification and the pilot run live on this line too.
Cost: definition + structure + electronics + firmware + tooling + pilot + certification.
The differentiation is the product, not the packaging.
Six questions we need answered before quoting
These six answers decide the platform, the cost and the schedule. A quotation given before they are settled is a guess with better formatting.
- Which age band, and which markets
- Age decides the interaction — tap or talk — the guardrail banding and the play pattern. Markets decide the toy-safety and radio requirements. Both come before the appearance.
- Does it need a camera
- The plush lines have no camera and no interface to add one; in screen-based companions a camera is only ever a client-requested development option. Without a clear need, it stays out of the design.
- Which voice route
- Local command set only, cloud dialogue with an on-device wake word, or a hybrid with a local floor — it decides cost, latency and the privacy story, and what survives a bad router.
- How deep the parental controls go
- An app settings page, or a mute switch that opens the circuit, viewable transcripts and a retention period the parent controls. Controls are a hardware decision, and they take their own line in the quotation.
- Which markets it will be certified for
- Toy safety, radio and children’s data rules. Certification decides part selection; it is not something to add after the layout is finished.
- Target retail price and first-run quantity
- The retail price implies a BOM ceiling. That ceiling decides which product exists at that price band — not which supplier is cheaper.
Five working rules
Structure and PCB designed together
The stacking, the key travel, the microphone port, the speaker cavity and the battery bay are all decided by the board outline and the component placement. Doing the outside first and changing the board second means redrawing the outside.
No invented production claims
Production runs on partner lines in Shenzhen. We name the line before an order and will arrange a visit, so the question of who builds it is answered before money moves.
Numbers with a source
Current, temperature rise, standby and noise are measured, not quoted from someone else’s datasheet. If we cannot produce the report, we do not give the figure.
Ownership written into the contract
Tooling the client paid for, the product-specific application firmware and the certification applicant position belong to the client. The RTOS, chip vendor SDK and third-party libraries stay under their own licences.
The one job we decline
Building an appearance prototype around a retail dev board, then swapping in a custom PCB for round two. That structure is rebuilt in round two, and any tooling cut for it goes in the bin.
What we build, and what is worth reading first
- · Conversation: cloud LLM integration, voice front and back end, wake and interruption
- · Motion: servo sizing, mechanism design, and action scripts on the same clock as the face
- · Display: round and shaped panel bonding, brightness and viewing angle, expression engine
- · Electronics: board, power tree, standby current, EMC pre-scan
- · Software: app, server, OTA, content and accounts
Tell us which shape first — then a quote means something
A brief, a reference drawing or a physical sample all work. What usually comes back first is which shape your brief lands in and which answers are still missing — not a number.
Send the brief