As you look at the kits on our Bountiful Baby site, look for an asterisk ‘*’ character in the title. Those are closeout kits. If you also see a ‘~’ character in the title, it means that even though it is a closeout, there are yet more coming from the factory (it takes awhile to shut the flow down). That means that even if the kit runs out of stock, new stock will be added soon.
The kits that have a ‘^’ character in the title are from the alternate factory. All vinyl kits from the alternate factory are being discontinued, but a few of them will have production shifted to the original factory. That means those few won’t actually be discontinued, but will reappear sometime in the future, with production from the original factory instead of the alternate factory.
Pretty much the entire kit industry has consolidated to a single China supplier, which I am calling the “original factory”. This means that genuine kits (and NOT counterfeit kits) are mostly all coming from the same place, regardless of who you buy kits from. And that means there are really only two differentiators between most of the kits from Bountiful Baby vs. anywhere else-- (1) price, and (2) sculpt design.
At one time we also produced some of our kits in Germany. I even made a trip to Germany to watch some of the production (and I saw kits from other vendors in the factory as well, not just ours).
We didn’t advertise which of our kits were from Germany. We wanted to see what you, the customer, had to say about those kits, without knowing they were from Germany. What we learned was that the original China kit supplier had fewer customer complaints than the German kits, plus the German kits were at least 50% more expensive to produce. When it came to belly plates, the German belly plates were at least 3x more expensive, because for some reason the German’s would only produce one belly plate per mold, but the Chinese would produce two (using both sides of the mold to create two plates at once). Maybe the Germans have since corrected this deficiency, but that is what we experienced.
We produced from other factories as well, and at one time we were dealing with five different factories. Of those five, the original China factory had the highest quality, followed by the German factory, followed by a mix of the other three. So the German factory was higher quality than most of the China suppliers. But not higher than all of them.
We also independently tested kits from all factories for phthalates, and found no significant difference between factories.
The original China kit supplier does not do painted kits. I once asked them why not, and their reply had something to do with their China export license, and dealing with Chinese regulations. That means that any factory-painted kit, from any vendor, did NOT come from this original China kit factory, which includes our Kinby line, as well as our painted/rooted animal kits (all of which we are discontinuing).
It is my belief that the bulk of the Chinese counterfeit kits on the market are coming from a single “bad” Chinese factory (but sold through multiple secondary Chinese companies). And yes, we have sued them, and the lawsuit is still ongoing. In addition to that counterfeiting source, the next counterfeit hot spot in the world is (in my opinion) Brazil, followed by Spain.
There is no doll manufacturing currently occurring in the United States (Secrest Doll Company was the last to do so). Our Kinby line bears a tag that says “Assembled in the USA”, but that’s the assembling and not the manufacturing. Since our Kinby line was being marketed to children, we had to satisfy a whole host of CPSIA regulations (Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act), including marking where the assembling was done.
The Chinese who are counterfeiting and marketing to children are not complying with the CPSIA, which hopefully will also one day invoke the regulatory wrath of our legislature in the fight against counterfeits.
I hope you have found this little discussion interesting.
Nevin Pratt, CEO