My sales staff here at Design X has been telling me that we are being undersold on our fine quality Italian imports.  Such as styling chairs which are designed by designers, and made it Italy.  The quality of our products is impeccable, made to last 20 years.  It is always possible that a price can be beat.  But when the same company keeps beating our price by half as much I did an investigation.
The results were Italian counterfeit salon furniture and equipment being made in a third world country. Copies of our Italian chairs being pawned off as quality products.  How they were doing it is just as sickening.  Styling chairs can be purchased online for $159 to $299 when made in a third world country.  If you are just starting a business this may have to be the choice for you, and you may get a year, or if you are lucky, two out of these type chairs.  But the sad truth is these guys selling counterfeits’ are charging $450 to $550 for the chairs that should sell for $150 to $300.  They cannot sell at a lower price because it would obviously look like counterfeits.  So they are making a ton of money selling under false pretense instead.  Lying about Italian made and jacking up the price to look like Italian made, at half the price as us. 
 
About 5 years ago I went to the hair show in Hong Kong and met with many third world manufacturers.  At the show some supplier’s equipment was failing apart, I stayed away from them.  I purchased containers of chairs from the companies that looked like the better quality.  As an example, styling chairs that cost our company after shipping about $130 per chair.  My customer service was quickly overwhelmed by problems. Every third hydraulic was leaking or did not pump up more than 4 inches, chrome was cracking and peeling, fabric stitching was failing.  The chairs were made of wood frames instead of metal, big clients were breaking frames.  Any company that sells low quality products either will go out of business or not do customer service. 
 
So we stopped importing from them and switched to only designer quality products from Europe or USA.  Live and learn.
 
One of my favorite statements applies here:

“It is unwise to pay too much, but it is worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money… that is all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the things it was bought to do. The common law of business balance prohibits paying a little and getting a lot… it cannot be done. If you deal with the lowest bidder, it is well to add something for the risk you run. And if you do that, you will have enough to pay for the something better.”
 
John Ruskin (1819 - 1900)
 
Written By
Robert Rosenberg VP
Design X Manufacturing, Inc.