The people behind an order
Between a drawing and a box on a doorstep stand six roles, and what follows is what each one actually decides.
Product: decides what to make and how many go in the box
Almost every argument about a product here ends up being an argument about the number in the box. A pack of three looks cheap on a shelf and is expensive per piece. A pack of two hundred is unbeatable per piece and sits unopened in a cupboard for four years.
The rule this role works to is that a pack should hold roughly what one household or one occasion uses within its natural life. For an interdental brush, replaced weekly, that is about a year: a hundred. For a dish brush, splayed within six weeks, it is a year again: eight. For favour tins it is not a life at all, it is a guest list.
Getting this wrong in the generous direction wastes somebody twelve dollars. Getting it wrong in the mean direction means they buy the thing twice, which is worse, because the second purchase is the one that includes a delivery and an afternoon.
Sourcing: finds who can make it and holds them to the specification
The hard part of sourcing is not finding somebody who can make a nylon dish brush. It is finding somebody who will make the same nylon dish brush in eighteen months, when the price of the resin has moved and nobody is watching.
That is why the specification is written down in numbers rather than adjectives: bristle diameter, tuft count, anchor pull force, handle length. Adjectives drift. Numbers can be checked against a sample from any run.
This role also owns the unglamorous half of the job, which is knowing which materials are declared for food contact and which are not, and refusing to let a food contact claim attach itself to a component that was never declared for it.
Quality control: says no to a batch, and counts what is in the pack
People expect quality control on a catalogue like this to be about strength and finish. In practice the complaint that arrives most often is about count: a pack labelled a hundred that turns out to hold ninety four, which is invisible in a warehouse and infuriating at a kitchen table.
So counting is a check in its own right, done by weight against a reference on the small pieces and one by one on the large ones. The rest of the list is short: anchorage on anything with bristles, tested by pulling rather than by looking; dimensions on the pieces where a millimetre decides whether a lid fits; colour against the reference, because a batch two shades off is useless for a wedding.
The thing this role is allowed to do, and does, is stop a run. That is the whole of its authority and the reason it exists.
Packing: decides how it survives the journey and how it opens
Transit damage is not random. It happens at corners, and it happens to whatever is packed against the outside wall. Both are packing decisions, made before a single box moves.
The second half of this job is the opening. A hundred small items in one loose bag is a decision that costs the customer twenty minutes and costs us nothing, which is exactly the kind of trade that needs somebody arguing against it internally.
Where a set has several sizes in it, the packing separates them. Sorting a hundred mixed interdental brushes at a kitchen table is not a task anybody should be given.
Support: answers the question that actually gets asked
The pattern in support questions across a catalogue this wide is remarkably stable. Two thirds are dimensional: will this lid fit that jar, will this cover fit that bowl, is the handle long enough to reach the back of a bottle.
Which means most of the job is measuring things and answering with a number. Where a figure is not published, the honest answer is that we do not have it, and that answer is allowed here.
The other third is quantity: how many of these do I need for forty people. That question is common enough that we built a planner for it on the front page rather than answering it forty times a month.
This site: publishes the catalogue and keeps the figures current
The catalogue is published here in full, including the products nobody buys and the ones whose ratings are mediocre. A range shown only at its best is not a range, it is an advertisement.
This role also owns the rule that produces most of the awkward gaps on this site: where a specification does not state a figure, the row is missing rather than estimated. It looks careless to somebody skimming and it is the opposite.
What we do not do here is take money. The buy buttons hand off to the store where a purchase is completed, and payment, delivery and returns all happen there.
If you need one of them
Every one of these questions arrives at the same address: hello@patelai.net. Dimensional questions get a number back, quantity questions usually get pointed at the planner on the front page, and anything about an order that has already been placed belongs with the store where you checked out rather than with us.
The catalogue itself is on Patelai.