Sajag Agarwal is a former seven-figure Amazon seller and the current Founder of Movley. In 2015, he grew his first ecommerce brand to $2 million a year in less than two years. But, after his business was plagued with quality control problems, Sajag decided to move to China, where he visited factories and performed his own inspections. He discovered that good inspections would have identified almost all of his manufacturing defects before shipment. With this in mind, Sajag founded Movley to help brands manufacturing overseas build better products through on-the-ground quality control inspections.
Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:
- How Sajag Agarwal found himself on the supply chain side of ecommerce and why he founded Movley
- How Movley helps brands achieve effective inspections at scale
- Sajag explains what he looks for in product tests
- Why the inspection your suppliers do isn’t enough—and how Movley fills the gaps
- Managing the feedback loop between ecommerce brands, their customers, and their manufacturers
- How fraud and bribery can occur with product inspections
- The most common mistakes brands make when manufacturing or sourcing from China
In this episode…
The bane of any ecommerce brand is quality fade: when the quality of products from a supplier suddenly goes downhill after a few orders. When this happens, a brand’s return and warranty claim rate skyrockets and they lose the valuable trust of their customers.
Unfortunately, product quality fade is a common problem for many ecommerce brands. This is typically because of high rates of bribery and fraud in the product inspection and quality control process, as well as a lack of human connection between sellers and suppliers. So how can you eliminate product quality fade and protect your ecommerce brand today?
Listen to this episode of the eCommerce Profits Podcast, hosted by Joshua Chin and featuring Sajag Agarwal, the Founder of Movley. Together, they talk about how to eliminate product quality fade when sourcing products from China, what to look for during product tests and inspections, and the lessons Sajag learned from his wealth of ecommerce supply chain experience. Stay tuned to catch all the details.
Resources Mentioned in this episode
Special Mentions:
Sponsor for this episode
This episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency.
If you are a direct-to-consumer ecommerce brand that wants to unlock the optimum customer lifetime value through email marketing, then look no further than Chronos Agency!
Our team of passionate email marketing experts have helped hundreds of brands generate over $70 million in return from email alone, and our clients receive an average of 3500% ROI from our efforts.
Chronos Agency has worked with a variety of brands, including Truly Beauty, Alya Skin, and many more. Our mission is to help real businesses achieve real results.
If you want to take your revenue to the next level using email marketing, be sure to email our team at sales@chronos.agency or visit chronos.agency to learn more.
Episode Transcript
Intro 0:04
Welcome to the eCommerce Profits Podcast where we feature top founders and experts in the ecommerce industry and take an in depth look at their struggles and successes in growing ecommerce brands profitably.
Joshua Chin 0:21
Hey guys, Josh Chin here. I’m the host of the eCommerce Profits Podcast where we feature top experts in the eCommerce industry and we go behind the scenes of the struggles and successes in growing eCommerce, businesses and brands. This episode is brought to you by Chronos Agency. If you’re a direct to consumer eCommerce brand that is ready for next level growth and to unlock the optimum customer lifetime value with email marketing Chronos is your company. We have helped hundreds of brands get over $17 million in return from email alone, and our clients get an average of 3500% ROI from our efforts on email. We’ve worked with brands like TrulyBeauty, The Udi, Ally Skin and many more and for some reason, Sajag, beauty brands and apparel brands are just attracted to us. It has nothing to do with my fashion sense, obviously. But the next step is if anyone’s interested out there, email us at Sales@chronos.agency, you can go to Chronos.Agency to learn more. And before we jump into introducing today’s guests, I just wanted to give a big shout out and thank you to Dr. Jeremy Weisz. Go check out their website at Rise25.com for more. Thank you Dr. Jeremy for making this introduction. They specialize in helping b2b businesses get more clients, referral partners and strategic partners to do done for you podcast service. And today’s guest. Sajag Agarwal is a former seven-figure Amazon Seller, the current Founder of Movley, and in 2015, he founded and grew his first eCommerce brand to $2 million a year in less than two years. plagued with quality control problems. Sajag moved to China for six months, he opened an office in Shenzhen and spend most of his time on the factory floor. While over there, he watched this in his inspectors fraudulently pass bad production orders and did his own inspections. Out of frustration in 2018. He founded Movley to make manufacturing overseas easier and more controllable. Today Movley brings tech, data analytics and better processes to do inspections better and more efficiently. Thank you for joining me, Sajag.
Sajag Agarwal 2:44
Thanks so much for having me on Joshua, and super excited to be on.
Joshua Chin 2:48
Awesome. So first question, tell me a little bit more about your background. How did you end up in ecommerce? The whole scene? And what led you to Movley?
Sajag Agarwal 3:01
Yeah, it’s a really good question. If you would have asked me like 10 years ago, you know, hey, Sajag, you’re gonna be in supply chain in 10 years, I would have thought you’re crazy. Supply Chain was like the most boring industry on planet Earth. So there’s no way I would end up in that. But here I am. But yeah, just a little bit about me. So I used to be a huge tech geek, US gaming nerd, used to play Minecraft all the time, and just kind of got bored and started looking on eBay and started trading stuff on eBay, like around 789 years ago now. And after doing that, for a few years, I went into Amazon and put together my own Amazon brand. And we grew super quickly. So first year, we did 40 K, second year, we did a million and on our third year, we were on track to do 2 million that year. But unfortunately, what started happening is we just started having a lot of quality control problems. So we started having issues where some of our products, were seeing five to 10% defect rates, other ones of our products, we’re seeing almost 100% of the products just breaking apart after a few months of use. So it was just a huge, huge problem. So back in 2017, I actually ended up moving to Shenzhen and I lived there for six months, basically on the factory floor every single day 12 to 16 hour days on the factory, trying to understand Okay, hey, you know what’s going on? Why? Why are my products having problems? Why are we having all these supply chain issues, and sort of getting into the weeds of stuff. And while I was there, I actually watched one of my inspection companies that I was working with at the time, they told me this inspection was going to be about nine hours, went to the factory and I was watching the inspector without telling him that I was the client. And basically the inspector spent three hours at the factory made up a bunch of results and then did the inspection and told me it was passed on a defective batch of products. And then a few months later, ended up opening my own office in Shenzhen and after running that for about a year, we started having a lot of problems again. And we found out that some of our employees were actually taking bribes from the suppliers and they were not working with the suppliers not doing proper inspections and just this huge mess and that’s how When I went ahead and found it Movley, and that’s why I kind of got into the business actually, was just, I was so frustrated and so sick of dealing with the kind of the problems that I had with my office, and I didn’t have the economies of scale to really make a difference. So my goal with Movley, was to actually bring those economies of scales bring that, you know, personal approach in order to do inspections a little bit more effectively. And, you know, have them actually be trustable results.
Joshua Chin 5:28
That’s an amazing story. And I, I can, I cannot even begin to imagine the the struggles of growing a brand when your suppliers and supply chain so far away from you physically, or just being being involved in fraud and bribery, and just not doing their jobs. Right. What I’m really curious about is, well, it’s, you know, doing one inspection per year, that’s, that’s relatively easy. And if if I were a business owner, I could, you know, I could make that inspection myself, if I, you know, pre COVID, I could fly down to China, maybe once a year. But at scale that gets harder and harder to do, how do you manage to pull that off with, you know, the number of brands that you guys have as client today? What does inspections at scale look like?
Sajag Agarwal 6:20
Yeah, that’s a really good question. And especially with inspections, like inspections should be done on every single order. So if you’re ordering once a year, you’re starting up, it’s not that big of a deal. But when you’re ordering every month, and you have, you know, 20 or 30 different products, and you’re doing 30 inspections a month, it starts becoming really difficult to manage keep track of everything. And the thing is that every product needs kind of a unique approach. So there’s a unique way to inspect every product, and then certain products or higher risk, they start having more problems, you need to do better inspections for those products over time, other products are doing well, maybe you want to cool down on the inspection a little bit. So you can save a little bit of costs and increase your efficiency. So it really comes down to each individual product. So doing them at scale becomes pretty challenging. And that’s actually what we are trying to fix MRV. And one of the ways we’re doing that is we’re actually building out a tech platform to streamline the entire process. And right now what we do is in which we’re going to carry through in the future as well. So we’d like to take a little bit of a service pot approach. So our kind of tagline at moblie is, we give you an entire quality control team for the price of an inspection. It’s kind of we like to look at ourselves as kind of your personal quality control team. So every client that we work with, we assign them a couple of people within our team that they work with. So every time they book an inspection, every time they have an issue a problem of concern, a question, they get contact the same group of people, and that group of people understands their business, they understand their products, their customers, and then can work with them to improve their inspections over time and kind of give them that very personal iterative approach that inspections need on a day to day level. So that’s kind of the approach we do when it comes to inspections. And then also to make sure that, you know, we can do inspections effectively and at the right time, we actually distribute our inspectors all across China. So you can get an inspector on site within two to three days of any anytime you need an inspection.
Joshua Chin 8:12
any major city in China.
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