Terry McGee wrote: ↑Fri Sep 01, 2023 3:19 am
To go back to my fanciful "Aussie" brand line of whistles, how would I find these potential suppliers?
Perhaps via a trade fair, introduction by an agent, or via a contact in Australia who happens to know the market in the country of origin? Presumably OEMs do advertise online, but they're not targeting the public and a substantial proportion may not use English as their business language.
The heads on your Aussies look rather like the Goldfinch, don't they, except in alloy rather than plastic?
By the way, your ETbotu looks as if it comes from the same source as the Alibaba ones. If you're yearning for a whistle with the head on the wrong end, you can also have it in blue, red, or black.
Here's yet another variant of the cheapie plastic head type from eBay:
https://tinyurl.com/4z7n4dku
stringbed wrote: ↑Fri Sep 01, 2023 3:45 am
Have we seen other whistles that are close enough metrically to the Killarneys to indicate a shared OEM? Their wording “Produced in Ireland” does suggest actual manufacture elsewhere but there’s a difference between third-party production of a branded product and an OEM serving multiple VARs.
Not yet, but it's still feasible they're made in the same country. The retailers of the Mullans etc have worked with manufacturers in Pakistan to achieve a really nice finish, but what seems to be missing is consistently good voicing. The skills will be there to do that, but pulling them together would probably need more time investment when the contract was set up, and the finished whistle would cost more. There might also be the possibility of a hybrid approach, where the last 20% of the process is done in Ireland? I don't know enough about it to understand what's possible.
Anyway, from Stringbed's photos it appears the Killarney Ds and As have a narrower bore than the Wilds, so if they were made in the same place, the production's a different setup. It seems unlikely they share an origin with the Sindts, though, not least because of the way John sells his whistles. It doesn't give the impression he uses an OEM production line even for part of the work.
stringbed wrote: ↑Fri Sep 01, 2023 2:24 am
With some misgivings due both to this and an inordinately long delivery time (immediate availability was incorrectly indicated on their website), I ordered another whistle from Mullan.
I noticed when I looked a few days ago that they say dispatch within 30 days, so presumably they've had people grumbling about this.
stringbed wrote: ↑Fri Sep 01, 2023 2:24 am
This time I opted for traceable shipment and was told that the tracking number would be provided as soon as the order had been dispatched. I never received either that number or: a response to a request for it; a response to a request for them to have the postal service track what by then was a clearly overdue shipment; the whistle; a refund; a replacement. That leaves me not just with the negative experience of one Mullan whistle, but with the loss of the purchase price of another.
That's really disappointing. Being in the UK, I could ask my card company to charge it back under Section 75 of the consumer credit act if I'd spent enough (a nifty bit of legislation where if you spend between £101 and £30,00, credit card companies have joint responsibility with sellers to ensure you get what you paid for). Well-run companies ought to know they need to take particular care with international customers who may not have this protection, if they want to hold onto their good reputation.