Sourcing
How to Audit a Jewelry Factory in China: A Buyer Checklist
A practical audit protocol for verifying a Chinese jewelry factory before your first order: what to request in advance, what to look for on a video walkthrough, and the six signals that separate a real manufacturer from a trading intermediary.
Almost every sourcing failure we see at the trade desk was visible during the audit stage, and it simply was not looked for. This is the protocol we hand to buyers evaluating any factory, including us. It assumes you cannot fly to China yet, which is the situation for most first-time importers.
Stage 1: the paper audit
Ask for four documents and check them against each other. Inconsistency between them is more informative than the documents themselves.
| Document | What it should show | What inconsistency means |
|---|---|---|
| Business licence | Legal entity name, registered address, scope of business including jewellery manufacture | Scope limited to trading or import/export with no manufacturing line |
| Export licence or customs registration | Registration number matching the licence name | A different company name, which means you are talking to a broker rather than the factory |
| Recent certificate sample | IGI, GRA or GIA report with the factory name as the submitter | Certificates with no submitter, or only generic stock images |
| Two recent commercial invoices | Your product category, real unit prices, dated within six months | Redacted beyond recognition, or prices wildly inconsistent with the quote |
Stage 2: the production video walkthrough
Request one continuous, unedited phone video rather than a highlight reel. Ask them to start at the entrance and walk through wax printing, casting, setting, polishing and QC in one take. A factory can produce this in ten minutes. A trading company cannot produce it at all, because the floor is not theirs.
- Count the benches. Setting benches are the bottleneck in jewellery production. A factory claiming 20,000 pieces per month should show at least 15 to 25 setters working.
- Look for work in progress. Racks of unset castings, trays of loose stones and part-finished parcels mean the line is actually running.
- Check the QC station. You want a dedicated area with loupes, a scale, a caliper and a written inspection sheet, not a corner of the packing table.
- Look at stone storage. A real factory keeps melee in labelled, sealed parcels sorted by size and grade. Loose stones in unlabelled bags is a red flag.
- Note the plating line. Rhodium and gold plating should be a defined tank or barrel line with a thickness controller.
- Ask about the laser. If they advertise engraving or certification inscription, there should be a laser marking machine on the floor.
Stage 3: the interrogation questions
Send three technically specific questions and score the answers. Vague or slow answers are the single most predictive signal of a difficult supplier relationship.
| Question | A capable factory answers | A weak answer looks like |
|---|---|---|
| What is your calibrated melee tolerance? | Plus or minus 0.05 mm on 1.0 to 2.0 mm, sorted to 0.03 mm on request | Standard size, with no number |
| What is the alloy composition of your 14K white gold? | Specific percentages, and whether it is nickel-free for the EU | 14K gold, high quality |
| Which plating thickness do you apply to silver? | A micron figure, such as 0.5 to 1.0 microns of rhodium, plus the test method | Good plating, it does not fade |
Stage 4: the sample order
Never place a bulk order on catalogue photography. Order one unit of a stock design, one piece with a metal substitution and one piece with a stone substitution. That three-piece order tests production flexibility, not just quality. When the parcel arrives, inspect in this order.
- Stone security. Under 10x magnification every prong should contact the stone with no gap and no rocking.
- Prong symmetry. Measure the gaps between prongs with a caliper. Uneven gaps mean hand-setting without a jig, which will be inconsistent at volume.
- Polish inside the shank. This is the part a customer never sees and the part lazy factories skip. It should be mirror-finished.
- Plating at the edges. Look at the inner edge of the band and the clasp. Thin plating shows as a colour change within a few millimetres of the edge.
- Weight against specification. Weigh it. A tolerance of plus or minus 5% is normal; a piece 15% light means hollow fabrication.
- Certificate match. Check the inscription against the report number and confirm the grade matches the specification sheet.
Stage 5: scale only after a mixed trial
A trial of 50 to 100 pieces across several designs tells you more than any questionnaire: how they pack, how they label, how consistent the grading is and how accurate their lead-time estimate was. Compare the actual delivery date against the promised date and write the difference down. If a factory is two weeks late on 80 pieces, it will be six weeks late on 2,000.
The six red flags, ranked
| Red flag | What it usually means |
|---|---|
| Cannot or will not produce a continuous production video | Trading company, or production is outsourced to an unknown workshop |
| No named merchandiser assigned to your account | You will chase status updates for the life of the relationship |
| Price far below market with no explanation | Lower grade stones, hollow settings, or plated base metal sold as silver |
| Refuses a paid sample order | Catalogue images are not their own products |
| No written approval sheet before production | Grade and dimensional drift on bulk, with no contractual basis to claim |
| Vague lead times, such as about three to four weeks | Your order will be deprioritised behind larger clients |
What a compliant audit looks like at the end
You should finish with a one-page approval sheet signed by both sides: stone grade with written tolerances, metal and purity, plating thickness in microns, piece weight, dimensions, packing specification and a lead time in working days. Every dispute we have mediated between a buyer and a factory traced back to a missing or vague approval sheet. The audit is not about finding a perfect factory. It is about finding one that will put its commitments in writing.
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Authoritative References
For buyers who need to verify the technical and regulatory basis of this guide, the following independent institutions publish authoritative reference data:
- ISO 9001 Quality Management - the international standard for consistent production quality.
- Wikipedia: Jewellery - manufacturing processes, materials and global trade background.
