You were not hired to know about zips

But the quotation is in your inbox. Three hundred units, and somebody senior is waiting for an answer.

Nobody else in the room knows more than you do. Which is to say nobody knows anything.

So you do what anyone would do. You compare the prices, look at the photographs, and choose the one that seems reasonable. And then you carry it. If the bags arrive with a smell, or the zips give out in March, it is your name on the purchase order.

Here is the part that helps, and it does not require you to learn the category.

You are not trying to judge the product. You cannot. You are trying to judge the quotation.

A supplier knows exactly what they are supplying. Every vagueness in a quote is a decision somebody made. So the useful question is not whether this is any good. It is: what has not been named, and why not.

Four things worth checking, on any quotation, in any category.

The grade, not the material. “Stainless steel” is not a specification. 304 is. “Leather” is not a specification either; full-grain is, and so is bonded leather, which is offcuts and adhesive, and cracks along the fold. A supplier who knows the grade writes the grade.

The component nobody mentions. The part that fails first is rarely the part in the photograph. On a bag it is the zip. On a bottle it is the seal inside the lid. On anything with a battery it is the cell. Ask for the brand, and notice that a real answer is a name. “High-quality YKK-style zip” is not YKK.

The decoration method, in writing. Pad print, screen print, laser, embroidery, deboss. They cost differently and they last differently. A quote that says “with your logo” has not told you whether the logo is still there next year.

Who honours the warranty. There is a difference between the manufacturer's warranty and your supplier's. Ask what happens if forty of these fail in month five: who replaces them, and out of whose budget. Somebody who has thought about it answers in one sentence.

Send all four in one email. You are not being difficult. You are giving a good supplier the chance to separate themselves from a poor one.

The first test anything has to pass before it goes into a proposal is whether we would spend our own money on it. That sounds like the soft one of the three. In practice it is the most demanding, because it turns a price into a question about years. A bag at twelve dollars replaced in eight months is not cheaper than a bag at forty still in use in year three. It is only cheaper on the day of the invoice.

And if you cannot get the answers, that is an answer. A supplier who will not put a grade in writing is telling you something about the grade.

None of this makes you an expert on zips. It does not need to. It moves you from guessing about a product, which you genuinely cannot do, to reading a document, which you can.

It also changes what you are answerable for. Not knowing everything about what you bought. Only having asked the questions a careful person would ask.

Which is the same care you are trying to put into the gift itself. Three hundred people will open a box with your company's name on it. The one thing within your control is whether somebody thought about them properly before it was sent.