Production · Logistics · Market development
Outsourcing production to Germany: the benefits for Swiss companies.
Our services enable small Swiss companies to focus on higher value product and customer development tasks. Lower-value activities such as production and logistics can be carried out in Germany rather than Switzerland.
Kreatronic also provides development services in production, procurement and product design as well as events marketing, which can quickly generate incremental revenue.
If your product is B2B, high-end or complex, Kreatronic can probably produce it cheaper than you can in Switzerland. Our process management discipline during production, testing, and packing ensures that when your goods leave, they will work straight out of the box.
Shipping from Germany reduces Swiss customs complications, especially with drop shipping, which we do worldwide with UPS (up to 60 cm tall, boxed). With pallet business we can take care of freight offers and export or certificate of origin documents.
Many traditional manufacturers are realising that their existing sales channels are farming customers who could just as easily buy direct. We provide advanced digital marketing services. Our content creation strategy establishes your company as the authority with AI search platforms and Google Marketplace, one of the cheapest and fastest ways to generate online sales. Innovative digital campaigns with Reddit, LinkedIn and traditional channels like Google Ads, Facebook, and Instagram work far better with high-quality short film clips, which present benefit-led products. Our AI auditing system helps optimise the campaigns and shows where the best return on investment is. We also produce AI-generated photos and video that present your key benefits to customers, without an expensive photo shoot.
Value Engineering
Value engineering looks for opportunities to reduce cost without reducing quality, reliability or value perception.
A fresh pair of eyes can look at a product and find alternative materials or slight design tweaks that provide significant benefit to the customer, or improve product lifetime, or reduce material costs. This is particularly important in this time of rising component costs, but there are often several strategies to maintain the cost without compromising quality. Sometimes it’s finding a new supplier for the higher-value components, restructuring the supply chain, or finding new negotiation opportunities with current suppliers to help them reduce their pricing.
Example: slight adjustment to the production process saved up to 40 minutes per day
By analysing the production process we identified that employees were wasting 30 to 40 seconds undoing cable binders and doing them back up during testing and boxing. A simple instruction to the manufacturing company allowed the cable to be delivered with a certain length at one end, not being tied up. This made it easier for the worker and saved time on every product, without incurring any additional cost.
Example: Redesign of a small component: improved customer satisfaction, product effectiveness, and reduced spare part orders
A backstop valve needed to be removed for cleaning. This required a tool, and invariably they didn’t bother cleaning it, which had affected the lifetime reliability. Often, they lost the part during cleaning, meaning downtime. We redesigned the part so that it was integrated into a simple-to-remove piece, thereby solving both of these problems. The additional cost to the component was very small but this change brought significant benefits in customer satisfaction, reliability of the product, and a reduction of low-value spares orders.
Example: de-risking against climbing prices of expensive components
Tungsten carbide provides exceptional qualities in terms of thermal coefficient and hardness. But it has risen 200% in the last year. Some parts also are very expensive to tool, requiring powder sintering. The client was locked into one supplier because every other one, even in China, was three times their price. This meant they were also very vulnerable to a lack of supply. In one quarter, the price went up 60%, and the customer was forced to accept it.
We researched alternative materials and found an exotic steel that could provide food-grade hardness of 58HRC, fast production time, and price stability. 440C can be heat treated to a high hardness while keeping its corrosion resistance, which is what these food industry parts require. Compared to tungsten carbide or ceramic it is far cheaper, the quality reduction is minimal and the supply is stable.
One of these tungsten parts, we were able to redesign it so that it became part of another existing component. In addition to reducing the number of parts, it eliminated the risk associated with pressing these two parts together, a process that had an unacceptably high mistake or rejection level. The cost per piece, including production, sank from €17 to €9 and could be produced in Europe without the high rejection rate. There was also significant improvement in cash flow, as previously in China it required a 3- to 4-month prepayment, while in Europe we were able to negotiate 30 days after shipping.
These value engineering projects create value extremely quickly.
By reviewing your products with fresh eyes, we’re able to provide a wide range of services, including CAD redesign and researching alternative materials. We provide fast prototyping and comprehensive testing to assure design and material change comes with no disadvantages.
On projects like this, we typically charge based on the saving we generate, so there is no upfront cost or risk for our customer.
Assembly and procurement
Our focus is complex, lower-volume assembly and testing, for products up to 58 cm, handheld to tabletop size. We’re not set up for simple, high-volume piecework.
We film and document your process, look for efficiencies and then build a repeatable model, so quality doesn’t drift between unit 5 and unit 5,000, or January and July. We set up our test rig so that each product has the same settings and produces the same predictable results.
We offer procurement support as required, based on setting agreed stock levels and alerts.
Securing annual contracts with our partners in Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany and Switzerland, instead of only single orders, often enables us to match Asian pricing, on 30-day terms and lead times in weeks rather than months.
Many component manufacturers sell only through country-specific resellers. Buy through Germany and you get German reseller pricing; buy from Switzerland for the same component, and their reseller network routes you back to the pricier Swiss reseller, often 30% higher. Using our German address gets you the lower price.
If required, Kreatronic can provide Swiss companies with the European-specific services that are required, such as a “responsible person” or “tax representative”. We can also offer you your own postbox if needed.
Testing and compliance
We test to your procedure and pass values, tracking every stage against the serial number for full batch and unit traceability. Each step of the process, from low-voltage or functional testing to visual inspection before packaging and 4-eye check at boxing, ensures your customer is going to get a working product with all the components. For contract-manufactured parts, we also hold the supplier’s own test reports and REACH documentation.
A Certificate of Conformity ships with each consignment, backed by that traceability record.
Electrical products get insulation resistance, earth continuity and dielectric strength testing. Performance testing covers whatever the product needs: power consumption, noise, or other specific readings.
We maintain the technical file behind your Declaration of Conformity, and flag it the moment a substance in your bill of materials joins the REACH/ECHA candidate list.
Logistics and shipping
Kreatronic’s focus is around the assembly and drop shipping. We do not offer logistics-only services, but we work with specialist partners for freight and import/export matters. This allows us to manage the complete process including:
- Procurement
- Goods in inspection
- Building of assembly groups
- Assembly into end products
- CE and functional testing
- Global drop shipping
- Informing the customer of the tracking information
- Export paperwork: commercial invoice, packing list, HS codes, EORI, the export declaration above €1,000, certificates of origin, and EUR.1
Once your products have been boxed, they can be picked up, or shipped to your resellers or drop shipped worldwide direct to your customers. We use UPS at negotiated rates for parcels, most of Europe next working day, or Dachser for pallets. Shipments go out DAP under your name.
Market development
It’s quite incredible how the online landscape has changed.
If your web sales suddenly dropped off at the end of 2024, the likely cause is that Google now penalises old websites. A fully optimised modern website is essential for any online sales strategy, and gives you access to many free online services that can significantly increase web sales or sales leads.
Google Merchant provides a free image-driven platform that comes up at the top of any Google search. There are many other such methods of ensuring your product has visibility without having to pay for expensive advertising campaigns.
The first thing we do is understand where your technology, marketing strategy, and effectiveness compete in the market. We use AI to see what people are saying about your products compared to your competitors, and look for specific areas where you can win without having to invest large advertising budgets.
Most sites are further behind Google than they look. Pages taking over 3 seconds to load lost roughly 23% more traffic than faster competitors after the last core update, often down to an old shop platform or unoptimised images.
The harder part is generating authentic, authoritative content and material. We can help you obtain references, case studies, and product-in-use photography from your existing customers. By having your products presented by your customers in a real environment rather than through paid advertising, Google, ChatGPT and other referral sites rank your content much higher. Customers reading these authentic comments can relate to the product, and it creates credibility compared to just reading typical marketing copy.
We also work the slower channels that compound over time: reviewers, forums your buyers use, and trade associations that carry additional weight in the market. All of these initiatives are geared at building presence that gets more authoritative over time, rather than just renting clicks through ads.
Google Analytics and Search Console are not always clearly integrated and can show very different figures. A high number of impressions, for example, may just be bots indexing your site, not real visitors. If you work in innovation, this is a real risk: those same bots can hand competitors, particularly in China, the exact information they need to decide whether to develop a competing product. Restricting bot access doesn’t just make your analytics more relevant, it also reduces the risk of cheaper competitors copying you.
Even platforms like Google Ads come with budget-sucking traps. Click farms are a very unethical but valid business model: companies, often based in India, sign up as affiliates or publishers within an ad network and get your ads placed on their own sites. Workers, or bots, click those ads thousands of times, earning a fraction of a cent per click, while you’re charged full price per click for a visitor who was never a real customer.
However, there are other platforms, such as Reddit, LinkedIn, and classical Google Ads, Facebook, and Instagram, and YouTube, where far more targeted campaigns can be generated.
By taking this very holistic approach rather than dated historical marketing approaches, we’re able to find ways to make digital strategy start paying for itself within weeks. Our services are paid from your incremental revenues.
Various pricing models
Cost-plus
This works well if you wish a dedicated team member for production. We work simply on cost plus agreed margin.
Activity-based
This is the most transparent method and means you just pay for the results. Each task (such as building an assembly group, assembling a finished product, testing it, and boxing it) has a price associated with it. You only pay for the work produced, and this works very well with batch products where you might have 100 products a week produced, so you can predict your production and your cost. Project work (sourcing, market research, campaigns) quoted separately.
Volume commitment
This model provides a minimum assembly volume agreed over a set period, so demand evens out without paying for idle capacity. It means if you have fewer orders in a month, we’ll be building inventory. If demand runs well above the agreed average, pricing may increase to cover the extra capacity needed to deliver it.
Account management
An administration cost covering the single point of contact who coordinates your account across production, testing and shipping.
The case for outsourcing
Do you recognise any of these in your own business?
- Are Swiss salaries or rising components putting your margin under pressure?
- Do you feel you're investing too much time in managing low-end tasks like production and logistics rather than developing new products and new customers?
- Do you need a legal representative in the EU: for WEEE registration, a returns address, or as the basis for warehousing and drop shipping?
- Is your web presence outdated, reaching fewer end customers than it should?
Location
Radolfzell sits on Lake Constance in southern Germany, close to the Konstanz crossing into Switzerland and on Stockach’s road and rail network.
Switzerland sits outside the EU customs union, so anything crossing that border faces import duty, clearance paperwork and delay, in both directions. Based in Radolfzell, our production and logistics never make that crossing. Components from EU suppliers arrive without a Swiss import step. Finished goods for EU and global customers leave from here too, without ever entering Switzerland. Suppliers who won’t quote for delivery into Switzerland, or who load the price when they do, deliver to us without a second thought.
The border itself is closer still: Gaienhofen, on Lake Constance, sits directly on the Swiss border and is just 4 km south of Radolfzell. The Konstanz crossing is about 20 km by road.
EU regulations
WEEE
If your product has a plug or a battery, placing it on the EU market makes you a producer under the WEEE Directive, with registration, take-back and financing obligations in every member state you sell into. We can act as your responsible person and handle registration and take-back so you don’t need a local entity.
REACH
Any part or material above 0.1% by weight of a Candidate List substance triggers notification duties, even in imported goods. We hold supplier declarations across our approved suppliers so we can tell you immediately whether a substance change affects your product.
Packaging (EU Regulation 2025/40)
Every packaging type placed on the market needs a Declaration of Conformity and a unique identifier, and empty space is capped at 40%. We design and document packaging to meet this before it ships.
News and regulation
12 August 2026
New EU packaging rules
Regulation (EU) 2025/40 applies directly, EU-wide: a Declaration of Conformity and unique identifier per packaging type, and empty space capped at 40%.
Continuous
REACH and the candidate list
Separate from CE marking: it governs substances, not product safety. Once something joins the candidate list, any part over 0.1% by weight brings notification duties. We hold supplier declarations so…
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