American quality at an overseas price
American manufacturing has long been the gold standard for high-quality products. Over the years, we as a country have outsourced the majority of our manufacturing and production overseas. That has let America enjoy lower-priced goods, but it has affected the overall quality of products available.
This is the core problem ACMS set out to fix: how can we produce an American-quality vape cart while keeping pricing competitive with overseas manufacturing?
Redesigning the standard cart
First, we went back to the drawing board. The primary 510-thread vape cart design has been around for over a decade, yet very little innovation or evolution has occurred. When vape carts were first conceived, the thinking was to get a design that works and then modify everything else to account for the problems that came up.
At ACMS, we use modern manufacturing techniques to solve the design issues rather than cover them up. The redesign had one major caveat: not only did it have to be more structurally sound, it had to be modular in a way that allows fully automated assembly in America.
More than 20 redesigns later, we found a solution to the antiquated hardware design and a design built for automated assembly.
Efficient supply chains
Globalized supply chains are unavoidable. No single country has the resources, workforce, raw materials, and know-how to produce goods in a vacuum, and the core argument for globalization is using supply chains across countries to lower costs while maintaining quality.
Our next step was deciding how to split the supply chain between what is assembled in China and what is manufactured in America. China is a manufacturing powerhouse, and many vape subcomponents need close proximity to suppliers to maintain acceptable quality.
All subcomponents of an ACMS cart start with our supply chain partners in China. ACMS uses only single-source materials and maintains control over our partners' operations, giving us transparency, quality control, and supply chain insight that open-market sourcing doesn't allow.
Automated assembly
A standard 510-thread vape cart has become a commodity. But unlike commodities in other industries, current suppliers rely heavily on human labor, which has artificially and unnecessarily kept prices high.
We don't release any product until we've determined how to automate its assembly with as few human touchpoints as possible. That keeps pricing stable and quality consistent across our product lines.
We constantly revisit our upstream and downstream assembly processes to replace human labor with automation as soon as it becomes inefficient or stops scaling linearly. Our goal is a 1:30 employee ratio to our competitors, by maximizing automation, scaling efficiently, and continuing to innovate.
Direct manufacturer access & pricing
ACMS is the manufacturer, and you buy directly from us, not through middlemen. We're currently the only company in the USA structured this way. Every other vape company has a Chinese or Indonesian manufacturing site and stateside resellers. That structure causes two problems:
Extra overhead
Each added layer drives up costs.
Built-in conflict
Resellers want more margin, which puts them at odds with their own factory.
What this means for our customers
Automation is nothing new, but its applications are endless. ACMS customers get the value of our extensive R&D into automation infrastructure, and because we assemble all of our vape carts in Texas, you get:
- A domestic supply chain with Just-in-Time delivery options
- Domestic partners who understand the cannabis industry
- Factory-direct pricing, because we are the factory
- No more losing your hardware supply at Customs
- No more excessive MOQs to get price breaks
- No more inconsistent products
- No more tying up your cash, your business's lifeline, in excess backstock