OEM means the factory manufactures to your specification and your brand. ODM means the factory owns the design and you put your brand on it. In practice most cold plunge programmes sit somewhere between the two, and the interesting questions are about what is customised, who owns the design, and what the minimum order actually is.
A realistic OEM conversation covers six areas. Ask which of them are tooling changes and which are configuration changes — tooling moves MOQ, configuration usually does not.
One of the most common assumptions is that a factory has a single MOQ. Ours differs by model and platform, because the cost of setting up a run does:
| Product | MOQ |
|---|---|
| AC-06, AIBC-900 chillers | 50 units |
| Remaining chiller range | 5 units |
| Stainless steel, wood and acrylic tubs | 5 units |
| Most portable tubs | 100 units |
| Floeberg pods and Ice Bath Incubators | 300 units |
| ibt0001–ibt0003 portable tubs | 500 units |
| Accessories | No MOQ |
If your launch is small, the honest answer is not always the model you liked first. It is often cheaper to launch on a platform with a low MOQ, prove the market, and move to a custom platform once volume justifies it.
Sampling takes 7–15 days, and mass production runs 25–45 days after the sample is approved, depending on configuration and volume. The sample stage is where you should be slow and specific: housing colour, logo behaviour, control panel language, plug type and packaging artwork all confirmed on the sample save weeks later.
Certificate timelines are separate from production timelines. If your market needs a certification that has to be obtained, start that conversation at the sampling stage rather than after the container is booked.
Tooling and design ownership are agreed case by case. Depending on whether the design is patented and whether it is co-developed with the brand, the arrangement is exclusive or shared — and it should be in writing before production starts, not discussed afterwards. If exclusivity matters to your business, raise it with the first specification rather than with the first purchase order.
We supply CE, SAA, EMC, FCC, RoHS and REACH documentation and a UL 60335 test report. Where a market requires a certification we do not hold, we help the brand obtain it rather than implying we already have it — a distinction worth checking with any supplier, because an unearned certificate claim becomes your compliance problem when the customs paperwork is examined.
Brands that treat OEM as a specification exercise rather than a shopping exercise tend to launch later than planned but with fewer surprises in the field.
The compressor control type decides how a chiller behaves once the tub is at temperature — how tightly it holds the setpoint and how often it starts. Here is what to put in a request for quotation, and which standards answer each question.
Read Article →Most of our chiller range can be ordered as cooling-only or as cooling-and-heating, and one model does both at once. Here is how to decide per market, and how to write the configuration into the purchase order so the right unit is built.
Read Article →
