Re-Cut the Mold Mid-Program — A Top-5 Sink Brand Story

The challenge

At first-article inspection on a brand-new SKU in an existing sink range, the silicone bottom grid seated correctly in the bowl but the drain cutout sat 2 mm off-center against the sink's rear-offset strainer. The CAD review four weeks earlier had been signed off with the same dimensions our mold workshop had cut to — but the customer's source sink CAD had been silently revised between RFP and first article, and the change hadn't propagated through our mold review. The visible offset would have read as a sink-fit defect at retail.

How we approached it

Industry-default response would have been one of: (a) ship the marginal first article with a request for the customer to "approve as-is", (b) cite the signed-off CAD as protection against rework cost, (c) propose a shim or insert workaround. We did none of those. The engineering lead met with the customer's product manager on a Zoom call within 24 hours, acknowledged the sink-CAD-revision miss on our review, and proposed a full mold re-cut on our cost on a 6-week schedule that would still hit the retail launch window.

Outcome

The re-cut hit a 5-week schedule instead of 6. The launch shipped on time with the corrected geometry. The customer's program manager later described the decision as a relationship shift — Wetop moved from "an audited vendor" to "the accessory supplier our internal team uses as a benchmark." The program has now run for 4 years and expanded from 3 SKUs in the range to 8, at roughly 75,000 pieces per year. The customer's procurement team has since brought us into two adjacent sink ranges from the same brand portfolio.