YOU ASKED. WE ANSWERED.

We believe they compare very favorably as our manufacturing model and component selection emulates the OEM strategy:  100% brand new components and shells manufactured in highly controlled, clean and automated manufacturing plants.  We assemble our products in China (just like HP, Lexmark and most other OEMs!) to keep the costs low and our technicians do not have to worry about assessing empty cores, cleaning and disassembling them, or judging what components can be reused, versus needing to be replaced.  These arbitrary processes that rely on Human skill are the foundation of the remanufacturing business model and one the reasons why even the best Remanufactured cartridges incur about a 1% return rate.  In 2018, our return rate has been consistently 0.1% – ten times less!  Cost?  Our product is about 20% less than leading remans, so that puts our product at about 40/50% less than the deepest OEM discounts.

Usually it’s a matter of previous experience and a lack of awareness that a high quality New Build like the Gold Line now exists. New build cartridges were first launched about 10 years ago and for the most part they were low quality/price, had high failure rates and infringed OEM IP. Many dealers in our industry got frustrated and lost customers as a result. However, New builds have improved and some companies like LD Products have reinvented the category and are taking it to the next level. Think about electric cars – In the 1990s/2000s they were not very good. Now its widely accepted that companies like Tesla have developed the electric car concept and now produce vehicles whose performance exceeds traditional Gasoline models. The purpose of this marketing campaign is to engage with potential customers like yourself, learn the questions that are important to your business and educate people that there is now an alternative (The Gold Line) that can surpass the quality standards and performance of a reman cartridge. In order to test our claims, any dealer can simply request free samples of the Gold Line and test them in their service centers, or customer fleets at no charge. Please put us to the test – We stand behind our product and you have the opportunity to increase profitability and customer satisfaction with your end users.

Yes – The Gold Line is designed and tested using the same American Society for Testing and Materials Standards that OEMs use to establish their yields at 5% coverage – ISO 19752 for monochrome cartridges and ISO 24712 for color. LD Products is also a member of the International Imaging Technology Council (IITC) and all our products are produced in factories that have attained IITC Standardized Test Methods Committee (STMC) Certifications. In addition to this we produce a range of Extended yield cartridges that massively surpass the OEM yields and these are commonly used in MPS environments. A couple of examples include: HP Q5942X – The OEM yield is 20,000 pages and we make a 30,000 page cartridge. HPCF281X – The OEM is 25K and we make a 40K Gold Line version.

(1) They will achieve yield, so the profit you calculate from each cartridge will be realized, compared to other cartridges that don’t achieve yield and miss revenue/profit targets
(2) The image density will not degrade visually in the last 20% of pages – This will eliminate the number of end user early replacement calls for a new cartridge – Again protecting your profit margins.

Not yet, but LD Products is very close to finalizing the development of the HP Officejet X451/X551/X576 series often referred to as the 970/971 series. We expect to launch these in Q4 2018.

Yes – The Gold Line contains no reference inside or out of LD Products – Each box is designed to include a wrap around label that displays the dealers logo, contact information and delivery to desk instructions.  See here for examples:  https://cpd.ldproducts.com/custom-labeling/

We’re glad you like it – Our Goal is to project a professional image to end users on behalf of a dealer.  At LD Products we are fortunate to have a very talented in-house design team headed up by Fred Machuca.  Incidentally, Fred and the team just won a prestigious Silver medal design award from the globally acclaimed design institution Graphis – See here for more details:

http://www.graphis.com/entry/45f56f5d-7e72-4ca0-a2ef-00377d505348/

While tank type printers (I am guessing you mean business inkjet devices like the HP and Epson series?) are gaining popularity amongst home users and small office environments, the vast majority of business printers still use traditional integrated Laser printer engines. We are working on developing our Gold Line inkjet products and will begin launching products in this category early in 2019.

Our Business model is very similar to that of Apple and other technology brands. If you look on the back of your iPhone, you’ll see that it says designed in California, Assembled in China. The high-value processes of our Gold Line like R&D, new product qualification, incoming inventory testing are conducted in Phoenix Arizona and the assembly is undertaken in China to keep costs low and pass on the most amount of savings to our dealers. Incidentally, HP and nearly all other OEMs also do the same. They design their products in the USA or Japan and build their consumables in China.

Some of our A4 Canon MFPs are compatible with similar HP models, but we don’t make any A3 Canon series yet.

We have invested in producing Gold Line models for the most popular monochrome and color HP, Lexmark, Dell, Brother, Samsung, IBM, and Xerox printer/A4 MFP devices launched in the last 15 years. Currently, we have over 220 skus and are launching around 10-20 new skus every month. Our HP range includes the normal OEM yields as well as a range of extended yield cartridges that are designed for high volume MPS environments. Our sales team will send you a complete product file by email shortly.

Currently there are no extended yield or “jumbo” chips in the market that our R&D Department have been able to qualify. We are aware that there are chips in development and will test / deploy them in our products if they prove to be demanded by dealers. The industry standard that we and the leading remanufacturers have followed for the last decade is to use the “A” or “X” yield chip with a corresponding extended yield toner cartridge and ensure the toner alerts in the DCA are set below the “toner low” threshold in the device. How a standard chip functions in an extended yield cartridge is similar to the standard yield chip. The printer first estimates pages and toner used based on the pixel count per page. Once it hits “toner low” at 20%-25%, the countdown of the remaining life from the chip stalls until the additional toner to make it a “jumbo” is used and the physical sensing then picks up for the remainder of the toner cartridge. Once the actual toner left is below the toner low level and at the threshold set in the DCA it will then trigger the replenishment alert (eg at 10%, 7%, 5%, etc) to ensure just in time fulfillment. There are chips in the industry for extended yield or “jumbo” cartridges that have the stated yield adjusted in the chip, but it only changes the value the chip reports upon installation (ex. 40,000) and the countdown is still calculated at the standard X yield (24,000). Thanks for the question Dustin as this is a challenge that has been in the industry for many years and it will be interesting to see if/how the chip manufacturers develop a solution.

We can – One of our team will reach out to find out what skus you are interested in and we’ll ask our R&D team to undertake a Technical Assessment.

Not yet – Product development of a new sku takes around 3 months on average and we have been concentrating on the highest volume skus first. If there are particular models that you are interested in, please let us know and we can add them to our development schedule.

That’s straight up purchase price savings for dealers.  We have not yet worked out what the additional benefit is of our lower return/failure rate than competitive products, but this is a great question and an area that we will research further.   Thinking it through, processing ten times fewer returns eases the administration burden on a dealers support staff to raise/track replacement orders, chase in credits from suppliers and leads to much higher customer satisfaction levels.

Yes – While Xerox EA is Xerox’s proprietary formulation, it is a technology of toner known as Chemical Polymer.  In the old days toner powder was made by grinding processes known as “Mechanical Pulverization.”  Since about 2014, first Color and then Monochrome toner technology has advanced to utilize Chemical toner that has a lower melting point.  This translates to faster print speeds and lower footprint size devices.  All the Gold Line color models (including Xerox) use chemical toner formulations.

No.  OEMs in all industries are prevented from denying warranty to customers that choose 3^rd party products (unless that product fails and caused the warranty issue!).  This is a long standing legal precedent enacted in 1975 by the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act:  “Simply using an aftermarket or recycled part does not void your warranty,” according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC).  See link here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnuson%E2%80%93Moss_Warranty_Act

Yes, We produce a wide range of Extended Yield cartridges for monochrome and color HP and Canon models covering all the models that leading remanufacturers produce.  In all cases, our extended yields match leading remanufacturers and in some cases we have a few models that exceed them.  Two that spring to mind are the Q5942X – The leading remans have yields of 26-28K.  Ours is 30K.  CF281X.  Leading remans are 34-36K.  Ours is 40K.

That is very hard to judge scientifically.  On one hand, a New built cartridge uses mostly new plastics and is built/shipped from China.  Unless a customer selects a recycling label from us when it is purchased (Cost $8 per cartridge to ship and properly recycle everything to R2 standards) then the empty New build will end up in the waste stream.  A reman begins its life as a (usually only once) used cartridge that is then refilled.  However, once this product is empty, most end up in the waste stream as Remanufacturers do not want the majority of their empty products back a second time.  At face value, a remanufactured cartridge is therefore more environmentally friendly than a new build.  However, the collection processes of getting that empty cartridge back from an end user to a sorting/processing center and then damaged cartridges eliminated before they are sent to a remanufacturer has a very high cost of carbon output due to all the shipping processes.  It is not understood if these environmental costs outweigh the benefits of recycling that cartridge.   In layman terms, it could be that remanufacturers spend carbon dollars, to save carbon cents…..  We recently published an article on this that has more detail:  https://cpd.ldproducts.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ENX-April-2018-Pepper-article.pdf

Yes – We take IP compliance as seriously as we do building the highest quality standard.  Every customer of the Gold Line receives a legally binding indemnification that in the event of an OEM claim of IP Infringement,  LD Products will take over the defense, all legal costs and settlements of that claim.  Like most successful companies in the Aftermarket, Remanufacturers or New Builders, LD Products has been involved in a handful of IP lawsuits over the past 20 years.  We have never lost a case, have always reached an amicable settlement with the OEM and none of our customers has ever paid any legal fees or damages.

Yes,  Our Boxes are wrapped with a label containing the dealer logo, contact info and a free text field that can contain things like specific delivery instructions.  See this page on our website for pics of what the label looks like:  https://cpd.ldproducts.com/custom-labeling/

When a replenishment stock order has been produced, the factory sends ‘Pre shipment’ samples by air to our R&D team in Phoenix where the cartridges are fully tested to life and the Bill of Materials is checked to ensure every component is as contracted. If they pass, the consignment is shipped to us by Ocean freight. When it arrives 3 weeks later, our warehouse pull further ‘Post shipment’ samples and send them to Phoenix for testing. If these pass, the consignment is booked into inventory to be sold.

If you think about any recycled product, for example paper, it costs more than new because of all the manual and extra processes needed to recycle that commodity.  In Remanufactured cartridges 30-40% of the cost of the finished product is spent on collecting empty cores, shipping them to sorting centers and then onto remanufacturers.  From here the cores have to be manually dissembled, or split in half, cleaned of all their waste toner and then glued back together. Typically an empty cartridge cost is around $10-20.   In a new built cartridge we don’t have these costs and a new shell plus new gears, pins, bushings, etc costs $1-2.  We therefore have more budget to spend on higher quality components than a remanufacturer and can pass on 10-20% savings to our reseller customers.

We collect and autopsy every cartridge that dealers report an issue with. Unlike many leading Remanufactured competitors who often give dealers a 1-2% invoice credit NOT to return faulty cartridges, we believe performing a root cause analysis on every returned cartridge is an opportunity to find out how we can improve our products and service. At the time of writing 10-2-18, YTD we have achieved a return rate of 0.14% and our defect rate is 0.09%. That is 1.4 cartridges out of every 1,000 that has being returned and after analysis we concluded that just under 1 out of every 1,000 is defective.

We use multiple manufacturers to assemble our Gold Line and don’t have data on the exact amount of recycled plastic used – There is some, but It tends to be affected by fluctuating commodity prices and our partners cannot give a solid answer at this time. This is an interesting question and we are going to look into it further to see if we can influence our manufacturers to use more recycled plastic content. Stay tuned.

No. Our Toner and Developers are manufactured by the Industry leading 3^rd party vendors.

HP CF226X

1. Cosmetics:  For years Dealers have been apologizing and explaining to end users why Reman cartridges often look used / bad condition out of the box.  Because our products are 100% new, the out of box experience is similar to an OEM cartridge.  Even though cartridges should just be judged on their print quality, everyone ‘buys’ things with their eyes and customers of our Gold Line tend to have more positive comments about the level of detail we have paid to our packaging and the cosmetic quality of the cartridge inside.
2. Leakage:  End users of Reman cartridges often report that the inside of their printers become more dusty /clogged up compared to using OEM carts, leading to service calls and low satisfaction levels.  One of the main reasons is that when you split apart and reseal a used cartridge back together, sometimes the seal is poor and the fine toner dust leaks out.  Gold Line New Build cartridges do not suffer from these issues as our manufacturing tolerances are much higher than manual remanufacturing processes.
3. Print Quality:  Gold Line Blacks and Colors are richer than leading Remanufactured cartridges as we have more budget to spend on the best componentry and toner formulations.  Remanufacturers cannot match this as 30-40% of their product cost is eaten up in collecting, sorting, disassembling, cleaning and reassembling used cartridges.

That’s it! Better Toner and Components – That’s everything that makes a cartridge!
The LD standard line is built to a low price point to compete online for occasional / low volume print user business. It is not good enough for business users.

At the time of writing (9-27-18), our product category has not been levied with a tariff in either of the two rounds the Trump administration has levied upon Chinese imported goods.

One of the reasons reported by Actionable Intelligence in September 2018 was the Lobbying undertaken during the consultation period by HP and other printer OEMs who also manufacture the majority of their cartridges in China.  Where the OEM and Aftermarket usually are fierce competitors, in this situation we are unlikely partners.  If the third round of proposed tariffs are implemented, it is understood that all Chinese imported products will have a tariff added to them (perhaps up to 10%).   If this happens, OEM products and our Gold Line will be affected and we already have plans in place to split the increased costs with our manufacturing partners so that we do not have to pass on any pricing increases to our dealers.  However many remanufactured cartridges will also be impacted as a lot of the components, toner powder, chips and even finished goods are manufactured by Chinese entities.

(1)    All our cartridges are designed and tested using the same American Society for Testing and Materials Standards that OEMs use to establish their yields at 5% coverage – ISO 19752 for monochrome cartridges and  ISO 24712 for color.  LD Products is also a member of the International Imaging Technology Council (IITC) and all our products are produced in factories that have attained IITC Standardized Test Methods Committee (STMC) Certifications.

(2)    Our customers can also independently verify our products meet their yields by pulling reports from most Remote Management Software like Printfleet, FM Audit, Print Audit, etc.  This software will verify the page yield attained by the cartridge at the end users average page coverage.  Our Gold Line is guaranteed to achieve its stated yield at 5% coverage and any cartridge a dealer returns to us that did not, will be replaced free of charge.

We surveyed hundreds of dealers in 2017 and 2018 and we found that nearly every dealer who use remanufactured cartridges in their business already purchase a small percentage of New Build cartridges.  What we found is that they tend to offer the low yield models (less than 2,000 pages) to mainly transactional customers – not MPS clients.  The reason is that small yield cartridges are quite technically simple and the failure rates of about 5-6% is absorbable.  However, dealers have steered away from larger yield cartridges as the low quality severely affects their profit margins and the number of failures causes complaints within their Business customer base.  Gold Line is the first series of Business class printer cartridges available to dealers that combine high quality, yield attainment and significant cost savings over Reman.  However, after spending most of 2017 in product development and fleet testing, we only launched the Gold Line into the market in January 2018.  Around 10 dealers per month are switching to Gold Line and we trust that as awareness grows and dealers test/ratify the performance of our YTD 0.1% return rate, our market share will grow.  

Today, with the exception of two skus, (Laserjet 9050 and M806) all our Monochrome skus are New Build, but most of our HP Color is still reman.  The reason for this is the increased technical complexity of a color cartridge and the volume of units necessary to justify the investment in building new shells.  We have recently launched some Business class color Xerox and Brother skus that are New build and many of our Color HP skus are in the final stages of development and testing.  Our current forecast is that in Q1 2019, we will begin refreshing the Reman HP color models in the Gold Line range with New Builds.

The Gold Line features most HP, Lexmark, Xerox, Samsung and Brother skus manufactured in the last 15 years.  There are still some older models that we have not invested in producing.  The market population of these really old devices is shrinking as dealers focus on replacing them with newer models.

We haven’t invested in building or offering a proposal tool yet, but it is something we have planned for 2019. At this time we recommend the EZMPS and Sherpa tools from Compass.

At the time of writing (9-27-18), our product category has not been levied with a tariff in either of the two rounds the Trump administration has levied upon Chinese imported goods.
One of the reasons reported by Actionable Intelligence in September 2018 was the Lobbying undertaken during the consultation period by HP and other printer OEMs who also manufacture the majority of their cartridges in China.  Where the OEM and Aftermarket usually are fierce competitors, in this situation we are unlikely partners.  If the third round of proposed tariffs are implemented, it is understood that all Chinese imported products will have a tariff added to them (perhaps up to 10%).   If this happens, OEM products and our Gold Line will be affected and we already have plans in place to split the increased costs with our manufacturing partners so that we do not have to pass on any pricing increases to our dealers.  However many remanufactured cartridges will also be impacted as a lot of the components, toner powder, chips and even finished goods are manufactured by Chinese entities.

This is a complex question and not one that I think has been studied/concluded scientifically. On one hand the shells of Gold Line plastics are produced from a mix of new and recycled plastics in China and then shipped in bulk for distribution across America. There is obviously a carbon and energy cost to this. When the product is spent, we do not take responsibility for it unless our dealers choose to enroll in our Recycling program which provides end to end collection and R2 certified recycling of all the components. Even within a recycling program there is further carbon output from the collection and shipping costs to return the empty cartridge. By comparison, in the Remanufactured model, empty cartridges have to be collected, shipped to producers and then sorted in order for the remanufacturer to actually have a product to sell in the first place. From my previous experience about 1/3 are rejected as not being suitable for remanufacturing (damaged, not desirable models, not virgin cores, etc). Then, most of the components and waste toner inside that used cartridge are discarded. Some remanufacturers pay to recycle these materials – others do not. Then the cartridge is resold and shipped around the country again. Once it has been used, some dealers/remanufacturers pay to collect/recycle the cartridge, but most do nothing further and I believe a large percentage of spent remans also then end up in the Landfill.

Which business model is most environmentally friendly? I cannot say for sure, but both produce waste, use energy and emit Carbon. My belief is that the responsibility for recycling is a decision each dealer and end user can make by selecting a recycling program. If this is an important consideration for dealer, they can add recycling of our empty products and depending on their choice of bulk collection, or including a recycling label inside each box, the cost is between $2 and $8 per cartridge. We recently wrote an article on this – More detail is here: https://cpd.ldproducts.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ENX-April-2018-Pepper-article.pdf

Yes and PA warehouse too.

As of October 2018 we have almost 300 Gold Line Skus. Around 200 monochrome and 100 color.
All but two of the monochrome are New Build (HP Laserjet 9050 and M806 series are the Remans) The majority of Colors are Reman today, but we are in the process of switching these over to New build and should complete this migration by the end of Q2 2019.
The product quality (Bill of Material items) is engineered in the USA. Pre and Post shipment quality control processes and returned product analysis is undertaken in the USA. Components are sourced from USA, Japan and China. Assembly processes are undertaken in China.

This is a complex question and not one that I think has been studied/concluded scientifically.  On one hand the shells of Gold Line plastics are produced from a mix of new and recycled plastics in China and then shipped in bulk for distribution across America.  There is obviously a carbon and energy cost to this.  When the product is spent, we do not take responsibility for it unless our dealers choose to enroll in our Recycling program which provides end to end collection and R2 certified recycling of all the components.  Even within a recycling program there is further carbon output from the collection and shipping costs to return the empty cartridge.  By comparison, in the Remanufactured model, empty cartridges have to be collected, shipped to producers and then sorted in order for the remanufacturer to actually have a product to sell in the first place.  From my previous experience about 1/3 are rejected as not being suitable for remanufacturing (damaged, not desirable models, not virgin cores, etc).  Then, most of the components and waste toner inside that used cartridge are discarded.  Some remanufacturers pay to recycle these materials – others do not.  Then the cartridge is resold and shipped around the country again.  Once it has been used, some dealers/remanufacturers pay to collect/recycle the cartridge, but most do nothing further and I believe a large percentage of spent remans also then end up in the Landfill.
Which business model is most environmentally friendly?  I cannot say for sure, but both produce waste, use energy and emit Carbon.  My belief is that the responsibility for recycling is a decision each dealer and end user can make by selecting a recycling program.  If this is an important consideration for dealer, they can add recycling of our empty products and depending on their choice of bulk collection, or including a recycling label inside each box, the cost is between $2 and $8 per cartridge.  We recently wrote an article on this – More detail is here:  https://cpd.ldproducts.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/ENX-April-2018-Pepper-article.pdf

At the time of writing (9-27-18), our product category has not been levied with a tariff in either of the two rounds the Trump administration has levied upon Chinese imported goods.
One of the reasons reported by Actionable Intelligence in September 2018 was the Lobbying undertaken during the consultation period by HP and other printer OEMs who also manufacture the majority of their cartridges in China. Where the OEM and Aftermarket usually are fierce competitors, in this situation we are unlikely partners. If the third round of proposed tariffs are implemented, it is understood that all Chinese imported products will have a tariff added to them (perhaps up to 10%). If this happens, OEM products and our Gold Line will be affected and we already have plans in place to split the increased costs with our manufacturing partners so that we do not have to pass on any pricing increases to our dealers. However many remanufactured cartridges will also be impacted as a lot of the components, toner powder, chips and even finished goods are manufactured by Chinese entities.

Someone from our team will contact you to understand your business and make some recommendations.

The most popular HP, Lexmark, Samsung, Brother, Xerox and Dell A4 Laser printer models manufactured in the last 15 years. Someone from our team will send you a product list to consider.

You can already recycle the cores by opting into our recycling program, but they cores are not remanufactured into more cartridges – Instead they are sorted and separated into their plastic and metal commodities – The reason is that recycling a cartridge can never consistently produce the same quality as the New product as it has to be split in half, cleaned out, some new components added, others reused and then the cartridge resealed again. All these processes rely on humans and occasionally we make mistakes. This is why the leading remanufactured cartridge producers have about a 1% return rate and a 0.3 – 0.5% defect rate (depending on how many people actually return faulty carts or how they massage their data) By comparison a new build product like our Gold line employs much higher levels of manufacturing automation and 100% new components every time. This leads to an industry leading return rate of 0.1% for our Gold Line in 2018.