Originally Posted by
veganbikes
Yeah that is a good looking stem, I bought one for a bike and it worked well. Sad they stopped making them but glad I own one and saved a lovely old frame from being turned into a fixed gear (nothing against fixed gear but this was a nice old handbuilt frame from Proteus which was a bike shop in Maryland somewhere that used to make frames)
Factory Five was a Shanghai based company. They didn't make the stem themselves. They bought it from a factory and sold it to the western market with a markup.
The stem is still being made. The factory never stopped making them. If you'd like to make some money, you too can invent a brand logo, email the same factory and ask for your logo to be laser etched, and then resell the thing in the west for middleman profit.
Velo Orange is another company that does the same type of business. I'm assuming you've heard of them. All these guys are middleman merchants. Go to a trade show conference in Asia, sign some contracts with factories, resell the stuff in the west with a markup.
Nowadays the Chinese factories are getting smart and started to sell the stuff direct, so the middlemen are getting squeezed.
By the way the Aliexpress price is way higher than the price on the domestic Chinese market. They're still charging a westerner markup. For the real Chinese price search on Taobao.com, Chinese equivalent of Amazon. Same ownership as AliExpress.
https://a.aliexpress.com/_msdl9qv