By the sound of it the biggest issue is their naivety. We do contract production of clothing for mostly UK retailers, it's sometimes shocking how little people that may have been in the clothing business for decades actually know about the manufacturing side of things. Even when you know the business it's not always a given that you're going to get what you specced, we had an incident a few years ago where a supplier in China made a whole batch of jeans with rivets that were not guaranteed nickle free. This was not picked up by anyone, including our paid for inspection service in China, till the merchandise hit the stores and someone had a reaction to the rivet. A very costly mistake.

Did the Empeg team do the deal with Rio purely for the money, or the access to manufacturing and marketing capability? I guess the same sort of thing happened at slimp3, manufacturing your own kit is never easy.