I Promise Officer its not a Bomb!

Would you believe that my stethoscope developer has been trying to mail me my prototype for 4 months now? Well it's the truth. So getting something mailed to you in the US from Pakistan is no easy feat. Especially when that thing contains wires and a lithium battery. So this is the story of the past few months and our customs trials.

The other day I got off the phone with my prototype developer and he sounded besides himself on the phone. He was completely harassed and bullied by Pakistan customs agents. Our team has basically finished tweaking our prototype and has packaged our medical device to ship to the USA. First we tried just mailing through DHL. No luck, they wouldn't take it. Apparently many shipping companies aren't shipping to the US due to tariffs. Since DHL wouldn't ship our device, my prototype developer then tried the currier he used last time to take it to Dubai and mail it from there to the US. Well apparently the currier just stole our money for shipping and didn't mail it to the US, He allegedly mailed it to the UK. by accident. Great! How can someone mix up the UK for the USA?! Try three was just through regular post. That is when the Pakistan customs agents came down on my prototype developer and accused him of being a terrorist sending bombs to the US. They stripped our prototype down to the circuits and just discarded it into a pile of junk. My prototype developer had to call in a family favor to get into the customs area where they discarded our prototype to get back the discarded pieces. Now my prototype developer is going to use those family connections to ship the device with their assistance a final time. He needs to rebuild the dismantled prototype before he ships it off again. I told him another option is just for me to get a 3D printer myself and to print out the prototype on my side, get the circuits mailed to me from the source and with his assistance build the prototype on my end rather than mailing it. We are going to go that route if his final attempt at shipping fails. What a complete hassle. How do bigger companies do it? There is so much red tape shipping anything between countries. Things to consider when we're ready to scale up. If it's hard to ship a prototype what kind of issues would we face shipping a bunch of manufactured items? This is why companies ship different pieces of their product from different parts of the world and assemble it in a central location. I bet we'd have less hassle if he was just shipping plastic parts.