Your Trusted Custom EVA Bags Manufacturer

Moulded EVA behaves nothing like a sewn textile. The shell is drawn over a heated tool under vacuum, so the shape on your drawing is the shape that comes off the line, and draft angles, corner radii and wall thickness settle the outcome long before anyone picks a fabric. Buyers arriving at EVA from a cut-and-sew background are usually surprised by two things: how much the tooling step shapes the calendar, and how directly wall thickness converts into both grams and dollars.

Specification options for custom moulded EVA bags

The grid below is the reference our production team prices against once a drawing or reference sample arrives. Read the wall-thickness row first — it sets weight, stiffness and cycle time in one move, and it is the line most programmes change after the first sample.

How a moulded EVA bag is built

Everything begins with the tool. EVA sheet is clamped, heated until it softens, then drawn over an aluminium mould by vacuum. Material thins wherever it has to stretch furthest, which is always the deepest corner, so the tooling is designed with local compensation: extra depth in the draw, generous radii, and draft of at least three degrees on every vertical face. Skip the draft and parts start sticking in the tool and tearing on ejection.

Once the shell comes off the mould it is die-cut or CNC-trimmed to its final outline. Trimming is where dimensional tolerance is actually held, and a formed shell left untrimmed can vary by two to three millimetres between the first and last part of a run. On designs that mate with a welded gusset or a zip flange, that variance alone is enough to cause visible panel mismatch.

Joining is high-frequency welding rather than needle work wherever possible. Welding fuses EVA to EVA and produces a seam that is waterproof without tape, but it only works on like materials, so any textile gusset has to be mechanically attached through a moulded flange. That hybrid — textile band trapped between two EVA lips and welded through — is the single hardest operation to stabilise on a new tool.

Zips are set into a moulded flange rather than sewn into fabric. The tape is captured in the weld, so the zip specification has to be fixed before the tool is cut; changing from a #5 to a #8 coil afterwards means reworking the flange geometry. This is why we ask for the closure decision at drawing stage rather than at sample stage.

Cost drivers and MOQ for moulded EVA programmes

Four variables set the unit price, and the first one is not a material. Tooling amortisation runs across the whole order, so the same shell costs materially less per unit at 2,000 pieces than at the 500-unit opening quantity. After that come wall thickness, cycle time and whether the interior is lined.

Wall thickness drives cost twice: more material per part, and longer heating and cooling per cycle. Moving a 12 L shell from 3.0 mm to 4.0 mm adds roughly a third to material weight and can add eight to ten seconds of cycle time, which on a seven-line schedule is real capacity. Programmes that need stiffness usually get it more cheaply from a rib or a rim than from a thicker wall.

Opening quantity is 500 units per style per colour, and repeat programmes on an existing tool drop to 300. Sampling takes 6–10 working days where stock tooling can be adapted, and 12–15 where a new mould has to be cut, with sample fees of USD 50–150 credited against your first bulk order. Payment is T/T 30/70 on FOB Xiamen; EXW, CIF and DDP are all available under Incoterms 2020. Pricing comes back within 24–48 hours of a complete brief. Transit is 25–35 days by sea, 5–8 by air and 3–5 by courier, and note that rigid shells nest only partially — a 20 L body can occupy close to its own external volume in the carton, so plan against 28 CBM in a 20GP, 56 CBM in a 40GP or 68 CBM in a 40HQ rather than against unit count.

Quality gates and acceptance criteria

Final inspection runs to AQL 2.5 with sampling under ISO 2859-1 — Critical 0, Major 2.5, Minor 4.0 — and AQL 1.5 where your own retail protocol requires it. Reports are issued from our 4,950 m² SGS-verified production floor before loading, and reorders use an identical format so two shipments can be compared line by line.

Tooling decisions and branding on a moulded shell

Branding can be built into the tool or applied afterwards, and the choice is mostly an economic one. Debossing a logo panel into the mould costs nothing per unit and cannot be changed for the life of the tool; screen printing or heat transfer after forming costs cents per unit and lets you run the same shell for three customers. Where a programme is expected to repeat for several seasons, debossing wins; where the shell will be shared across colourways, printing wins.

Ordering path for moulded EVA programmes

Six steps take you from a sketch to a loaded container; a first programme with new tooling typically lands at 12–16 weeks. Material trade-offs are set out under custom bag materials, and the wider process is documented on bag manufacturing process.