Why minimum order quantities exist, and what the 44 on this site are

What a minimum order quantity is

A minimum order quantity, usually written MOQ, is the smallest quantity of one article a factory will put through a production run. It is a manufacturing number before it is a commercial one.

Each of the 44 product pages on this site carries its own figure, printed on the page rather than quoted to you after a conversation, so you can plan against it before you contact anybody. Minimum orders start at 25 sets. Every page states the minimum that applies to it: its own for the articles with a published specification, its category's for the rest.

Why a minimum exists at all

This section is general. It describes how batch manufacturing works, not what any one company does.

A hand instrument is not made one at a time. A run is prepared before anything is produced: the pattern for that article, the tooling, the grinding and polishing steps, the inspection the finished piece is checked against, and the packing it goes into. That preparation happens once per run, and it is the same preparation whether the run is small or large. Steel is ordered to a specified grade and arrives in batches. How incoming steel is handled here (including what arrives with it, and what TGI does and does not check) is set out on the tiers page, in its own words.

A minimum, then, is the point at which an article is produced as a run rather than as a one-off job. It is a threshold, not a target.

What the published minimums actually are

How each figure was arrived at is not published. Every one of them is, and you can read down them yourself.

Four figures cover all 44 of them. 300 instruments is on 10 articles, 5 under Surgical instruments, 3 under ENT instruments and 2 under Gynecology instruments. 200 is on 13 articles, 7 under Hollowware and sterilization boxes, 4 under Dental instruments and 2 under Training instruments. 150 is on 12 articles, all under Diagnostic instruments. 25 sets is on 9 articles, all under Surgical instrument sets. Kidney trays are stated differently and are described below.

The lowest published minimum on this site is 25 sets and the highest is 300 instruments. How any one of those figures was set is not published, so read the figure on the page you are ordering from rather than a rule drawn from the others.

What the number is counting

Read the unit, not only the figure. Twenty-five sets and 300 instruments are not the same kind of number.

The Abdominal Laparotomy Set is a 104-piece set, and its minimum is 25 sets. Both numbers are on its product page. A set minimum can look small and not be small.

Kidney trays are the one article where this site publishes how the count may be spread. The minimum is 200 pieces in total, and the four sizes (6, 8, 10 and 12 inch) can be mixed inside it. That is worth knowing, because it means the figure is one minimum rather than four.

Three articles published a range instead of a single figure: the General Surgery Instruments Set, the Cesarean / C-Section Set and the Delivery Instruments Set. The owner settled all three at 25 sets on 2026-08-24, so no minimum on this site is now a range: a range invites a follow-up email and a single figure does not. Which end applies to your order is confirmed in the written offer, together with the specification, the steel tier, the lead time and the freight basis.

Lead times are published separately from the minimums. Instruments ~2-3 weeks · full sets ~4-6 weeks after advance.

The minimum does not apply to holding the instrument first

A minimum is a production number. It is not the quantity you must reach before anyone will deal with you, and it is not the quantity you must reach in order to examine the article.

Free samples for all buyers: you pay only the sample shipping cost.

So no minimum has to be met before you can hold the article. The written offer states the minimum for your article, samples follow it, and neither step asks you to commit. The full sequence is on the how an order runs page.

What this page does not settle

Here is where the published information stops. A buyer choosing a supplier should be told this, and it is shorter to read than to find out later.

A minimum is not a statement about quality, and it says nothing about regulatory status. Those are separate questions, answered on the certification page: each entry there publishes what its own document supports, and where there is no register to check one against, the page says so.

No price appears anywhere on this site. A minimum here tells you a quantity and nothing else; everything commercial reaches you in the written offer.

One minimum is published per product page for the 44 articles with a full specification, and every other article in the catalog states its category's minimum on its own page. So a figure is published either way; what the offer confirms is which end of a range applies and how it is spread.

Whether the steel tier you choose changes an article's minimum is not published. The product page gives one minimum and lists which tiers the article is available in; nothing states a relationship between the two. If your order turns on that, ask.

Mixing sizes inside the minimum is published for kidney trays, whose four sizes may be mixed inside one 200-piece minimum. For the other articles that come in several sizes, whether one minimum may be spread across sizes and patterns is agreed per order.

Whether the minimums of different articles combine inside one order (three articles meaning three separate minimums, or one total) is not published either.

An order carrying your own brand takes the same minimum as the catalog. A minimum for your own printed box, pouch or insert is agreed per order. How marking itself is agreed is published in the terms.

None of those gaps is filled by guessing. Where there is no document behind a number, this site prints no number, which is why several of the points above end in ask rather than in a figure.