I wish you luck with getting a US made top cheaper. Its been tried and things haven't worked out. One guy died and the other guy...well you all know what happened with him. Things in Pakistan may be cheaper, but it's not the product that is costly, it's the logistics.
Here's how it was explained to me...
One guy makes the tops and a different guy makes the bows, each one has their own skill. Neither guy is a business or has a bank account so you have to deal with an intermediary. They make these by hand in shops that have dirt floors. There's another guy, Ehsan, who interacts with these people. He has to coordinate these guys so that he has tops and bows at the same time. This hasn't always worked, which is why I would have tops and no bows or bows and no tops. He has to move and store the tops and bows and sometimes hold tops until bows are ready and vice versa. Then he has to ship the product by truck to Karachi which is about 3,000 miles away. Then they are flown to the US, typically through London. All this moving and touching adds cost. So Ehsan is actually a couple of layers above the production guys and is more or less a distributor. Everyone who touches the product before him adds cost. Then when the stuff arrives in the US, there are import fees on top of the shipping fees. As a business, it leaves very little room for profit. If a top and bows cost $800 from Ehsan, by the time it gets here and the shipping and imports fees are added, it's actual cost is closer to $1,000. I would sell them for $1,200 and make a $200 profit. That doesn't include shipping material, packaging time and driving to and from UPS. It's no picnic moving these tops around either. The boxes are expensive and a top and bows weighs 70lbs and is 55" long and 15" wide. After a while sending $10,000 off to Pakistan and making less than $2,000 in profit after a few months work just wasn't fun. Not to mention if I had a quality issue. So where I'm going with this is if you want a $500 top then buy a Jeep.
