Han Ximin

    ximhan@126.com

    A PLANT in Dongguan, neighboring Shenzhen, has jumped at the opportunity to help a 14-year-old autistic British boy by restarting production of his favorite 1990s baby drinking cup after hearing a plea his father tweeted to the world.

    Ben Carter, who has severe autism, has been drinking from a blue Tommee Tippee cup since he was a toddler. He refuses to sip from anything else even though it has resulted in more than one trip to the hospital due to dehydration.

    “These cups are not made any more. The replacements are all new and fancy. We’ve tried them. Ben throws them at us,” the father, Marc Carter, said in a tweet, which had been reposted thousands of times in the past weeks.

    People around the world offered blue sippy cups that looked similar, but unless it was “99.9 percent identical,” Ben would refuse to drink from it, the father explained.

    The plea caught the attention of the cup’s manufacturer, Tommee Tippee, whose staff in the United States, Australia, France and Hong Kong searched for the cup. It eventually found the original mold design at Jackel China Co. Ltd. in Dongguan, a contractor of Tommee Tippee and a company under Mayborn Group, a U.K.-based company that was acquired by a Chinese company this April. Mayborn has three plants in the world including Jackel China in Dongguan.

    “Like people all over the world, we were touched by Ben’s story and wanted to help, even though we had stopped producing the cup in 2003. Our factory team luckily discovered the tools to make the original cups in the warehouse,” said Li Jieying, operation supervisor of Jackel China.

    The company produced 50 samples of the cup so Marc Carter could check the color. Li said that the company needs to find all the suppliers of the cup’s materials including the color powders if it wants to produce the product exactly the same as those Ben had used.

    “Once the samples are confirmed, we will start manufacturing 500 cups, which will take a week and cost about 20,000 yuan (US$2,985),” Li said.

    Li hopes the first delivery will be able to reach Ben by Christmas or the New Year, as gifts.

    “The 500 cups could be a lifetime supply for Ben and the family won’t have to worry about finding another cup,” Li said.

    Ben’s father tweeted that he couldn’t believe that the mold had been found and so many cups would be produced. He has been inspired by this experience and wants to make a documentary to keep autism in the spotlight.