First-time importers
testing a product before committing to volume
About
Run by someone who lives here.
FAYFORT International Trading is a sourcing, logistics and consultancy company based in China.
Who we are
I’m FayFay. I’ve been here eight years. I speak the language, I know how the markets work, and — more usefully — I know which of them are worth your time.
What my company does is close the gap between the people who make things in China and the people who want to buy them, without the layer of middlemen that sits between the two by default.
Why that gap exists
Most people buying from China are not buying from the factory.
They are buying from someone who bought from someone who bought from the factory, and every one of those people took a margin. By the time a price reaches a first-time importer, it has been marked up two or three times — and nobody along the way has any reason to explain that.
Our work is going directly to the source. Finding the factory. Walking the market. Checking the goods before they’re paid for. Packing them properly, and getting them home.
Who we work with
Clients come to us from Nigeria, the United Kingdom, the United States and elsewhere — usually with a product in mind and no idea where it’s made.
Sometimes we already know the factory and it’s a phone call. Sometimes it means walking every market in a category until we find it. Either way, what a client is buying is the eight years, not the errand.
Established businesses
who want to cut out the agent layer they’ve been paying for years
Retailers and brand owners
developing their own product rather than reselling someone else’s
Buyers coming to China in person
who need someone on the ground who knows where to go
How we work
We go to the source. We look for factories directly. We don’t work through middlemen, because that’s the cost we exist to remove.
We tell you what we find. If a product is cheaper in another city, we’ll say so. If a supplier is a trading company rather than a factory, you’ll know before you order. If something can’t be done at your quantity, you’ll hear that too — before you’ve spent money finding out.
We don’t touch counterfeits. We don’t source branded lookalikes, and we don’t point clients toward them. Seizure at your destination port attaches to your importer record, not just to the goods, and no margin is worth that.
The other side of the business
Alongside the sourcing work, we publish.
LANDED — The Guangzhou Sourcing Directory is our book: market and factory addresses, in English and Chinese, with the working knowledge that makes them useful. It’s published under our imprint, The Hard Way Press.
FaySource is the directory behind it — continuously updated, because markets move, stalls change hands and buildings get redeveloped. A printed list starts dying the day it ships. A maintained one doesn’t.
Both exist for the same reason the sourcing business does: the information that makes importing work isn’t secret, it’s just hard to find, and the people who know it rarely write it down.
Get in touch
If you’re coming to China and want someone on the ground, or you have a product and no idea where to start — that’s the conversation to have.