I import from China for my own brand. I will do it for yours.
Merchandise, barware, apparel, packaging. Products that already exist, needing nothing but your logo, your colours and your name. If it can be made in China and landed in Australia, tell me what you are after and I will tell you straight whether I can get it.
I have imported and sold 300,000+ units of my own product into Australia and the USA, on two different freight models at once. It is stocked in 134 BCF stores and in Tackle World, plus more than 200 independent stores. Every supplier relationship, every forwarder and every customs problem on this page is one I have paid for myself first.
Send an enquiry- What I source
- Anything made in China
- At what size
- One unit to a full container
- Who you deal with
- Me, start to finish
- What an enquiry costs
- Nothing, and there is no list
Nearly every unit I have imported has crossed on a ship like this one. Sea freight is slow, cheap and predictable, and the whole job is planned around the day it lands.
The factory price is the easy part. Everything after it is where orders die.
Anyone can find a factory on Alibaba in an afternoon. What takes the time is everything between that first message and a pallet you can actually sell from.
Finding the right supplier.
Not the first one that answers. The factory that actually makes the thing, rather than a trading office reselling someone else's work with a margin on top, and the questions that tell the two apart.
Samples, before anything else.
Nothing gets ordered off a photograph. Samples in your hands, quoted and shipped, and a second round when the first one is wrong. It is the cheapest money in the whole project.
Minimum order quantities.
The first MOQ you are quoted is rarely the real one. What moves it is order value, packaging, colours and who pays for the tooling, and every one of those is negotiable if you know which to push.
Quality control.
An inspection before the goods leave China, against a written spec rather than a hope. A fault found in the factory costs a week. The same fault found in your warehouse costs the order.
Freight, duty and terms.
EXW, FOB, CIF, DDP. Which one you agree to decides who carries the cost and who carries the risk, and a first-time importer usually agrees to the wrong one. Sea or air, clearance, duty and GST, with a forwarder I have used for years.
Lead times, told honestly.
Production, then QC, then sailing, then clearance, then transport to your door. Chinese New Year moves all of it by weeks, every year. You get the real date, including when the real date is bad.
Southern China to Australia, the route every one of my orders has taken. Most of the list above is settled before the ship ever sails.
Four things people actually ask me to source.
Nearly every enquiry lands in one of these. If yours does not, ask anyway: the process is the same whatever the product turns out to be.
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Branded merchandise and promo.
Stubby holders, keyrings, lanyards, tote bags, pens, magnets. Your logo on something people keep rather than bin.
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Barware and drinkware.
Stainless tumblers, glassware, bottle openers, coasters, hip flasks, shakers. Anything a bar, a bottle shop or a distillery puts its name on.
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Apparel and accessories.
Polos, tees, hats, socks, ties, embroidered workwear. Your colours, your sizing, your logo, in the quantity a uniform run actually needs.
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Packaging and print.
Custom boxes, mailers, labels, inserts, tissue, printed cartons, counter displays and pull-up banners. The part nobody budgets for and everybody needs before a product can be sold.
Then there is the large one off end: a caravan, a trailer, a container pool, anything that arrives on its own truck. A pallet of stubby holders and one container pool are the same job at different scales, and the same six things have to go right in both.
If you are not sure which one yours is, that is fine. Describe it and I will tell you.
Every one of these starts blank. The logo is the last step and the cheapest one, and it is never the part that sinks an order.
The number that matters is not the factory price. It is what the thing costs sitting in your warehouse.
Unit price, tooling, cartons, freight, insurance, duty, GST, port charges, transport to your door, and the units you write off as damaged. Add all of it up and divide by what arrives sellable. That is the only number a retail price can be built on, and it is almost never the one on the quote.
What lands is a pallet like this. The real cost is everything you paid to get it here, divided by the sellable units on it, and I put that number in writing before you commit.
I am a sourcing agent, not a trading house.
I do not hold stock, I do not own a factory and I do not have a showroom. What I have is suppliers I have used for years, forwarders and a customs broker I trust, and the scar tissue from getting all of it wrong once on my own money.
If your product sits outside what I know, I will say so in the first reply rather than learn on your order. That is the shorter conversation and the cheaper one.
No showroom and no stock on hand. The job is done on factory benches like this one, before anything is allowed near a ship.
Tell me what you are after.
One field is required and it is the email address. Everything else helps, and a blank answer is a fine answer: half of these start with someone who only knows roughly what they want.
No sales sequence and no obligation. Business hours AEST, usually a reply inside a business day, and if it is not something I can do well I will say that instead.
A photo, a rough sketch or a link to something similar is plenty to start from.
Got it.
I read these myself and reply from Admin@AJ-Industries.co, usually inside a business day. If you have a photo, a drawing or a link to something similar, send it to that address and I will have it in front of me before I answer.
In the meantime, have a think about quantity and about the date you need it by. Those two answers change the supplier, the freight and the price more than anything else you can tell me.
That did not send.
Your answers are still in the form above, so nothing is lost. Try once more, or email the same detail to Admin@AJ-Industries.co and I will pick it up from there.