The Best of Calgary, Edmonton, & Lethbridge Marketing Companies
Ideas and Actions that grow your business
The Best of Calgary, Edmonton, & Lethbridge Marketing Companies
Ideas and Actions that grow your business
March 11, 2013
Did you know? The David Howse Marketing China Team has been to every Spring and Fall Canton Fair since 2009?
January 29, 2012
We've been in Guangzhou, China for four days (of a 21 day trip). Reconnecting with Grace and Sharlin, our in-China product sourcing staff, is always the best part of visiting China. Hands-down, Grace and Sharlin are the hardest workers I have ever met.
October 21, 2011
We've been in Guangzhou, China for four days (of a 21 day trip). Reconnecting with Grace and Sharlin, our in-China product sourcing staff, is always the best part of visiting China. Hands-down, Grace and Sharlin are the hardest workers I have ever met.
On the 18th and 19th we attended Phase 1 of the Canton Fair.
Phase One had about 10,000 exhibitors who manufacture everything from:
Some photos of Guangzhou: Grace modeling a purse (about $8.50 wholesale), the Guangzhou cell phone market (the yellow building with the superman-cellphone-character) is the place to go if you
want a Chinese phone number added to your Canadian phone (if you want to get in touch with me while I am in China
call 0086-1345-082-1627), and the inset is
a tile manufacturer's booth at the Canton fair.
The 20th and 21st saw us wearing the soles of our shoes thin as we spent 10 or so hours walking the Guangzhou fashion district. To get a sense of how big a wholesale market is in Guangzhou, imagine if all of the retail space in Toronto was located in one area, that area wouldn't even come close to the square footage or the sales volume of the Guangzhou fashion district.
The past two days were spent hunting down a single product line for one of our clients. The result was cutting our client's buy price from $30.00 to $5.40 CAD; that is more than an 80 percent cost reduction!
Phase Two of the Canton Fair starts this coming Sunday and runs through to Thursday. After that we will go to Hong Kong for Phase Two of the Mega Show and then back to Guangzhou for the third and final phase of the Canton Fair. I'll post more updates in the coming days.
- Xie Xie (Thank you) for visiting, David.
If any of the following points apply to you then David Howse Marketing can help.
If you watch, listen to, or read the news you will often hear about Canadian business people and government official embarking on trade missions with the goal of doing business with China. If anyone knows anything about China then it would be very easy to predict a certain level of failure with this strategy.
Going to China shouldn't be about "doing business" Canadian style but about building Friendship and Guanxi. I do not yet have Guanxi but I do have friendship. With friendship comes trust and a desire to see each other succeed. Friendship in China is about mutual cooperation. It's about watching each other's back.
Having people in China who are interested in your success means having people telling you who the real factory owners are (at the Canton Fair) and who the agents are (those most likely to burn you). Agents in China are kind of like a parasite; that may have an office in a factory where they bring you if only to make themselves look more legitimate. Factory owners are not too fond of agents but they are often necessary to create trading connections the factory might not have otherwise - it's a bit of a dilemma.
When I went on my first trip to China I wasn't at all interested in making deals but in making friends. The deals would come later.
Some of the above services may become on-going such as QC and you may retain the services of David Howse Marketing but you are not obligated to do so.
We are not importers or exporters. We create connections.
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