Sourcing notes & insights

What ten years of corporate credit work taught me about supplier risk — written for overseas buyers. No sales fluff: what we check, what we can't verify, and what we'd do in your position.

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Supplier screening

How to Screen a Chinese Helmet Supplier Before You Pay a Deposit

Seven checks that separate a professional helmet factory from a market-stall trader — business registration, tooling, certification documents, samples, financial discipline and the questions that reveal how a supplier behaves when things go wrong.

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Factory risk

The First Thing I Check About a Chinese Factory Isn't the Product

Certificates and showrooms can be borrowed. Financial discipline can't. Here are the observable signals — payment posture, pricing sanity, staffing stability — that tell you whether a factory will still be answering the phone when your container is at sea.

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Send us the factory or quotation you're considering. We'll tell you what we'd check, what we can verify on the ground, and what we'd walk away from.