AS 64: How to Source from China Smarter with Sam Boyd

Today, we had Sam Boyd, live from China come on the show! He is an American living in Asia. After working in product development, he founded his own sourcing company called Guided Imports in Shenzhen, China. He’s Focused on assisting importers of all sizes to navigate the often treacherous waters of Chinese manufacturing.

What you'll  learn:

* How Sam moved to China and start a business as an American

* How Sam built and expanding his sourcing company to 10+ employees

* What was his decision to go to China

* How pricing and quality match up when purchasing in China

* What QA/QC is important and how to do it

* The eco-system and insights of China

* How things are done in China

* How he's changing the game

* Manufacturing in China, how to get goods from China

* How to source product from China

* How to get inventory from China

* How to do everything from product development, to storage, to fulfilment from China

* QC Inspection tips and secrets

* How to ensure a manufacturer is real

* How to market a product, source a product, manufacturer a product and all in between

And much more.

Get in touch with Sam

GuidedImports.com

David Aladdin:  Great to have you on this show Sam. Can you tell us a little more about yourself?

Sam Boyd:  Hey thanks David for having me here, yeah great introduction, a little more about myself is I grew up in US, north east close to Philadelphia, and I ended up moving to china where I started my own company, sourcing company. Originally before I started my own company I was working with product development company out in Shenzhen and I just didn’t like having a boss and what happened was I left the company and I basically ask my assistant who was working with this product development company to come and join me where I was going to start my own company from my kitchen table.

My goal was to set out and have a sourcing company where we helped people get products manufactured in china and then ship it all over the world. And that was the company that grew from the kitchen table to a small office and then we continued to add on more employees. About a year ago, what we recognized was that there are a lot of people who are looking into products manufactured in China and it’s very easy to get attached to these big fish people who are doing stuff with retail, big box retailers and the wholesale.

There is not a lot of help for Amazon sellers. So what we found was if we offered a service that’s little bit more transparent than the traditional sourcing services that were out there that we would be attract Amazon sellers, we would be able to help them out and really allow them to grow their business by offering a full purchasing office in china. So that’s what we have been focusing on.

Our company is still a small company, almost all of us are based out of china and you know we just continue to grow and continue to figure out more and more ways to help a lot of eCommerce and Amazon sellers and that’s really the generally a gist of things.

David Aladdin: A lot of listeners are kind of wondering, how did you decide to end up in China, how did you decide to live there, you know how long do you plan to live there?

Sam Boyd:  To answer your last question, how long do I plan to stay in China, my answer always is till I am sick of it and there’s always ways you can get tired of china but when you look at it, its where businesses is especially for e-Commerce this is the best place to be for. So probably until I can really set things up and I can completely get out of the country full time and have full team operating it or until another country becomes the next China.