Shadowing Practice: How He Makes Millions Sourcing Products From China - Learn English Speaking with Video

Meet Isaac, commonly known as the sourcing guy on social media, where his videos have racked up millions of views.

Isaac has become the go-to expert for e-commerce entrepreneurs, looking to source products, and he manages his entire operation from Bali.

His journey started with selling portable fans to sorority girls at parties.

Now he's sourcing products for some of the world's largest e-commerce brands.

By senior year, we were already doing a few million dollars in sales.

In this video, Isaac shares how much he earns from his business, how beginners can start a sourcing venture

and offers valuable tips on finding the best products for your e-commerce store

when did you move to bali uh it's been two

and a half years now yeah where'd you move from from miami

that is a big change right it's a big change

and a lot of people ask me they're like what you're from miami like why would you ever leave miami

and i do love miami like i'm back like three four months out of the year

but you don't get this in miami did you just visit bali for a holiday

and just like this is it pretty much i mean i kind of knew i wanted to go and live in Asia.

And I was on a big sourcing trip.

So I was visiting factories in Cambodia, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

And I was kind of burnt out after that.

And I went and heard Bali was this amazing place to go and work from.

So I came out here to come try it out.

And immediately after like three days was like, okay, I can actually see myself living here.

So what were you doing before sourcing?

I've always been sourcing.

So my dad, when he was my age, moved to China and opened up an electronics factory.

And then before that, my grandfather, my mom said we had a small apparel factory in Canada where I was originally like born

and grew up and then would always go

and work for the factories from like being like a toddler helping out with the fabrics doing swatch cards

and then when I was older going to China with my dad helping manage the factory there

and then decided rather start an agency to help other people source products

and become like a sourcing agent and so I started my agency eight years ago now.

I started the business freshman year of college by accident I

brought these little cell phones I would always like order gadgets on AliExpress I thought they were fun.

I brought this little cell phone fan

that plugs into your phone to a party just because it was genuinely hot in Gainesville, Florida, University of Florida.

And I go and I start using it at the party and all these girls are coming up to me like, oh my God, where do you get that?

That's so cool.

I need that for Sorority Rush.

And I kept on giving them something with the Alibaba link or that Aliexpress link.

And then by the fifth person, they were like, where do you get that?

And I was like, I'm, I was kind of drunk.

I was like, I'm Isaac the fan guy.

I sell fans.

They're $5.

Would you like one?

And they're like, yeah.

I'm like, well, I'm sold out right now.

I'm just completely like off rip.

Then I ordered 100, sold out in a week.

And it wasn't there.

Was it there?

No, it was.

So you were just slinging fans?

This is like freshman year of college, you're just slinging fans.

But then very quickly, about 100, about 1,000, had people sign them all around campuses, had some news articles about us.

Then my hometown reached out and they're like, hey, can we buy 2,000 fans with our logo on them?

I'm like, yeah, sure.

You know, there'll be 20% off.

But we made like $6,000 just off that little bulk order.

And I was like, wait, this is a way better business than selling to drunk shorty girls.

Like I should be selling these to businesses.

This is the fun part about Bali.

You can come in.

So Gi makes my clothes.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Okay.

So one of the benefits about Bali is

that we have lots of access to fabric markets and we have like awesome tailors.

This is the issue with like manufacturing in Bali.

It's an Island.

So you're not going to have all these big fabric mills to be able to go and get the fabrics.

A lot of them are going to come from China either way you're gonna have, from like a labor cost perspective, it's going to be naturally higher than almost anywhere else in Indonesia,

because it is like a touristy kind of zone.

And you have lots of holidays.

So like all these different elements make it a very slow, expensive place that makes it hard to scale.

But the thing is, great brands have started here.

Because they have people like Guy to be able to go

and they test out fabrics and they're able to do small runs and get going.

But I'm helping like eight of my friends right now with brands in Bali move their manufacturing outside, mostly to China, because it's just too hard to scale.

This is David.

He does all my video work.

Yeah.

So your socials have been growing hates fast as hell.

Hey, is that how you get all your clients?

Yeah, exactly.

For the most part, we have some other like sales reps and stuff like that.

Yeah.

But, you know, obviously, you know, the best is inbound.

So we're making a series about popular products and then how much they actually cost.

We're having a hard time in the beginning going to socials because it was very education focused.

If I don't make the videos that are interesting to everyone, I'm never going to get the eyeballs and never be able to actually grow my personal brand.

So it took us a while, trial and error, to find the types of content that was going to work.

And then once we found the series that worked, we just kept on repeating and now we're doing a lot more travel stuff, going over to Vietnam, going over to China, doing more YouTube, long form.

Last month we grew like 120,000 followers, fully organic.

That's crazy.

Yeah.

And how many clients would you get from that?

300 inquiries a month probably for sourcing and we'll take on like one to two.

And what's that life, the lifetime value of the clients?

Oh, I mean a lot of them are going to be six figures.

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Yeah. So crazy.

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Zooming in hundreds of thousands just off social media.

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Yeah, it's great.

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That's awesome.

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These are our sugar gliders.

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No way.

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They don't look real.

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They're so cute.

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They're super cute.

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So if you were starting out, how would you get your first sourcing clients?

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So I found like we started out doing corporate sourcing.

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So we were doing like custom t-shirts, custom water balls, hats, because you know, most businesses are going to need some level of like swag and giveaways.

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And that's a pretty low, you know, low hanging fruit hanging fruit, it's lower volume, it's gonna get you kind of comfortable going and sourcing products and delivering the customers.

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And you kind of just grow from there.

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You start working with bigger and bigger businesses, you work on like getting all those deliverables in place.

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And then the bigger jump is in working with actual e-commerce brands.

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Yeah.

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It took us a few years of like getting really comfortable with working with factories overseas, with overall production process, making sure everything was perfect.

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And then we can start taking on, you know, seven plus figure e-commerce brands.

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So you basically have to find factories, vet them, make sure they're good, and then put the clients in.

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Is that basically what you do?

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That's what we like to do.

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So our whole thing is that we've been curating the best factories around the world

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because it's pretty easy for brands to go and find mediocre products.

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You can go on Alibaba, you can filter, you can find a decent product.

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But if you want to find the best T-shirts in the world, the best hats, the best of whatever the product is, that's the hard part.

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But then once you go and do all that work to find the best of the best, then you can bring on a client and then easily go and plug and play.

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How do you charge that to a customer?

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Because obviously they can eventually find those factories.

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It just takes trial and error.

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You're just saving them time, right?

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And helping them manage that relationship.

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Exactly.

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We're saving them time and reducing their risk.

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Yeah.

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Because obviously it's not just the cost of the product, but it's also the risk that you might take by doing it wrong.

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So if you do a production run for $100,000 and the production is wrong, then you have to, you know, not only do you lose all the time yeah

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and the market opportunity of selling the product especially

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if your brand's growing really quickly

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but now you're going to lose the actual product that's was supposed to be blue

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and came out green

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so could a beginner just gone to alibaba find a couple of factories organize the samples

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and stuff like that

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or do you need to actually go to china you build the relationships again i think

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that a beginner can go and make mediocre products yeah but

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if you want to make the best product in the world that's where the kind of experience

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and then the whole kind of blueprint that we built like that's where you have to go and follow to really execute.

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It's funny, like you and Daniel, like you guys are exploding on social media.

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It's almost like sourcing is becoming sexy.

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Like it's almost like cool now.

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Finally, right?

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Why is this the most boring thing happening?

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It was my like least favorite part of like managing the e-commerce.

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Why do you think it's getting so big?

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I think people are interested in like where products are coming from.

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Right.

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They love behind the scenes, especially with TikTok

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and social media want to see like the get ready with

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me the behind the scenes of the olympian you know at the olympic village eating their muffins

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and all that kind of stuff social media inflection point i think

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so yeah and then it's kind of a perfect uh cross point

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because everyone wants to start a business everyone wants to have a brand yeah right

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and they don't know how to do it

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and then you also have the behind the scenes of how these bigger brands are manufacturing

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and where they're getting their products from it makes it feel

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very tangible yeah you know i can do this too relatable relatable right?

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It's just like they see us selling your product for $80 and they're like, how they even make you as possible seeing it be made for $10 and just like, wow, I'm actually going to be able to do this.

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Exactly.

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What do you mean tips of dealing with like China and the suppliers there?

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You want to keep them on their toes as much as possible.

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So a lot of people will go and they think like, oh, I have my factory in China.

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I'm good with them.

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I don't really need a backup.

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And I'm scared to let my factory or my agent know

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that I'm looking at other factories because it's going to hurt the relationship.

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My opinion is only going to strengthen the relationship because if they know that they can take advantage, then they probably will.

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So them knowing that you have contingencies, you have other factories you're negotiating with, you're showing them the price and you're getting from other factories.

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They know that if they don't act as an A-level supplier, someone else, it's a very competitive game, someone else is gonna take the business.

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So I would say always have that backup.

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And then from a production standpoint, you really, really have to, that's why we built an 80 step process to go and source products.

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And the team has to go through and check off 80 boxes

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because there's so many little ways where you can mess up.

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But if you follow the steps, you will not mess up.

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One of the biggest things is clear communication.

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So can you build a specification sheet?

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Can you build a tech pack?

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Can you build exactly how the product's gonna look, exactly how you're gonna imprint it?

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Something I like to talk about is centering.

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Just because you tell the factory this is centered, doesn't mean they're gonna center it properly.

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They're not really gonna, is it centered this way?

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Is it centered this way?

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It's better to go, I want four inches here, four inches here, two inches here, two inches here, than say centered.

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So again, as specific as you can go, don't let them make any decisions for you make them all

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yourself that's what the tech back is right tell me about

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the progression of the agencies like first year what did you

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make second year what did you make what was like the major turning point yeah i mean

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so we started off in college doing like you know a few hundred k just going

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and selling some merchandise by time you know graduating college

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but by senior year we were already you know doing a few million dollars in sales

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so it was a big growth a lot of that came from starting to work with more e-commerce clients.

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So what happened is we started in corporate and the corporate business was great.

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It was really fun, but we were doing everything direct to factory, a different model of how we were sourcing the merchandise.

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Because all my friends, you get it, like when you're a young entrepreneur and you have a cool business, who are the other ones in their twenties?

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It's normally the e-comm guys.

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So a lot of my friends are these e-comm guys and then COVID hits, all their supply chains break, right?

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But their sales are growing because ads are performing

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so they're like they call me and they're like Isaac can you go

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and can you help me here so i'm like yeah sure

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and then we went

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and started taking on these like huge projects taking over companies entire supply chains

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and it really was like a test

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because it was the hardest time to ever source and ship product

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but we were able to do it successfully

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so covert it also accelerated demand but

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because of the complexity it got your heat to clients they realize how fragile their supply chain was exactly

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and i think that it's still at this point where brands now know

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that they need to have contingencies and we're coming in

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and we're building out those contingencies for them yeah

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so what year was that that was your third year of the agency

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that was my yeah my third year of the agency third

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or fourth year i like my agency what we're trying to

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do is we're trying to again offer more solutions for smaller brands

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because i mean you get it like the impact

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that we can make is going to be very much tied

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to like the overall skill yeah also a lot of what we do is move stuff out of China.

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Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Vietnam, Thailand, we're going to a little bit of northern Africa.

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So Egypt has been great.

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We're doing some stuff in Pakistan.

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It's really like an observation of you have to look at where the raw material is coming from.

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So look at the labor cost.

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You have to look at overall taxes and you know where that kind of country is progressing.

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So you can kind of run a little bit of analysis

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and look at the volumes and say okay like if you go and you move over to Egypt, your lead time is going to increase by 30%,

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but your cost base is going to decrease by 30.

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So what's worth it?

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I think it's the cost basis.

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What's the kind of good first year in terms of income creating like a sourcing agency?

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I think you could offer first year, you can make like probably 60 grand pretty easily.

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If you go to any like decent sized business, they're probably going and they're probably spending $100,000, $200,000 on like t-shirts and mugs and those kinds of products.

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If you're able to run a 50% margin, all you really need to do is get $120,000 in sales, get majority of one business's book of business,

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and you can make like you know a decent salary how do you get

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that first client like obviously it's corporate as you said do you just dm them

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or do you like source their product cheaper like

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so well i think that sourcing going with price isn't how i love to sell

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but i think when you're getting started it's the best way to sell

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so the whole thing with the corporate merchandise industry is that majority of people don't go factory direct.

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They're going through this domestic supplier network.

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So these big suppliers in the industry that go and they're going to stock millions of t-shirts, millions of water bottles, millions of hats.

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And then the domestic industry, you just go and you submit a purchase order to a warehouse in the US, they decorate the product and they deliver it to your client for you.

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But if you go direct the factory, you can easily get like 30% less.

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So all you need to do is go to any business.

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I'd recommend going in your local area.

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So you can go door knocking, you go up to them and say like, Hey, you know, we're different, we source merchandise for a brand, but we're different because we're going back to direct.

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So we typically can get pricing for way cheaper.

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Can you just go and tell me the products that you're going and making right now?

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And let me price it out for you.

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Right.

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And then they're going to go and they're going to say, yeah, for the hats, you're paying $12 and then you're going to go on Alibaba

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and you're going to go and you're going to find a hat for $3.

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and then you can go and sell to them for seven.

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Would you go get a sample from that factory?

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Like, let's say we've got the hoodie on a hat.

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Yeah.

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Do you need the actual sample from the company first to then send to the supplier to get the actual final sample?

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Or are you just like, these are my actual prices and you can just do it without touching it?

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So I always recommend trying to get samples from factories

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if you've never worked with them before because you don't want to go

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and pitch a product that's going to be low quality.

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You want to send reference samples of if the client's very happy yeah

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so if the client's like i love this hat it's perfect it's just too expensive great take

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that sample ship it over to china and have the factory go

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and show the replicate it the best they can what's a

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really really good sourcing agency like make how much cash can they produce i mean i know sourcing agencies

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that do hundreds of millions of dollars in sales a year

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wow i mean like yeah i know people with sourcing agencies

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that have 80 million dollar houses in hong kong you know

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so you can make a ton of money i met a

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guy in hong kong recently he started like at my age pretty much just going to China, starting to selling products.

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He was growing the sourcing agency, eventually got to the point where he started buying minority stakes into some like headwear factories

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and started really focusing on that category and close, you know, like people like Nuera as clients.

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So you start going after really, really big business.

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There's kind of two ways you can go with it.

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You can either resell the product and have your margin baked into it, or you can have a flat percentage basis and then make the money off of all the production that you're managing.

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So he kept on growing, growing, getting bigger

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and bigger clients, really understanding the niche having the best pricing out there at the point for

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that less quality of hat and then built it, built it, built it into doing, you know, he does hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars a year now.

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That's crazy.

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What's the main thing when you buy a factory that you need to know or buy interest in a factory?

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It's a tricky thing.

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It's something I don't recommend.

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You just start out like, okay, this is what I'm going to do.

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I'm going to start buying a factory because most people

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that I know that bond factories have failed miserably

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and have burned themselves pretty significantly unless you're going to go and live there at the factory.

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I'm not going to be able to do things that we wouldn't be able to.

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So lead times, samples, getting created, like what's the main benefit?

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I would say pricing and also quality.

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So like for example, my dad, the benefit of him having the factory in China was to

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be able to produce the highest quality power inverters in the world

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so that he could get the licenses for the big brands and really offer a product that wasn't available in the market.

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So he really focused on engineering and R&D.

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And that was his main stress was that he kept on going to China.

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He had an e-commerce brand.

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He was selling these inverters and kept on going to China.

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I was really stressed out because he can never get the quality that he wanted to in the market.

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So he just said, screw it.

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I'm just going to make open up my own factory and make sure the quality is perfect.

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Yeah, that's incredible.

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Well, man, you know, you shit.

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Very happy to have your own daily mentor.

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Your guidance has been crazy for all of these brands as well.

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So I appreciate it.

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Yeah, of course, man.

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It's been a pleasure.

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Cheers.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing Practice: How He Makes Millions Sourcing Products From China - Learn English Speaking with Video

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