Daniel sent us this one — he's been thinking about the actual mechanics of sourcing goods from China. Not the AliExpress browsing-from-your-sofa version, but the real thing. Getting on a plane, walking factory floors, finding someone who can introduce you to suppliers without getting you burned. He's framing it through architecture and interior design since that's Hannah's world, which is actually perfect because it makes it concrete. You're not buying generic widgets, you're hitching your reputation to physical objects your clients will touch every day. Who's the middleman, how do you find them, and who pays them? How do you do ethical due diligence without getting the Potemkin village tour? And what should a first-timer know before stepping off the plane?
The middleman question is the right place to start because that person is the linchpin of the entire operation. They're typically called a sourcing agent. Sometimes you'll hear purchasing agent or procurement agent, but sourcing agent is the standard term in the China trade ecosystem. And the distinction matters because this is not a travel fixer, not a translator you hire for the day. A proper sourcing agent is someone who lives in the manufacturing cluster you're targeting, speaks the local dialect — not just Mandarin, but whatever regional language the factory owners actually use among themselves — and has existing relationships with suppliers. The relationships are the entire asset. Without them, they're just someone with a phone and a car.
It's not a credential you can test for. It's a rolodex with legs.
And that's what makes the finding-them part genuinely hard. There's no licensing body, no professional association with a directory you can trust. The sourcing agent industry in China is completely unregulated. Anyone can print a business card. The way experienced importers find good ones is through trade shows — the Canton Fair, the Yiwu Fair, the Shanghai Furniture Expo if we're talking interior design — because the legitimate agents are there, walking the floors with their existing clients. You see someone translating for a buyer, negotiating quantities, checking seam finishes, and you approach them afterward. Or you get a referral from someone in your industry who's already importing. Cold-emailing agents you found on Google is how you get the Potemkin village tour.
Let me pin down the money side because I think most people assume the factory pays the commission, like a finder's fee. But that setup creates an obvious incentive problem. If the factory's cutting the check, the agent works for the factory, not for you.
This is where the structure really matters. There are two common models. In the first, the agent charges you a percentage of the order value — typically three to five percent for most consumer goods, though it can go up to eight or ten percent for complex categories like furniture where the inspection demands are heavier. You pay this directly. The agent never takes money from the supplier. In the second model, the agent charges a flat fee per project or per day, which is more common when you're doing a dedicated sourcing trip. You might pay a daily rate of two to three hundred dollars plus expenses, and the agent's loyalty is unambiguous because the factory never touches their compensation.
The third model is the one where you think you're getting a free agent because the factory pays the commission, and six months later you're wondering why your walnut veneer is actually printed laminate.
That's the hidden-cost version, yes. The factory-paid commission model does exist, and it's not inherently corrupt — plenty of agents operate that way transparently, and the factories build the commission into the unit price. But an agent paid by the factory has every reason to steer you toward the supplier with the highest margin, not the best quality. If you're doing this for the first time, direct payment to the agent is the only structure that makes sense. Pay for loyalty.
The agent's job isn't just introductions. I want to map out what you're actually buying for that five percent.
A proper sourcing agent does about six things that would each be a separate nightmare if you tried to handle them yourself. One, supplier identification and vetting — they narrow down from potentially hundreds of factories to three to five that actually match your specifications. Two, negotiation — not just price, but payment terms, production timelines, quality standards written into the contract. Three, factory audits — they physically visit before you ever get on a plane. Four, sample development and review. Five, quality control during production, including inline inspections where they check goods while they're still on the line, not just at the end when everything's already boxed up. And six, logistics coordination — getting your goods from the factory floor to the port.
They're part detective, part translator, part project manager, and part quality inspector. And you're trusting them with your business reputation. Which brings us to the ethics question, because the sourcing agent is also your primary lens for evaluating working conditions. If your agent is willing to show you a fake compliance certificate, you'll never know until a journalist or a regulator finds out for you.
The ethical due diligence piece is where most first-time buyers get completely out of their depth. There's a standard tour that factories give to Western buyers who ask about working conditions. They walk you through a clean, well-lit assembly area, show you a break room with a ping-pong table, and hand you a folder with a social compliance audit certificate. That certificate might be real, or it might be from an auditor who spent two hours on site and checked none of the things that matter. The two main certification bodies are BSCI, the Business Social Compliance Initiative, and Sedex, the Supplier Ethical Data Exchange. A factory with a valid BSCI or Sedex SMETA audit has at least been evaluated against a standardized framework covering forced labor, working hours, health and safety, and freedom of association.
The certificate is a starting point, not a conclusion.
A certificate tells you the factory knew an audit was coming and passed it on that day. What you actually want is unannounced audit capability, which is a different tier of commitment. You also want to look at who conducted the audit. The credible third-party auditors are firms like SGS, Bureau Veritas, TUV Rheinland, Intertek. If the audit was done by a local firm you've never heard of, or worse, if it was a self-assessment, it's worth approximately the paper it's printed on.
Which is to say, nothing.
Less than nothing, because it creates false confidence. Here's a practical thing most people don't know: you can ask to see the audit report, not just the certificate. The certificate says pass or fail. The report has scores, specific findings, corrective action requests. If the factory won't show you the full report, that's not a red flag, that's a brick wall.
There are things you can observe yourself that no certificate captures. Dormitories on site. That's a big one, because if workers live in factory-provided housing, you want to see it. A factory that proudly shows you the production floor but suddenly gets vague about where people sleep is telling you something.
Dormitory access is probably the single most informative thing you can ask for on a factory visit. Another one: look at the age distribution on the floor. If everyone looks very young, that's not inherently a violation, but it warrants deeper questions about hiring practices and whether they're using student labor programs that blur the line between internship and exploitation. Look at whether workers make eye contact with management when they walk past. Look at whether there's a union representative or worker committee listed anywhere. Look at the fire exits — are they blocked with inventory? In a factory that passed a safety audit, blocked fire exits mean the audit was window dressing and everything reverted the moment the auditors left.
The fire exit test. It's like checking the bathroom at a restaurant. If they can't keep that right, the kitchen's worse.
For interior design and architecture specifically, there are material-specific ethical concerns that go beyond labor. If you're sourcing hardwood furniture or flooring, you need chain of custody documentation for the timber. Illegally logged wood enters the Chinese supply chain constantly, and if you're specifying materials for a project in the US or Europe, you could be violating the Lacey Act or the EU Timber Regulation without knowing it. A good sourcing agent should be able to connect you with suppliers who have FSC certification — Forest Stewardship Council — and actually maintain the documentation, not just the logo on their website.
The ethical layer isn't just about not buying from a sweatshop. It's about legal exposure, supply chain transparency, and the kind of due diligence that holds up if someone investigates your sourcing two years from now.
It's also about the business case. The factories with genuine social compliance tend to have lower turnover, more experienced workers, and better quality control. It's not charity. It's a production quality variable that happens to align with treating people decently.
Alright, let's move to the third question — the first-timer's guide to actually going. You've never been to China, you don't speak the language, you've found a sourcing agent you think you can trust, and you're about to spend real money. What do you need to know before you get on the plane?
The first thing is that the manufacturing geography of China is not one place. It's a series of industrial clusters, each specialized to a terrifying degree. If you're sourcing furniture and interior design products, you're probably going to the Pearl River Delta — specifically Foshan, Dongguan, and Shenzhen. Foshan is the global capital of furniture manufacturing. Something like sixty percent of the world's ceramic tiles come from Foshan as well. Dongguan is where you go for high-end upholstery and woodwork. Shenzhen has moved upmarket into design and electronics-integrated furniture. If you're sourcing lighting, you might go to Guzhen in Zhongshan, which produces an estimated seventy percent of the world's lighting fixtures. The point is: you don't go to China. You go to a specific city for a specific product category, and if you try to source furniture in a textile town, you're wasting everyone's time.
The cluster map. I've heard you talk about this before. It's one of those things that sounds obvious once you know it, but first-timers imagine China as a single undifferentiated manufacturing blob.
The cluster logic extends to the calendar. The major trade fairs happen in two seasons — spring and autumn. The Canton Fair runs in April and October. The Furniture China expo in Shanghai is in September. If you're planning a first trip, you align it with the relevant fair. The fair lets you see dozens of suppliers in a compressed timeframe, compare quality side by side, and identify which factories are worth visiting in person. You do the fair first, then factory visits. Not the other way around.
You use the fair as a filter. Walk the floor, collect samples, take photos, note prices, and then spend the following days visiting the three or four that seemed legitimate.
When you do the factory visits, there's a protocol that matters. Number one: never announce your visit weeks in advance. A factory that knows you're coming has time to stage the production floor, bring in better equipment temporarily, borrow workers from a neighbor. Give them two or three days' notice at most. Number two: always visit at least three factories for the same product category, even if the first one seems perfect. You need comparative baselines to evaluate anything meaningfully. Number three: take photos of everything. The production line, the raw materials storage, the finished goods warehouse, the shipping dock. A factory that won't let you photograph something is hiding something.
The raw materials storage is an underrated tell. If you're sourcing solid wood furniture and the lumber yard is full of particle board, you've learned something useful.
Another one: check the factory's order book. Not the numbers — they won't show you that — but ask what other brands they produce for. If they're making goods for companies you've heard of, that's a form of third-party validation. If they won't name any clients, ask yourself why.
What about the actual negotiation? Because I think there's a cultural layer here that first-timers get wrong. The instinct is to be direct, name your price, push hard. And my understanding is that approach doesn't work the way Westerners think it does.
The negotiation culture in Chinese manufacturing is relational, not transactional. The first meeting is not where you close a deal. The first meeting is where you establish that you're serious, that you're not a tire-kicker, and that you're someone worth doing business with over the long term. If you come in swinging with aggressive price demands in the first hour, you've signaled that you're a one-order buyer who will disappear after squeezing them on margin. The factories that make good product don't need that business. They'll politely serve you tea and let you leave.
The actual sequence is: visit, express genuine interest in their capabilities, ask detailed questions about their process, build rapport, and then negotiate on the second or third interaction.
When you do negotiate, you negotiate on total value, not just unit price. Payment terms — thirty percent deposit, seventy percent before shipping is standard, but you can negotiate that split. Quality control — who pays for rework if a batch fails inspection? Lead times — can they guarantee production slots during peak season? Packaging — is it export-grade, will it survive a container voyage? These are all levers. A factory that won't budge on unit price might give you net sixty payment terms, which is effectively a discount if you understand cash flow.
The unit price fixation. It's the rookie mistake that keeps on giving.
It's also how you end up with the factory that quoted the lowest per-unit cost and then substituted materials, missed deadlines, and shipped goods that arrived damaged because they skimped on packaging. The cheapest quote is almost never the cheapest total cost.
Let's talk about something I don't think gets discussed enough: the communication layer after you leave. You've done the trip, you've selected a supplier, you're back home. Now you're managing a manufacturing relationship across a twelve-hour time difference with someone whose primary language is not English.
Everything breaks if you don't have a system. The single biggest failure mode is specification drift. You send a technical drawing, they make a sample, it's close but not exact, you approve it verbally because you're in a hurry, and production runs with the slightly-wrong version. Six months later you're explaining to a client why their custom vanity is three centimeters narrower than the drawings specified. The fix is painfully simple and almost nobody does it: every specification change, every approval, every deviation gets confirmed in writing with a photo attached. Not a WhatsApp message that says looks good. A formal confirmation that references the specific drawing revision, the date, and what was approved.
The paper trail as insurance policy.
The time zone thing is actually a feature if you use it right. If you send questions at the end of your workday, you often have answers by the next morning. The problem is when you need real-time clarification and it's two in the morning in Guangdong. The solution is to front-load the specification work so thoroughly that real-time questions are rare. The more unambiguous your initial brief, the fewer midnight emergencies.
I want to circle back to something you mentioned earlier — the cluster geography. Because I think for someone in Hannah's position, an architect or interior designer who's never sourced from China, the cluster map is the single most empowering piece of information. It turns an abstract, overwhelming task into something concrete. You're not sourcing from China. You're sourcing from Foshan for furniture, or Guzhen for lighting, or Xinhui for stainless steel hardware.
Those clusters have their own sub-specialties within them. In Foshan, the Lecong furniture wholesale market is the largest furniture market in the world — something like three million square meters of showroom space. But Lecong is mostly domestic-market product. The export-quality manufacturers are often in the industrial zones outside the city center, and they don't have showrooms on that strip. A sourcing agent who knows Foshan knows the difference. A first-timer wandering Lecong alone will find plenty of things that look good in a showroom and arrive looking very different.
The showroom-to-shipping-container gap.
Which is why the factory visit is non-negotiable. You need to see the production line that would actually make your order. Not a sample room. Not a showroom. If the factory is reluctant to show you the production floor, there's a reason, and none of the possible reasons are good for you.
What about the money side of the trip itself? The practical logistics. You're flying into Guangzhou or Hong Kong, you need to get around, you don't speak the language. How does the first-timer actually navigate this?
The sourcing agent handles most of it. A good agent will pick you up from the airport, drive you to factories, translate every conversation, and handle restaurant orders and hotel check-ins. But you should still have some basics. WeChat is non-negotiable — it's how business communication happens in China, and if you're trying to use email or WhatsApp, you're effectively invisible. Set up WeChat before you go. Get a VPN that actually works, because the Great Firewall is real and your usual apps won't function without one. Carry cash — mobile payments are ubiquitous in China through WeChat Pay and Alipay, but as a foreigner without a Chinese bank account, you may not be able to set those up easily. Cash is still accepted, though increasingly grudgingly.
The business card thing. I've heard there's a protocol.
Bring bilingual business cards — English on one side, Chinese on the other. Present and receive cards with both hands. When you receive someone's card, look at it for a moment before putting it away. Don't shove it in your back pocket. It's a small gesture that signals respect, and in a relationship-based business culture, those signals compound.
The card ceremony. I appreciate a culture that still takes business cards seriously.
Another practical thing: don't schedule factory visits back to back across different cities without accounting for Chinese traffic. The distance between Dongguan and Foshan looks manageable on a map — it's about a hundred kilometers. It can take three hours. You can realistically visit two factories in a day if they're in the same industrial zone. Three is pushing it. Four means you're spending the entire day in a car and learning nothing.
You budget a week for a first trip. Two days at the trade fair, three days of factory visits, buffer time for travel and follow-ups.
That's the minimum viable trip. And you should expect to make at least two trips before placing a substantial order. The first trip is for shortlisting. You identify potential suppliers, collect samples, build initial relationships. Then you go home, evaluate the samples in your own context — in Hannah's case, showing them to clients, testing finishes, checking how materials age under actual use — and return for a second trip to negotiate terms and finalize specifications. The people who try to do everything in one trip are the people who end up with a container full of regret.
Container full of regret. That's the name of my next album.
Your album would be called Something About Leaves and it would sell twelve copies.
Eleven of those to me. But let's get into the samples question, because I think there's a paradox here. You fly to China to see factories so you can evaluate quality in person. But the samples they give you at the fair or the factory visit might not represent what you'll actually receive. How do you close that gap?
This is what pre-production samples are for. There's a sequence. First, you get showroom samples — these are what you see at the fair. They're often the best thing the factory has ever made. Then, once you've selected a supplier and negotiated terms, you commission a pre-production sample, made on the actual production line by the actual workers who will make your order, using the actual materials specified in your contract. You pay for this sample — it's not free — and you inspect it obsessively. This is your golden reference. Everything that follows will be compared to this sample.
Then you keep the pre-production sample. You don't let the factory hold onto the only reference standard.
You sign it, photograph it from every angle, and retain it. The factory keeps a duplicate. When production is complete and you do a final random inspection — or your third-party inspector does — every unit is compared to the golden sample. If the production units don't match, you don't ship. You've written that into the contract.
The golden sample. It's the physical embodiment of your specification. And if the factory resists making one, or wants to charge an unreasonable amount for it, that's another brick wall.
It's also worth understanding that for custom interior design products — bespoke furniture, custom lighting fixtures, architectural hardware — you're dealing with a fundamentally different supply chain than off-the-shelf goods. The factory isn't just manufacturing your order. They're engineering it. They're interpreting your design drawings, making mold adjustments, solving production problems you didn't know existed. This is where the relationship with the factory owner or production manager becomes critical, because you need someone who will call you and say this detail can't be manufactured the way you drew it, here's what we can do instead, rather than someone who will try to make it anyway and deliver something that doesn't work.
The engineering feedback loop. That's actually a value-add from a good factory, not a failure of communication.
And it's one of the things that distinguishes export-quality factories from domestic-only producers. The export factories are accustomed to working from Western design specifications, dealing with architects and designers who have strong opinions about millimeter tolerances, and pushing back constructively when something isn't manufacturable. The domestic factories are accustomed to producing from their own catalog and may not have the engineering communication infrastructure to handle custom work.
Let me pull on a thread from the prompt that I think is worth naming explicitly. The prompt mentions finding a partner who will speak your values and deliver consistent quality. That word — partner — is doing a lot of work. Because I think a lot of Western buyers approach China sourcing as a transaction. Find the cheapest supplier, place the order, move on. And that works if you're buying generic promotional tote bags. It absolutely does not work if you're an architect staking your reputation on custom millwork that has to arrive on time and match the renderings.
The partner mindset changes everything. It means you're not asking what's your best price, you're asking what's your best product and how do we make it work for my market. It means you're visiting the factory more than once, even when you don't have an active order. It means you're sending them photos of the finished installation so they can see their work in context. It means you pay on time, every time, because in the China manufacturing ecosystem, payment reliability is one of the primary ways buyers build reputation with suppliers. A factory that knows you pay promptly will prioritize your orders during peak season. A factory that had to chase you for a balance payment will remember.
Payment reliability as competitive advantage. It's so obvious and so under-discussed.
Chinese factory owners talk to each other. The industry clusters are tight-knit. If you develop a reputation as a reliable, professional buyer who communicates clearly and pays on time, word gets around. If you develop a reputation as someone who nitpicks, renegotiates after the contract is signed, and delays payment, that also gets around. And the factories you actually want to work with will stop returning your calls.
Your reputation as a buyer is a business asset you're building or burning with every interaction. Which means the first trip isn't just about evaluating factories. It's about presenting yourself as the kind of client that good factories want to keep.
That loops back to the sourcing agent question we started with. A good agent doesn't just find you factories. They vouch for you. In a relationship-based business culture, the agent is saying to the factory owner: this buyer is serious, this buyer is professional, this buyer is worth your time. Without that vouching, you're just another foreigner who might place one order and disappear. With it, doors open that you didn't even know existed.
The agent as character reference. That's the piece that doesn't show up in the fee structure.
It's also why you should be wary of agents who are willing to represent anyone who pays. The best sourcing agents are selective about their clients because their reputation with suppliers is their primary asset. If they connect a factory with a buyer who turns out to be a nightmare, the factory blames the agent. An agent who's been in the business for ten or fifteen years and works primarily by referral has probably turned away more potential clients than they've accepted.
How do you verify that an agent is actually experienced and not just good at a sales pitch? Because I imagine there are plenty of people who present themselves as seasoned sourcing agents and are actually just enterprising twenty-five-year-olds with a LinkedIn profile and a cousin who owns a factory.
You ask for client references and you actually call them. You ask specific questions: how many orders have you placed through this agent? What went wrong and how did the agent handle it? Did the agent catch quality issues before shipping or did you discover them on arrival? Would you use this agent for a product category you've never sourced before? The answers to those questions tell you more than any certificate or website.
The phone call due diligence. Underrated in every industry.
You also want to understand the agent's background. Many of the best sourcing agents in China spent years working in the industry they now source for. They were quality managers at furniture factories, or production planners at lighting manufacturers. They know the production process from the inside, they know the common failure points, and they know the factory owners personally because they used to work alongside them. An agent with that background can walk onto a production floor and spot in thirty seconds what would take a generalist agent three visits to discover.
The domain expertise layer. It's not enough to be a good negotiator who speaks Chinese. You need someone who understands the specific manufacturing process for your product category.
For interior design and architecture specifically, that domain expertise includes understanding Western quality expectations. Chinese domestic market standards for furniture finishing, for example, are different from what a high-end American or European client would accept. A domestic buyer might tolerate a slight unevenness in a lacquer finish that would get a piece rejected by a US designer. A good agent knows where those expectation gaps are and can communicate them to the factory before production starts, not after.
The expectation gap. That's probably responsible for more sourcing disasters than outright fraud. The factory didn't cheat you. They just built to the standard they consider normal, and you assumed normal meant your normal.
Closing that gap is almost entirely about communication and reference standards. You don't say high quality finish. You say finish must match the attached reference sample under lighting conditions of X lumens at a viewing distance of one meter. You don't say solid wood. You specify the species, the moisture content, the allowable knot size, the grain matching requirements for visible surfaces. The more subjective your specification language, the wider the gap between what you expect and what you receive.
The poetry of sourcing. Turns out it's mostly about being aggressively specific.
The least poetic activity imaginable, and the most essential. I'd say for a first-timer in Hannah's position, the single most valuable thing you can do before the trip is develop a specification document that leaves nothing to interpretation. Dimensions, materials, finishes, tolerances, packaging requirements, inspection criteria. If it's not in the document, it's not in the contract, and if it's not in the contract, it's not in the factory's production plan.
We've covered the sourcing agent — who they are, how to find them, how they're paid, and why the payment structure determines whose interests they serve. We've covered ethical due diligence — the certification alphabet soup, the unannounced audit, the dormitory visit, the fire exit test, the timber chain of custody. And we've covered the first-trip playbook — the cluster geography, the trade fair sequence, the factory visit protocol, the golden sample, the specification document, and the relational approach to negotiation. Is there anything we're missing that a first-timer would kick themselves for not knowing?
The one thing I'd add is about intellectual property. If Hannah is designing custom pieces — original furniture designs, unique lighting concepts — she needs to understand that IP protection in China is real but it works differently than in the West. You want to register your designs in China before showing them to factories. Chinese patent and design registration is relatively inexpensive and much faster than the US or European equivalents. A design patent can be granted in six to eight months. Without registration, if a factory decides your design is interesting and starts producing it for other buyers, your legal recourse is extremely limited.
Register before you disclose. That's not a China-specific principle, but the enforcement landscape makes it especially important there.
Practically speaking, you work with factories that have a track record of respecting IP. The factories that produce for recognizable Western brands have too much to lose by stealing designs. The factories that only produce for anonymous domestic wholesalers have much less to lose. This is another reason to ask about their existing client list during the factory visit.
It also connects back to the partner mindset. A factory that sees you as a long-term design partner with a pipeline of future projects has an incentive to protect your designs. A factory that sees you as a one-time transaction has an incentive to extract maximum value from your IP before you disappear.
The entire sourcing trip, when it's done right, is an exercise in aligning incentives. You structure the agent's payment so their interests match yours. You select factories whose business model rewards long-term relationships. You write contracts that make quality failures more expensive for the factory than getting it right the first time. You build your own reputation as a buyer so that maintaining the relationship is valuable to them. Every decision either aligns incentives or misaligns them, and the misalignments are what eventually cost you money, time, and reputation.
The two-word summary of everything we just talked about.
I'd say there's one more thing worth mentioning, which is that the first trip is also about calibrating your own expectations. You will see factories that are cleaner and more professional than you expected. You will also see things that trouble you. The working conditions in Chinese manufacturing have improved enormously over the past fifteen years — rising wages, labor shortages, and government enforcement have all pushed standards upward — but there's still a wide range. You have to decide where your red lines are before you're standing on a factory floor, because it's much harder to think clearly about ethical boundaries when you're face to face with a factory owner who's been hospitable and you've already invested time and travel budget.
Pre-commit to your standards. Write them down. If you decide in advance that you won't buy from a factory with dormitory housing you haven't inspected, or with blocked fire exits, or without a valid third-party social compliance audit, then you enforce that rule regardless of how nice the samples look or how competitive the pricing is. The time to negotiate with yourself is before the trip, not during it.
That's really the through-line for all three of the prompt's questions. The sourcing agent, the ethical due diligence, the first-trip preparation — they all come down to doing the unglamorous groundwork before you ever set foot in a factory. The people who skip that groundwork are the ones with the horror stories. The people who do it tend to build supply chains that become genuine competitive advantages.
Which is probably why Hannah wants to go in person. You can't subcontract judgment.
You can't. And that's actually the optimistic read on all of this. In an era where you can order almost anything from a screen, the fact that serious buyers still get on planes and walk factory floors says something about what quality actually requires. There's no app for trusting a supplier with your reputation.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, used by the island's deaf community from the early seventeen hundreds until the last native signer died in nineteen fifty-two, survives today only through a twenty-seven-minute film made in nineteen thirty by a researcher who visited the island specifically to record it before it vanished.
A twenty-seven-minute film as the sole remaining speaker of an entire language.
That's somehow both heartbreaking and an incredible act of foresight by that researcher.
The open question I'd leave listeners with is this: if you're building something — a business, a product line, a design practice — and your supply chain is the part you've been treating as a back-office afterthought, what would change if you treated it as a core competency instead? Because that's really what a sourcing trip represents. The decision to stop outsourcing judgment.
If this episode sparked questions about your own sourcing setup, or if you've got a trade show story that belongs in the container-full-of-regret hall of fame, we'd love to hear it. Find us at myweirdprompts dot com.
This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Corn.
I'm Herman Poppleberry. Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing. We'll catch you next time.
