A supplier sends you a photo: a bright workshop, forty people at sewing machines, a sign above the door with the company name on it. You ask for a video call and they walk you through the same room. It all checks out.
Then someone visits the address on the business licence and finds a locked office on the fourth floor of a residential block.
This is not rare. It is the normal way a certain kind of trading company sells itself, and it works because almost nobody gets on a train to check.
The showroom is a room, not a factory
In Yiwu and Shenzhen there are buildings full of factory showrooms. You rent a floor, put samples on shelves, hang a sign, and take photos. Some of them will even lend you a workshop for an afternoon if a buyer insists on a video call.
None of this means the products are bad. A good trading company can be more useful than a bad factory: they know which of the twelve workshops in the area actually delivers on time. The problem is that you are paying factory prices for a middleman, and you do not know it.
What a real factory looks like
It is usually less photogenic than the picture. Things I look for, in order:
- Raw material stacked somewhere visible. A factory that cuts or moulds has offcuts and scrap.
- Machines that are running, not covered in dust.
- Half-finished goods on racks. Assembly lines have work in progress; showrooms have finished samples.
- A smell. Machine oil, fabric dye, plastic. An office smells like an office.
- Workers who ignore you. In a real workshop, nobody stops production for a visitor.
Three questions that separate them
You can ask these by email, before you pay anyone to visit:
- What is the address on your business licence, and can I see a photo of the workshop at that address? A trading company will send a showroom photo and hope you do not compare the two.
- How many production lines do you run, and what is your monthly capacity for this item? Vague answers are the tell.
- Which part of this product do you make yourselves, and which part do you buy in? Almost every factory buys something. The honest ones tell you what.
What I do instead
I go to the address on the licence, not the address in the brochure. I film the entrance, the sign, the floor, and the machines. If the address is a flat, I film the flat. Then I write down what I saw and send it to you, including the part where I stood in the wrong place for twenty minutes because the gate was not where the map said.
That is the whole service. Not a certificate, not a score out of ten. Just someone standing in the room, telling you what is in it.
If you want a supplier checked, send me the name and the address. I will tell you what I find, free, before you spend anything.