Our family's roots in international trade go back to my grandfather's generation — he started a toy trading company in Hong Kong in the 1950s. My father transformed it into a buying office, holding exclusive purchasing agreements for three major European retailers. In 1999, after finishing my studies in Boston, my brother and I joined the family business, starting out on the buying-office side.
In those years, I traveled through what was then a brand-new manufacturing belt — Shenzhen, Dongguan, Foshan (what people now call the Greater Bay Area, though nobody called it that yet), as well as inland cities like Wenzhou, Ningbo, and Yiwu. That was the era when the entire industry ran on OEM manufacturing. My judgment was built factory by factory, during exactly that period.
Later, we moved from pure sourcing and OEM work into building our own brands — everything from small electronics to housewares, sold globally, with our own sales, customer service, and logistics teams built out in the US. Over thirty years, I've built 5 of my own brands, helped facilitate over $900M USD in export value, and landed orders from major US buyers like Walmart, Target, and TJX. At peak, we were handling over 3,500 SKUs a year and managing over 6,200 40-foot containers annually across a broad range of non-perishable categories. Eight years ago, we sold part of the business to a private equity firm — and since then, I've been putting my energy into things I find genuinely more interesting: sharing what I've learned so exporters can avoid the hard lessons, building my own brands in the US, and planning three major buyer showrooms in the US. None of this came from a textbook — it's judgment built over three generations, deal by deal, container by container.
Over the years, I've turned that judgment into a system — a way of helping manufacturers break into Western markets without burning years on guesswork. This site is my open notebook: how I think, how I make the calls I make, and the fastest way for you to find out whether I'm the person who can help.
