You tell me what you need. I’ll go get it.

You can. Genuinely — none of this is a secret and the sites are open to anybody. If you want to go and do it, I’ll tell you that plainly rather than pretend there’s a locked door.

Here’s what you’d be taking on. There are hundreds of listings for whatever you’re after, and a lot of them are trading companies reselling somebody else’s product with a markup on it, not the factory. Telling those apart means knowing which questions to ask and what a real answer sounds like. Then samples. Then a spec written tightly enough that what turns up is what you agreed to. Then freight, which gets quoted a dozen different ways. Then duty and clearance and a broker who wants paperwork you’ve never seen before. Then the part nobody warns you about — a factory that goes quiet for two months and doesn’t move until somebody pushes.

None of it is impossible. It’s a full-time job for a while, and the expensive mistakes are the ones you don’t yet know to look for.

So yes, I make a margin on what you buy, and I’ve said so elsewhere on this page. But I’m not selling you the same thing at the same price you could get here. You get it for less than the domestic option and you get your month back. Both of those are worth something.

Tariffs are real and I’m not going to pretend they aren’t. The difference is you never meet one as a surprise. The price I quote you already has duty inside it, along with freight, customs clearance, and the truck to your door.

Here’s the part most people miss. The domestic supplier you’re comparing me against is almost certainly importing from the same place I am. The US device company selling that cryochiller for $6,487 is bringing in the identical unit and paying the identical duty. So is the catalogue company selling you a chair.

So tariffs raise both numbers. They don’t close the gap — because what I take out is the middleman’s markup, and that markup doesn’t care what the duty rate is. When rates go up, the domestic price goes up too, usually by more, because the markup gets applied on top of whatever it cost them to get it here.

Rates have moved several times in the last year and are being argued over in court. That’s exactly why you get a fixed delivered price with a validity window on it, instead of an estimate that drifts.

You see a sample before anything gets produced. If the sample isn’t right, we don’t move forward, and you haven’t spent anything on a production run.

I’ll be straight with you about what “the same” means. Sometimes it is literally the same factory that makes the US-branded version. More often it’s a different factory building to the same standard, and the piece isn’t identical — occasionally it’s better. What I won’t tell you is that a $4,800 machine is a $6,487 machine with a different sticker. I’ll tell you what it actually is, and you decide with a sample in front of you.

Yes. Custom logos, custom colors, custom packaging — that’s the normal conversation with a factory, not a special favour you have to negotiate for.

Send me your logo file and what you have in mind. You’ll approve a proof before production starts.

Then buy it from them, and I’ll tell you where to look. I’d rather send you somewhere else than take a thin margin on something you could have had faster and cheaper on your own.

Here’s the honest rule, and it’s the first thing I check. If the thing you want has a page on a US promotional-products site — standard pens, tote bags, drinkware, plain printed keychains — a domestic supplier probably beats me. They import the same goods at a hundred times my volume, hold stock in a warehouse, and can ship in five days. I can’t beat that on a commodity, and I’m not going to tell you I can.

Where I win is everything that doesn’t have a catalogue page. Equipment and machines, where the domestic price is a badge and a markup on the same unit. And anything custom enough that nobody stocks it — a part in a shape that doesn’t exist, a spec nobody offers. That’s the work.

So ask me. If it’s the first kind, you’ll get a straight answer and a link, and it costs you nothing to have found out.

It depends on the product, and it’s usually lower than people expect. Equipment can be a single unit. Custom printed goods tend to start in the hundreds, sometimes 100, sometimes 500.

Custom moulded parts surprise people most — a zipper pull, a keychain, a badge in your own shape and colour is realistic at a couple of hundred pieces. The mould is a one-off cost, so a bigger run doesn’t unlock the option, it just spreads that cost thinner. What does need real volume is a custom colour or material on a finished product, because the factory has to source and run it for you.

Tell me the quantity you actually want. If it’s too low for a factory to run, I’ll tell you that straight away instead of talking you into ordering more than you need.

That’s my problem to solve, not yours. Everything ships insured, and the factory holds a share of the payment until the goods are accepted — so they have a reason to get it right.

If something arrives damaged, I file the claim. If it arrives wrong against the spec you approved, the factory remakes it. You send me photos and I take it from there.

No. You never speak to a customs broker, you never file paperwork, and you never get a phone call about a container sitting at a port.

It shows up at your address. That’s the whole experience on your end.

One price per piece, or one price for the run you asked for. Everything is inside that number — the factory’s price, any mould or tooling charge, freight, customs, duty. My margin is in there too.

That’s deliberate, and it’s worth understanding why. The usual version of this is a mould fee, then a per-unit price, then shipping per unit, then duty, then a handling charge — and you can’t tell what you’re actually paying until somebody adds it all up for you. If a custom mould costs ninety-five dollars, that goes into the per-piece price. It doesn’t turn up as a line on an invoice three weeks later.

Samples are the one thing quoted on their own, because they happen before you’ve committed to anything. If you want to hold the thing before a production run — and on anything custom you should — you’ll see that number before I order it.

Getting a quote costs nothing and doesn’t commit you to anything. If the number doesn’t beat what you’re paying now, I’ll tell you, and you walk away having spent nothing.