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International Sales: Bringing Factories + Buyers Together

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

amp0193

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"Oh, sorry, we don't have a new catalog yet". f*cking moron is selling to the biggest players in the space - how he got those deals I don't know. He lies about the dumbest things where there isn't even incentive to lie. Trust gets killed instantly. The deal gets killed. Our commission gets killed.

ugh, what a waste.

So you vetted these guys beforehand. What was that based on? Strictly product quality? So these guys totally fumbled, but they have amazing product right?

How do you even know how it's going to go, without doing an order yourself?


Hey, does someone there speak {this dialect of Indian}? We called a handful of restaurants before finding a guy that we tipped well to write some Whatsapp messages. Now onboarded a real translator.

Haha, this is awesome. No excuses!
 
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AgainstAllOdds

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ugh, what a waste.

So you vetted these guys beforehand. What was that based on? Strictly product quality? So these guys totally fumbled, but they have amazing product right?

How do you even know how it's going to go, without doing an order yourself?

They're a new subsidiary of one of Indian's largest players in the space. The executive director sucks. The product doesn't. We vetted for product, price, production capacity, etc. Didn't vet for ease of working with as a rep. Big mistake on our part since we assumed everyone everywhere would do what's logical and in their best interest - not true.
 

amp0193

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Didn't vet for ease of working with as a rep. Big mistake on our part since we assumed everyone everywhere would do what's logical and in their best interest - not true.

Up the comission a bit, and be the liason between client and factory?

Shield the client from this bullshit?

Adds a layer of hassle for everybody though.
 

AgainstAllOdds

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Got any updates on this?

We decided to push forward on quartz distribution regardless of factory representation buy-in. I bought a semi-truck with a crane and trailer for slabs. Hopefully get it on the road running within a month. Just need a driver. Not the business model I wanted, but not a bad business model either. We have great pricing from a few factories which will allow us to be competitive on a distribution front.

My partner meantime is flying to Asia including India. We're having a lot of trouble cracking India and need to go in person. We've hired an Indian importer here that has connections in India to line up additional meetings. We'll see how it goes.

The biggest problem with India has been lying, and an overwhelming culture of wanting to screw you over. They know China is out of the game, so the biggest factories essentially formed a cartel to increase the price on all quartz. Their ability to cooperate with each other on price fixing has been really impressive.

Other than that, there's more sensible representation deals in the pipeline if India doesn't work out.

The most impressive is one of the biggest furniture factories in the world. They have their own skyscraper. We're planning to represent them after my partner finishes training at their location. Hopefully our partnership with them goes a lot better.
 

AgainstAllOdds

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Update:

My partner flew out to China and finished training at one of the biggest furniture factories in the world. We locked in a deal to represent them. These guys are huge with tremendous potential. I'm considering going all in on representing them.

After China, he's flying to India to negotiate deals for quartz. The broker model didn't work with India - we'll see if that changes in person ... if it doesn't, then we're going to import quartz and distribute ourselves.
 

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