Sourcing intelligence from inside Chinese factories
Most guides about Chinese manufacturing are written by people who have never stood on a factory floor. I spent seven years inside them — building battery and energy-storage systems, arguing over tolerances, watching which suppliers deliver and which ones disappear. This is the version nobody puts in a brochure.
Start free. Pay only when it saves you real money.
The 12 decisions that decide whether your first order goes well.
How to tell a real factory from a trading company in 48 hours.
Ongoing intelligence, and a person you can ask.
Who this is for
Big companies have procurement offices in Shenzhen. You have a browser tab and a supplier who replies in ten minutes with a surprisingly low price. That gap is where the money disappears — through tooling fees that were never real, through "same as the sample" shipments that aren't, through a factory that is actually a living room with three sewing machines.
Unfiltered China exists to close that gap. Not with motivational content, but with the specific checks, words and numbers that decide whether your order arrives the way you expect.
No, and that matters. An agent earns a percentage of your order, so an agent is motivated to close orders. I earn from subscriptions, so I am motivated to be right. If you need someone to place orders for you, I will tell you honestly — and tell you what a good agent should charge.
You can find the general advice free. What you cannot find free is the specific version: the actual wording that gets a factory to admit it is a trading company, the real cost structure behind a quotation, which inspection is worth paying for and which is theatre. That is what I write.
My hands-on depth is batteries, energy storage and electromechanical products. But 80% of what goes wrong in China is category-independent: how to verify a supplier, how to read a quote, how to hold a factory to a sample. That 80% is what the Kit and the Playbook cover.
Yes, any month, from your own receipt — no email required, no exit survey. One-time purchases are refundable within 14 days if they did not help.
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