About
A working guide to buying furniture in Foshan, written for people who are about to get on a plane.
What this site is
A practical guide to the Foshan furniture district, and a way to arrange a trip through it. The market guides describe each centre as it actually is, so that a first visit does not have to be spent working out the geography. The trip pages describe the different shapes a buying trip can take, because a designer buying twelve chairs and a wholesaler filling a container need very different days.
Why Foshan
Because the concentration here is unusual even by Chinese standards. Showrooms, workshops, packing and freight all sit within the same district, which means a buyer can go from seeing a piece to seeing it made to arranging its shipment without a long journey between any of those steps. Very few furniture buying regions in the world can offer that, and it is the reason people keep coming back.
How the guides are written
Plainly, and without inventing anything. Where a figure would be a guess it is left out. Where something varies by season or by year, the page says so and suggests confirming it. Nothing on this site disparages a market, a mall or a supplier: the centres here serve different buyers and different budgets, and a building that is wrong for one order is exactly right for another.
How a trip is arranged
It starts with a short conversation about what you are buying, roughly how much, and when you can travel. From that comes a suggested route: which centres, in what order, how many days, and whether a factory visit is worth building in. If the honest answer is that you need fewer days than you thought, that is what the reply will say.
On the ground, the job is straightforward. Get you to the right buildings in the right order, hold the conversation in Chinese where that makes the answers better, keep a record of what was seen and what was quoted, and stay out of the way while you decide. The buying decisions are yours, and the site is built on the assumption that a well informed buyer is a better customer than a hurried one.
Getting in touch
The enquiry form is on the trip planning page and it reaches a person. Messages that describe the category, the rough volume and the timing get the most useful replies, because those three things decide almost everything about the route.