The distributor
Looked the part on paper. Pitched beautifully. Then sat on the inventory for eighteen months while the brand quietly lost its launch window.
Why vetted
Most "China distributor databases" are scraped lists. This one is not.
Compass was built one meeting at a time, by a team that has spent fifteen years putting consumer brands into China’s distribution and eCommerce channels. Every name on the list has been vetted in person, visited on site, or worked with directly on a real brand engagement.
It is the difference between knowing a partner exists and knowing whether they actually fit your brand.
The problem we kept running into
Every brand entering China asks the same question.
Who do we sell with?
Distributors, TPs, importers, cross-border operators, category specialists. The list runs long, the names turn over fast, and from outside China they all look the same. A deck is a deck. Every one of them has a warehouse photo, a client logo wall and a very confident account director.
A contact list tells you who exists. We tell you who fits.
Three ways it goes wrong
We have watched each of these happen more than once.
The TP
Promised flagship-grade operations. Had never actually run the category. We worked that out at month four, by which point the listings were already burned.
The importer
Warehouse, trucking, customs, all squared away. No real ability to sell anything to anyone. Pallets in. Pallets stayed.
The damage rarely stops at one bad year. Lost shelf. Burned listings. A China entry that has to start again from scratch.
What we have been building
Fifteen years of meetings, written down.
The database was not a plan. It was a by-product. Our leadership team has spent fifteen years doing distribution and eCommerce work inside China, and somewhere along the way that work threw off something nobody had budgeted for: a lot of data.
Every distributor we vetted. Every TP we briefed. Every warehouse we walked. We wrote down what they actually do, not what their deck claims. Real categories. Real volume. The reputation they carry with the brands they have worked with before. The ones we would recommend in a heartbeat, and the ones we would quietly steer a client away from.
After a few years of spreadsheets and shared documents, the whole thing became Compass.
Why a database
A directory lists names. A database answers questions.
These are the questions that actually decide a partnership, and not one of them is answerable from a company website.
- Cross-border or domestic?
- Tmall, JD, Douyin or offline retail?
- Which categories do they really run, versus the ones listed on their website?
- Will they take exclusivity?
- How do they pay, and how fast?
- Have we seen them succeed with a brand like yours, or seen them fail with one?
The database does not make the decision for you. What it does is shorten the list, and make sure the names left on it are worth your time in the first place.
How we are different
A database, not another directory
| What we compare | Scraped directories | Compass |
|---|---|---|
| How names get added | Bulk uploads, scraped from public sources | One meeting at a time |
| What we actually know about them | A company name. Maybe an email. | Real categories, real volume, payment terms and fit for your brand |
| Years spent building it | A few months | Fifteen |
| What you walk away with | A list of maybes | A shortlist worth meeting |