We did not have a booth at the Canton Fair. Not because we were turned down — we never applied.
We are a sourcing agent. A booth at a trade fair belongs to companies that sell goods; our job is to find goods on a buyer's behalf. Inside the halls that is genuinely hard: sixty thousand people are moving, and there is nowhere to sit down and finish a conversation.
So for two days we stood on the pavement outside Gate 1 with one sign, three staff lanyards, a modest stack of leaflets, and two students we had hired for the week.
Day two, 08:20. The queue outside Gate 1 already runs past the corner.
The sign
"We can Source any product for you!" — two A1 boards, with a QR code and our web address along the bottom.
About ten minutes after we raised it, a man stopped and asked what we were selling.
I said we don't sell anything; buyers pay us to find factories for them. He said "oh" and kept walking.
The third person wanted to know whether we were ticket touts. It was a fair question: there were real touts twenty metres away, and their boards were better designed than ours.
The fifth was a buyer from Chile. He read the board for about eight seconds, took out his phone and scanned the code.
Eight seconds is roughly the whole budget you get at that gate, which is why the board carries a QR code rather than a paragraph about our services.
The lanyards
We had three made: one for me, one for each of the two students. Red, S logo on the front, QR code on the back — identical to the ones we wear ourselves.
The reason is unglamorous. At that gate, everyone who looks like staff is wearing a lanyard: security, exhibitors, the people handing out catalogues. A lanyard buys you the first two or three seconds. Without one you are a person pushing paper at strangers, and people's eyes slide off you.
Three lanyards cost under a hundred yuan. What they bought was this: two students who had never worked a trade fair could answer "who do you work for?" by turning their badge around, in about five seconds, without explaining anything.
Three lanyards. The QR code on the back does the introductions.
One of the two students we hired for the week. She had never worked a fair before; the badge meant she never had to open with "let me explain who we are".
The paper
One sheet, printed on both sides. Front: what we actually do. Back: QR code, phone, email, and the Dongguan address.
Near the main gate security moves you along roughly every ten minutes, so most of the handing out happened two hundred metres up the road. The copies nobody took came back to Dongguan in the suitcase. Paper is cheap; carrying it around all day is not. Next time we print less and carry less.
One German buyer slid our card into his badge holder, next to his Canton Fair buyer pass. "This one is useful," he said. I did not have the nerve to photograph his chest.
He kept the red card in his hand for the rest of the conversation. We blurred his face before publishing; we did not have to ask him to hold it up.
The leaflet, front and back. Everything a buyer needs to check us out before trusting us with a quote.
The numbers, unvarnished
Two days. Forty business cards with a name on them. Twenty WhatsApp contacts.
At 12:02 on the 17th the first one came through. His opening message was "I'm ____ PD" — product development — followed by a photo he had taken of the two of us.
The first WhatsApp add of the fair. He sent his own photo before we asked for anything.
Of the forty cards, about half ended with "I'll send you an email", which in our experience means nothing. Nine led to a question about a specific product. Three reached a quote. One placed a trial order.
Is that a good conversion rate? It is ordinary. The comparison that matters is with a booth: a booth costs far more and usually ends with a stack of scanned badges nobody opens twice. Forty cards we can actually read suits us better.
Three things we said no to
- Carry your samples home for you. A buyer asked us to check two boxes of samples as luggage and bring them to Europe. We said no. Once goods leave China in our name, whatever happens to them becomes our liability, and that is not a risk we can absorb.
- Be your interpreter, by the hour. We are not good at it, and a professional interpreter costs less per hour than we do. You would be paying more for a worse result.
- "Just make a sample and see." No drawing, no BOM, no target price. Without those three we cannot even get a factory to quote, so the request only costs two weeks.
If you are going next year
Three things we got wrong, in the order they cost us time:
- Do not work the pavement opposite Gate 8. Security clears it every ten minutes. Walk two hundred metres toward Pazhou station: the crowd is the same and nobody moves you on.
- Foot traffic collapses after 3pm. Nine to twelve is the whole day; the afternoon is mostly people walking back out.
- Print fewer leaflets than you think. Whatever you print, some of it ends up back in the suitcase. Estimate from what two days on that pavement can actually absorb, not from how big the crowd looks.
Who we actually are
If you want to check that we are a real company: our business license is on the About page, and the registration number 91441900MAKBTADYX3 is searchable in any Chinese company registry. Our registered address, phone and legal name are on that same page — no PO box, no virtual office.
If you want the awkward questions answered — are you really the cheapest, what happens if it goes wrong, who pays for rework — eighteen of them are on our FAQ & Customer Q&A page.
None of this is meant to sound clever. Standing outside a trade fair for two days is not a clever move.
It was, however, cheap to test. The alternative was to stay in Dongguan and wait for the website to bring enquiries in, which works, slowly. Two days on the pavement worked faster, and we met people we would not otherwise have met.
We will be back next year, in the same spot. If you see the board that says "We can Source any product for you!", take a card. The WhatsApp number on it is answered by a person, usually within a few hours.
