What I Actually Think About Buying Furniture in China

It’s louder and hotter than you imagine

My first afternoon there I sat down on a display sofa because my feet hurt, and a salesman brought me a small cup of tea and didn’t try to sell me anything for about fifteen minutes. I remember being surprised by that. I had arrived braced for a fight and instead I got tea.

That’s the first thing I’d tell anyone. The pressure you’re imagining before you land is mostly not there. What is there’s scale, and heat, and a great deal of walking, and by four in the afternoon you’ll be making decisions with a tired brain. Almost everything I later regretted, I decided after four in the afternoon.

The thing that took me two trips to understand

I thought I was looking for a factory. I was actually looking for several, and I didn’t know that.

This is a town of specialists. One workshop lives and breathes upholstery frames. Another has been doing solid wood dining for twenty years and is quietly excellent at it and mediocre at everything else, which they’ll tell you if you ask. The place with the best sofas in the district may have a wardrobe range that’s simply somebody else in the family having a go.

On my first trip my whole range came out of one building, because one building had most of what I needed and I was relieved to be finished. Parts of that range were superb. I still buy them today. The rest was fine, and I had no idea which was which, because I had nothing to hold it against.

The one thing I’d change about my first three years

I want to be fair to that first workshop, because they were good to me and two of their categories are still in my range today. Nothing about that relationship was a problem.

What I’d change is that my whole range was capped by one set of strengths, and I had no idea, because I’d never seen anything to hold it against. When a customer asked for something outside what that workshop did well, I either said no or I sold something merely acceptable with my name on it. For three years I thought that was just what the market offered.

It wasn’t. The market was full of people who were exceptional at exactly the thing I was turning down. I simply had no way of finding them, and I’d have carried on not finding them indefinitely, because nothing about the situation felt like it needed solving.

What changed for me

On my second trip I had somebody with me who knew the place. I’d expected that to make the days run smoother. What I hadn’t expected was that it would change what I came home with.

What I got wasn’t magic pricing. What I got was a route. We went to eleven workshops in three days and every one of them was relevant, and we did them in an order that made the prices make sense. He took me to a cheap hall first, deliberately, and afterwards said now you know what a sofa costs. He was right. Everything I heard for the rest of the week landed differently.

The other thing, which I didn’t expect, was that he pushed me toward the makers rather than away from them. I came home with the names and numbers of the people actually building my furniture. I had assumed it would be the opposite.

I came for sofas and left having sorted the bathrooms

I mentioned in the car, just making conversation, that I still had a flat at home to finish. Floors, lights, a bathroom.

He changed the next morning’s plan.

Foshan doesn’t only make furniture. Twenty minutes down the same road it makes tiles, sanitary ware and lighting, at the same depth and for the same kind of buyer. I spent that morning in a tile market I hadn’t known existed.

If you fit out whole properties rather than filling shelves, that changes everything about the trip. One flight. One container. One set of people. The floors and the lights arrive with the sofas instead of being three separate jobs across three months.

I’d never have found any of it alone. I didn’t know to look.

The money, said plainly

I paid a commission on that trip, and afterwards I sat down and worked out what it had actually bought me, because I wanted to know before I planned the next one.

Two days of my first trip had gone on working out where things were. That was gone. A category I had been buying from a workshop that was ordinary at it moved to one that specialises, at a similar price, and the returns on it dropped. And I didn’t order anything at half past four in the afternoon while tired, because somebody was managing the day.

None of that shows up as a saving on an invoice. All of it was real. I still wouldn’t call it cheap, and I’d pay it again.

If you’re going for the first time

Give the first day away. Order nothing. It feels wasteful and it’s the single best thing I know to do.

Ask questions with numbers in them. What is the foam density, what timber is the frame, what board grade. People answer those happily and the whole conversation moves to a different level.

Write down the width of your own doorway and lift before you go, because you won’t remember them when it matters.

And ask, for every single item, whether it ships knocked down. The answer is often yes and it’s almost never offered.

Things people ask me about this