Our very first container, back in 2013, came from Ningbo: a 40-footer of motor housings for an appliance line in Illinois. For three years after that we managed Ningbo suppliers from Shenzhen, which is a 14-hour drive or a 2-hour flight away. It worked, but not well. Every problem took a day longer to fix than it should have.
In early 2016 we had enough Ningbo volume to justify one person there. We were lucky that the person was Mei Lin Zhao.
One desk, one person
Mei Lin had spent eight years at a large forwarder in Shanghai and knew the Zhejiang supplier base well. She started in April 2016 at a desk we rented from a local trucking company in Beilun, right by the port. The phone line took a week to connect, so for the first few days our Ningbo office was her mobile phone.
What changed
Having our own person in Ningbo changed things fast. Short shipments got caught at the factory instead of in Chicago. Suppliers who had been missing dates started hitting them, partly because someone was now visiting in person. Within a year, two of our clients moved more of their sourcing to Zhejiang because they finally had eyes there.
By 2018 the office was four people. By 2020 it was seven, and Mei Lin was running all of our China operations. Today it's nine, handling a little over 3,000 containers a year.
Ten years, in numbers
- About 21,000 containers shipped from Ningbo since April 2016
- More than 340 suppliers visited in person
- 9 people today, 3 of whom have been with us more than seven years
- 1 office move (to a real office, with a phone line that worked on day one)
What it taught us
Ningbo is the reason we have our own people at origin instead of relying on agents. It's also the model we followed for Long Beach in 2023 and Toronto this year: open when clients need it, start small, hire someone who knows the ground better than we do, and let them build it.
Thank you to Mei Lin, to everyone who has worked in the Ningbo office, and to the suppliers and clients who have trusted them. Here's to the next ten.