Team

Two people, two desks

We are a small company and we intend to stay one for a while. Your order is handled by the two people below — not passed to an account manager, and not subcontracted to a trading company with a different name on the invoice.

Zhang Hao张浩

Founder · Operations & Export

Zhang Hao was part of the founding team at Tujia, one of China's largest vacation rental platforms. His background spans Chinese travel platforms, accommodation and hotel operations, local lifestyle services and online bookings — businesses where supply is fragmented, quality is uneven, and trust has to be earned operationally rather than claimed in a brochure.

He moved from travel into cultural tourism gifting: the products sold in museum shops, scenic-area stores and hotel lobbies. He has spent eight years on that trade and its cross-border side, and the problem there is the one this company exists to solve — the buyer is thousands of kilometres away, the workshop is local, and the distance between them gets filled with photographs that may or may not be true.

He runs the operations desk: quotations, contracts, order flow, export documentation, and the person who answers when something goes wrong at the port.

Handles — Quotations, agreements, order tracking, export documents, client communication Before this — Founding team, Tujia; eight years in cultural tourism gifts and cross-border operations Languages — Mandarin, English

Zhou Xian周娴

Sourcing & Authenticity

Zhou Xian read Chinese Literature at Soochow University, then took a second degree in Archaeology at Nanjing University. She worked at the Aitao Art Museum, where she learned how objects are catalogued, described and authenticated — and how often a confident label turns out to be wrong.

She then moved into media, working as a screenwriter, a writer-director, the editor-in-chief of a magazine and the host of a food programme. Later she founded her own cultural-products studio, which is where she learned what it actually costs — in time, material and failed samples — to make something properly.

The combination is less eccentric than it looks. Archaeology taught her to date a pattern and to recognise a moulded surface. The museum taught her to describe an object precisely. Writing and editing taught her to interrogate a claim instead of repeating it. Running a cultural-products business taught her what a workshop can and cannot do at a given price.

She runs the sourcing desk, and she is the person who looks at a sample and tells you what is wrong with it — before you spend money on the order.

Handles — Workshop shortlisting, sample verification, authenticity assessment, pre-shipment inspection Education — Chinese Literature, Soochow University; Archaeology, Nanjing University Before this — Aitao Art Museum; screenwriter, writer-director, magazine editor-in-chief, food-media host; founder of a cultural-products studio

Why only two. A sourcing agency is a trust business. Every additional layer between you and the person checking your goods is another place where the specification gets paraphrased and the bad news gets softened. We would rather be reachable, and slow to grow, than impressive on a team page.

Talk to the person who will do the work

Tell us what you are trying to source. You will get a reply from one of the two people above, not from a shared inbox that routes to nobody.

Send a sourcing request