Tool
Which region makes your product?
China is not one place — it is a set of specialised clusters. Work through four questions and the region falls out the other side.
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How it works
Four questions, in order.
- What you makeThe category decides the cluster. A kitchen gadget, a cosmetic and a PCB do not live in the same city.
- What it is made ofMaterial is the second filter. Plastic parts point to injection clusters; fabric points to textile clusters; wood points to furniture clusters.
- How many you will orderQuantity separates market cities from manufacturing cities. A few hundred units is a Yiwu order; a few thousand with tooling is a Ningbo or Dongguan order.
- Stock or customCustomisation changes everything. A stock shape you can buy is a market order; a custom mould is a tooling order, and the tooling cluster matters more than the market.
Once you have a region, we can turn it into a shortlist — see factory matching. If you are weighing two categories, the industry pages explain what to check in each.
The table
Category to cluster, with the reasoning.
- Small commodities & giftsYiwu — the market plus the manufacturing hinterland. Best for stock shapes, low MOQ and wide SKU assortments.
- Appliances, hardware, textilesNingbo / Hangzhou — large plants with tooling departments. Best for tooling-led parts and defined production programmes.
- Electronics & smart hardwareShenzhen — PCB, SMT and assembly within one radius. Best when the process control, not the enclosure, is the product.
- OEM & private labelGuangzhou / Dongguan — cosmetics, garments, homeware, toys. Best when formulation, packaging and assembly need to sit close together.
- Furniture & home appliancesFoshan / Shunde — furniture, ceramics and the motor-and-heating heart of appliances.
- Textiles & fabricsShaoxing / Keqiao — the fabric market and the mills. Best when the cloth itself is the product, not a finished good.
- The home provinceZhejiang — several clusters in one working radius; the trip where a market day and a plant visit are the same week, not two flights.
Worked through
Four products, four answers.
- A 30ml serum bottle, private label, first order around 5,000Guangzhou / Dongguan. The packaging supplier and the filling plant are two different companies there, and the cluster puts them close together.
- A custom injection-moulded toy, 10,000 unitsDongguan or Shantou. The tooling and the injection capacity sit in the toy cluster, and the MOQ is set by the mould, not the market.
- Five hundred units of a stock kitchen gadgetYiwu. A stock shape at low quantity is a market order, and Yiwu is built around that — Ningbo would not be interested at that volume.
- Fabric for a home-textile line, bought by the rollShaoxing / Keqiao. The market shows the range, the mills behind it make the cloth, and colour is judged on the floor, not from a swatch.
What we don't do
When a product does not fit one cluster
Some products span two clusters — a lamp is a lighting product in one city and a metal part in another. The finder gives you the primary region; the route is where the two halves meet.
- A product that mixes electronics and furniture may need two stops, not one.
- The material usually decides the second stop — follow the component, not the brand.
- When in doubt, ask. A wrong region costs two travel days; the question costs one message.
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