Almost everything written about buying furniture from China is written for importers and wholesalers. It assumes you have a company, a warehouse, a customs broker on speed dial and a reason to buy two hundred dining chairs.
Plenty of the people who contact us are not that. They are finishing a house, furnishing a villa, fitting out an apartment they just bought, or renovating a family home and looking at quotes from local shops that make their eyes water. The question they ask is whether this is something a private person can actually do.
The short answer is yes, with one condition attached, and it is worth understanding that condition before you get attached to the idea.
The condition: you need to fill a container
Shipping is charged by the container, not by the chair. A 20 foot container holds roughly 28 to 33 cubic metres, and clearing it through customs costs about the same whether it arrives full or a third empty. That single fact decides whether this makes sense for you.
The good news is that a 20 foot container is smaller than most people imagine. A three bedroom home furnished from scratch, beds, wardrobes, sofas, dining set, coffee tables, desks and the rest, generally fits inside one with room to spare. If you are furnishing a whole property rather than replacing a couple of pieces, you are already in the right territory.
What it tends to cost
Approximate factory prices for a mid range specification. Not the cheapest available and not designer pieces, roughly the quality level most people picture when they think of a good quality home.
| Room | Typical contents | Approx. factory cost |
|---|---|---|
| Living room | Sofa, coffee table, TV unit, accent chair, rug | USD 650 to 1,400 |
| Dining area | Table and six chairs, sideboard | USD 500 to 1,100 |
| Master bedroom | Bed frame, two nightstands, wardrobe, dresser | USD 550 to 1,300 |
| Second bedroom | Bed frame, nightstand, wardrobe | USD 350 to 800 |
| Third bedroom or study | Bed or desk setup, storage | USD 300 to 700 |
| Bathrooms | Vanity, mirror, fittings, per bathroom | USD 200 to 600 |
These are factory prices. Freight, insurance, duty, local tax, delivery and our fee sit on top, and that block is covered properly in our guide to landed cost. Even after all of it, people furnishing a full property routinely finish well under what the same standard would have cost through local retailers. The saving is real, it is simply not the raw seventy percent that a naive comparison suggests.
How it works when you are not a company
- You do not need an import licence in most countries to bring in household goods for personal use, though the rules vary and your broker will confirm what applies to you. This is the first thing to check, not the last.
- You will still need customs clearance. We prepare the documentation and correct classification. A local broker handles the clearance itself at your end, and we can usually point you to one.
- You buy from several factories, not one. Nobody makes good sofas, good wardrobes and good bathroom vanities under one roof. We collect from each, inspect, consolidate at our warehouse and load one container.
- Lead time is longer than a shop. Production typically runs a few weeks, sea freight adds several more depending on your destination. Plan on a few months from decision to delivery, not days. If you are working to a move in date, start early.
- Samples are hard at this scale. A wholesaler orders samples. A private buyer usually cannot justify shipping one sofa across the world to check it. This is exactly why coming to see the goods yourself matters so much, and why photographs of your specific production run before shipping are not optional.
The risks, stated plainly
The things that go wrong for private buyers are predictable. Colour that does not match the screen. Foam that softens within a year because nobody specified a density. A wardrobe that will not fit up the stairwell because nobody checked the assembled dimensions against the house. A supplier who turns out to be a trading office rather than a factory, quoting on goods they have never seen.
None of these are exotic problems and all of them are avoidable with specification written down, an inspection before the container is sealed, and someone on the ground who has been inside the building. That is the entire job we do.
The part you cannot judge from a spreadsheet
Prices tell you whether a project is worth exploring. They do not tell you whether a factory can actually build what you drew, whether the finish matches the sample under daylight, or whether the person quoting you owns a factory at all rather than a desk and a phone.
This is the reason Foshan matters so much in furniture. The factories, the showrooms, the material suppliers and the finishing workshops sit close together, so a buyer who comes in person can see genuinely different suppliers in one day rather than spending a week in traffic. Lecong alone runs to millions of square metres of furniture showroom space, and the ceramics, lighting and sanitary ware bases are a short drive from it. Very few places in the world let you compare this many real manufacturers this quickly.
Booking a sourcing trip to Foshan
If you are seriously considering an order, come and walk the floor. We will build the itinerary around your product list, drive you between factories, translate the technical conversation, and tell you privately afterwards which suppliers we would actually use and which we would avoid.
One practical note, and we would rather be blunt than lose your time. We take a limited number of buyers each week, because each visit needs a person from our team with you for the whole day rather than a driver and a map. Certain windows fill up first: the two Canton Fair periods in April and October, and the weeks running up to Chinese New Year when factory capacity tightens and everyone wants to place orders before the shutdown. If your travel dates fall anywhere near those, confirm them with us early rather than late. Late requests in peak season are the ones we most often have to turn down.
Tell us when you are thinking of coming and what you want to look at, and we will confirm whether we have the days free before you book flights.