"Importance of Relationship Building in Business: And honestly, if anyone's listened to much of my content before, I always preach the importance of you get the best results in this business from building relationships, right? Because as a result of a better relationship, you get a better price, you get better credit terms, they offer you new products that you're working on, they give you good information about what your competitors are doing, because as we develop products, so do our factories as well."

"Impact of COVID-19 on Alibaba: All the big buyers, all the big brands were going to the Canton Fair. But now, with COVID happening and the Canton Fair not being open since 2019, now those bigger factories are having to list on Alibaba.com. And also when COVID first hit, well, now we have to buy it online because we can't go and see the factories, like, face to face. So you can still find amazing factories on Alibaba.com, you can still build great relationships there as well."

"Understanding Supplier Selection: So that will tell you the number of years they've been in business, what markets they supply, what certificates they have, what type of machinery they have, how many workers they have, where's their factory located, and how many trade shows they've attended, like, which countries have attended these trade shows. And this gives us a lot of key information about these factories to then understand, all right, how do we want to work with them?"

"Long-Term Business Relationships: And then the factory, at their own expense, remade 18,000 bags and sent it to us free of charge. Took a massive loss on that order, but they understood the long term business that we had because we'd been buying from them for several years and they could see, well, okay, let's say, for example, I'm going to take a 50K loss on this order. I make more than 50K supplying this customer every year. So let me just take a loss this time and at least I've still got them and we've been working for them for the last ten years, but if they washed their hands of it and they said, sorry, we made a mistake, but we're not going to refund you anything, they would have lost us. But they had the long term vision and that comes from the relationship."

"Building Relationships in International Business: 'And now you've got eyes and ears inside the factory because you built that relationship up through WeChat...And then you can pull in favors later on.'"

"Creativity in Business Operations: You have to get creative. You have to think of ways of, like, where can you get that advantage? Where can you make those one or 2% savings that other people are not thinking about? Because normally when things go wrong in production and supply chain, it happens to everyone."

"Passion Projects and Branding in Ecommerce: So it just kind of like, you have to show your worth, show what you're good at and things like that. And I think now the next step is working with big content creators as well, because you see what MrBeast is doing, you see what Logan Paul's doing, the amount of traffic they can drive. And if you can give them a very good product at a very good price, something that they're passionate about, that's something that they want to develop and make it happen, it can be phenomenal."

"Understanding Manufacturing Costs: 'But they never went back to see like, am I getting the best factory, am I getting the best price? And because of their volume now, they should be getting better prices, they should be getting better quality from higher factories. They should be getting lesser production times from factories which have better infrastructure, but they've never shopped that around.'"

"Product Sourcing Strategy: I always say that you have to go to the country which specializes in the main raw material of that product. So, for example, India is very strong for wood, cotton, canvas, handcraft leather. So if you're doing leather bags, well, yeah, like India or Pakistan would be a great source for and like a quick hack is that you can go to Alibaba.com. And I know I've said search by manufacturers, but if you search by products rather than by manufacturers and type what your product is and hit search on the left side of the page, it will tell you the number of the countries which have results for that product. So you might see like, Thailand, Russia, Turkey, Bangladesh, and you're like, oh, cool, click on those countries, and then now engage with those companies and start to have those conversations."

"China's Labor Issue and Its Effect on Economy: So China's got a labor issue and it's only going to get worse. But on the flip side, because I talked to a lot of factories about this to be know, what are you guys doing about it? And they're investing a lot into AI, so they're going to be a lot less labor dependent. The costs will increase in the short term, but in the long term, they should come down."