What changed
Your parcels didn’t get slower. The rules did.
The United States ended the $800 de minimis exemption — for China and Hong Kong in May 2025, for everywhere on 29 August 2025. The EU abolished its €150 duty-free threshold on 1 July 2026, replacing it with a flat €3 per tariff category.
Every small parcel leaving China now needs a real commercial invoice, an honest description and a correct HS code, with duty paid on entry. The single most common reason a parcel sits at customs is a vague product description or a code somebody guessed.
Which means the thing most sellers try first — switching to a different agent — fixes nothing. Per-order direct shipping got structurally slower for everybody. The work moved upstream, into classification, documentation and consolidation.
That flat €3 is charged per tariff category, not per parcel. A bundle of four unrelated products can be four separate charges. Designing a set so it stays inside one HS family is now a pricing decision, not a packing detail.
The line
Six stations, in the order things actually happen.
You can start at any station and stop at any station. Most brands come in at three or six, then work backwards once they see what was going wrong upstream.
Product validation
Before we look for a factory, we look at whether the product is worth making. Landed cost, shipping weight and volume, HS classification, and whether the category carries compliance you have not budgeted for. Half of this job is talking clients out of things.
Factory sourcing & verification
Finding the maker, and proving it is the maker. Most of what sells itself as a factory is a trading company with a markup and no control over the line. You see who I found, what they actually produce, and what the real quoted price is.
Samples & quality control
Samples pulled, photographed honestly, and sent to you before anything is committed. Then inspection against a written spec on the production run — not a thumbs-up in a chat window. This is the step almost everyone skips.
Product photography & video
The part no sourcing agent can do. Fifteen years of directing commercial shoots, applied to your product while it is still sitting on my desk in China. Studio stills, lifestyle, and short-form video, shot to a brief and delivered as a set — not the factory’s white-background JPEG.
Packaging
Structure, print, unboxing, and the boring half — dimensional weight, what survives a courier, and what a customs officer sees when the box is opened. Designed here, printed here, in the same city as the product.
Logistics, customs & HS codes
Choosing the line, writing the declaration, classifying every item, and consolidating so you pay the entry once instead of forty times. Plus the parts nobody warns you about: IOSS if you sell into the EU, what changes above €150, and what a non-EU company has to have in place first.
Why a producer
A fixer is a job title where I come from.
For fifteen years I made things happen in China for people who were not in China. Foreign directors, impossible schedules, a client in another timezone who needs a straight answer tonight. Find the right vendor, get a real quote, protect the budget, tell the truth about what is possible.
Nothing about that changed. The deliverable is a product on a doorstep instead of a film — but it is the same job, and I am doing it with the same rules: transparent quotes, no hidden margin on your factory price, and an answer the same day.
Bilingual producer in Shanghai. Automotive and technology campaigns — Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Audi — largely with international directors.
[ your exact credit — role + which films ] at MediaArtsLab, including Apple’s Chinese New Year films.
Directing programme, UCLA Extension.
Founder and sole operator of uggaz.com. Sourcing, listings, customs paperwork, tax registration and shipping, all of it mine.
How this works
How I charge.
You see the real factory price. I charge a stated fee on top of it, agreed before anything starts. I do not mark up your product price and keep the difference, which is how most of this industry earns and the reason most sellers do not trust it.
Fees depend on the stations you need and the size of the run, so there is no price list here that would be honest. The first call is where that gets worked out, and it costs nothing.