My wife has been pushing me for weeks to do this, and I have been resisting.
As always, the wife is always right.
We need to change our business models and do what is most needed – for the world and for our businesses.
I’m bringing back the old Shadstone Sourcing trading business – Shadstone-sourcing.com – and will be focusing on trading masks, testing kits, and other coronavirus nightmare equipment.
Never before have I received so many requests – both on the buyer and seller side. Wechat is overloaded with factories contacting me, Global From Asia blog, Wendy, and others in our network to help them distribute and sell their various coronavirus emergency products.
And on the other side – people Facebook messaging me asking if a random friend on my Facebook friend list or someone from they found on a Facebook group is someone they can trust as they are going to buy a wholesale lot of masks for their home country. So they are asking before they wire them money upfront.
What Got Me To Make This Drastic Change?
What finally pushed me over the edge was this Mark Cuban article about survival during a crisis:
And this specific section
Experiment with new ideas“If you can find other services to offer, do it,” Cuban wrote in response to a question specifically about avoiding layoffs in the event industry, as trade shows, sporting events and concerts are being canceled. “Since you have holes in your schedule, it’s a great time to experiment with new lines of business and see what sticks.”
Have an Amazing Podcast Interview for Global From Asia coming for Mask Trading w/ Ivan Tan
And Ivan Tan, a friend and seller in Chiang Mai, he and I have organized FBA seller meetups in Chiang Mai, Thailand – and he has gotten into the business. I introduced (well re-connected him as they met already) to my wife Wendy and they are doing deals already.
He’s doing it from his Facebook personal account !
So within the week, we will have a special mask trading edition podcast – globalfromasia.com slash masks will be the URL – and he will give amazing insights -and we will add a special section updating even more real time later this week.
Talking to Friends Who Need to Supply Cities in USA, Europe
A network of friends is something I’d say I have – and they are asking for HAZMAT suits for entire cities in America for the medical staff.
China has all the goods, all the factories – and they are back to normal. It is really insane now how undersupplied and underprepared many Western countries are to this.
It is really scary and sad.
Amazon Also Shutting People Out
Was quoted in another Wall Street Journal article -this time about the FBA system not letting non-essential products to be shipped into their warehouse.
My quote:Some third-party sellers said this would hurt their business, as they would not be able to rely on Amazon’s logistics network to store new batches of goods and ship to customers for three weeks. The measure could potentially curtail their sales on the platform and lead to shortages of products for customers, some said.
“This makes things nerve-racking,” said Michael Michelini, a partner at Alpha Rock Capital, which sells around 10 brands on Amazon. He said he didn’t know where to store shipments of goods—shoe and car accessories—that will be ready to ship from China later this week.
Re-focusing the Shadstone team
Here’s a letter I sent in the Slack channel
Drastic Times – Let’s Re-Focus on Mask Trading
Team,I will discuss this on an upcoming vlog – but let’s get everyone re-aligned to mask and medical trading products import/export ASAP. Let’s slow down our time on the longer term content projects and websites and allocate towards this short term crisis.
Daisy – start doing data research for these products and make a full list of medical supplies from masks to Hazmat suits to testing kits. My wife Wendy has been talking to many, but we need to make a full list for the website, like you do for other sites we are doing.
Stephenie – focus on shadstone-sourcing.com and adding more pages for each product type Wendy finds, we get requests for , and Daisy researches
Alvin – we will be making more videos on these products, I will make some myself and also get some from factories in china to broadcast on our site. Let’s use the Shadstone Sourcing’s youtube channel to host these and make a new folder in Google cloud for this.
Cheryl – we will have client services inquiries for these trades. I hve been getting them personally to my wechat, Facebook, and other social channels – I will ask them to email Shadstone Sourcing and hope you can help organize a workflow for inbound requests
Working on 24/7 live chat for the site – those who want to jump in to oversee the live chat on the trading site, let me know – we don’t have live chat in other sites at the moment – but believe live chat will be most helpful as we drive more traffic there.
Let’s focus on this and also keep a list of countries and groups who cannot afford to buy it and see if we can make a pool of funds to help them. Open to any ideas and suggestions from you all.
Throwback – my Sourcing Office in Shenzhen in 2008
And here’s a video I made (way low quality) on Shadstone youtube from 2008 of the sourcing office.
Bringing this back.
More than Money – It is a Need
I also hesitated to do this as I didn’t want to price gouge or profit off of misfortune – but seeing so many others doing it – and risking losing money as they are wiring money to people they don’t even know – I need to jump in to try to save bad deals and bad quality going through.
My wife is on the ground in China – we are re-allocating some of the people on the Shadstone team to this – from client service to content marketing – to re-ignite the Shadstone Sourcing website to showcase all the various medical products we can help source and trade.
Also Hope to Do Donations
By re-building this trading business and by creating value in a network of suppliers in this space, how it can allow us to help those less fortunate get the supplies they need. Once we get this rolling we can do some amazing things.
Reach out to our Shadstone Sourcing team now
It is happening. Now is the time – you can reach out to your contacts, governments, and other associations and let’s see if we can help get them the medical supplies they need during this complete crisis and fallout of the system.
Contact my trading company at Shadstone dash sourcing dot com we will be adding live chat there soon as well.