China has become the number two stone exporter in the world behind the Italians (surpassing them some months, especially in granite), and is a powerful player in the stone industry, but the quality can range from excellent to terrible. How do you know what you are going to get? How can you maintain the level of quality if your intial orders seem to be OK? What happens if a problem occurs?

The only way to really know what you are going to get is to make a trip and visit the factory, but this is often not fool proof because the factory you visit may not even be the factory of the company you are going to buy from. It might be a sub-contracting factory, no matter what they tell you. Every company states "we own the quarry" and "we have our own factory"... this is not always true.

You need someone based in China that can interact on a daily basis in Chinese to handle the problems that come up, to research new ideas, and to find new factories when one becomes unreliable.

There are many horror stories about companies sending inferior product and these stories are true. For every 20 factories inspected only 2 or three may be suitable, but those 2 or three, if you can find them, will produce top quality product at great prices, enabling you to have a competive edge in your market.

The problem is that sometimes you find a supplier that is reliable for the first several orders, and then things change. The prices start going up, the quality drops off, and all of a sudden you have a problem on your hands.