Entering China for the first time
Your first Tmall TP. Cross-border or general trade. Distribution built from a blank sheet of paper. Most of these projects move from brief to shortlist in two or three weeks.
A service of Beyond Border Group
Skip three months of partner search. Get the right China partner first time.
BeyondCompass is our private database of distributors, Tmall TPs, Douyin Partners and importers. We've met every one in person, vetted them on site and, in plenty of cases, worked alongside them on real brand projects. The wrong partner in China can cost you two years. Some brands never really recover from it. That's the part we help you skip.
上海 Shanghai
北京 Beijing
广州 Guangzhou
深圳 Shenzhen
成都 Chengdu
杭州 Hangzhou
南京 Nanjing
武汉 Wuhan
重庆 Chongqing
苏州 Suzhou
宁波 Ningbo
青岛 Qingdao
天津 Tianjin
西安 Xi’an
厦门 Xiamen
上海 Shanghai
北京 Beijing
广州 Guangzhou
深圳 Shenzhen
成都 Chengdu
杭州 Hangzhou
南京 Nanjing
武汉 Wuhan
重庆 Chongqing
苏州 Suzhou
宁波 Ningbo
青岛 Qingdao
天津 Tianjin
西安 Xi’an
厦门 Xiamen
The problem
A contact list tells you who exists. We tell you who fits.
Google "China distributor database" and what comes back is a stack of scraped lists with a contact form bolted on the front. A thousand names by lunchtime, almost none of them right for your brand.
We've watched brands sign with a name lifted straight off one of those lists. Four months in, they find out the partner has never really run their category. Or that the warehouse they toured was rented for the morning.
The damage almost never stays inside the year. Lost shelf. A brand rebuild nobody budgeted for. A launch window that won't come around again.
How it works
You brief us. We come back with the shortlist.
“Finding the right partner in China usually swallows a quarter. We start with the answer.”
- Step 01
The brief
Half an hour to an hour, on a call. Your category, your stage and what you're really trying to pull off in China. A cross-border test. A domestic launch. The quiet replacement of a distributor who's stopped picking up the phone. Sometimes something we've never seen before, which is fine too. - Step 02
The shortlist
We come back with a map of who actually operates in your space, plus three to five partners worth meeting. Each one with a short brief: strengths, weak spots and where to push when you sit down to negotiate. - Step 03
The introductions
Most of these partners already know us. You walk in with a relationship behind you, which usually puts the A-team in the room rather than the pitch team.
How we are different
A database, not another directory
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Years on the groundScraped directories
BeyondCompass
How names get added
Bulk uploads, scraped from public sources
How names get added
One meeting at a time
What we actually know about them
A company name. Maybe an email.
What we actually know about them
Real categories, real volume, payment terms and fit for your brand
Years spent building it
A few months
Years spent building it
Fifteen
What you walk away with
A list of maybes
What you walk away with
A shortlist worth meeting
Who it is for
Mid-sized to large consumer brands. Usually one of two stories.
Already in China, and rebuilding
Your distributor's been sitting on inventory. Your TP can't shift the category. The next launch window is closing fast. You need names that fit, not thirty maybes you'll have to sift through yourself.
What clients say
We came to BeyondCompass needing a distributor who actually understood the supplements category in China. Two weeks later we had a shortlist of three, and the introductions were warm from day one. They saved us a quarter of partner search we couldn't afford to lose.
Tom, CEO, Sydney
Built and run by
Beyond Border Group
We're a marketing and e-commerce agency. Our leadership team has spent 20 years building distribution and e-commerce businesses inside China. We work with brands in beauty, food and beverage, fashion, lifestyle, home, wellness, mother and baby, and pet. Cross-border and domestic. From the first market test through to a full distribution rollout.
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Curated profiles
Every record human-built, never scraped.
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Years on the ground
Shanghai · Hong Kong · Paris.
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Field-grade categories
From beauty to F&B to industrial.
Get in touch
No obligation. No long pitch.
Entering China? Replacing a partner that's stopped pulling its weight? Still working out the right shape for distribution in your category?
The first call is short. Most people know inside half an hour whether this is the right kind of help for them. If it isn't, we can usually point you to someone whose work is.
Book a 30-minute callA service of Beyond Border Group