What can you find in this database?

A private database, not a product

BeyondCompass isn't something you can buy off our website. We don't license it. We don't email you a spreadsheet. We don't sell access by the seat.

It's a private working tool. We built it for ourselves over the last fifteen years to do better work for our clients, and that's still really what it's for. When you engage us, we use it on your behalf.

For clients we're working with seriously, we can open up a limited preview. A handful of records, redacted where they need to be. It's not a free demo, and it isn't the whole database, but it's enough to show you we aren't bluffing.

We say this up front because "China distributor database" online usually means a scraped list of company names with a contact form attached. That isn't what this is.

When you do engage us, the partners we shortlist for your brand come out of this database with the full file attached: our notes, the brands they've handled, what they're good at and where they fall short, what we've heard from people who've worked with them. Not a name and a phone number. The actual working file we use ourselves.

Who's in there

Several hundred partner profiles in there at this point, across the categories that matter when you're trying to sell in China:

• Distributors, national and regional, for cross-border and general trade
• Tmall and JD Partners (TPs) for flagship store operations on the major eCommerce platforms
• Douyin Partners (DPs) for Douyin shop, livestream commerce and content-led sales. Some people in the market still call them Douyin TPs. We use DP, mostly out of habit.
• Importers with the licenses, customs setup and warehousing for general trade
• Category specialiststhat don't fit any of the above neatly, but quietly own a niche

Coverage spans most consumer categories: beauty, food and beverage, fashion, lifestyle, home and wellness, plus mother-and-baby, pet, and a few more specialized verticals.

What we actually know about them

This is the part nothing scraped can give you.

For most of the names in BeyondCompass, we've met them in person, often more than once. Visited their offices, their warehouses, sometimes both. Briefed them on a real brand and watched how they responded, which tells you almost as much as the meeting itself does. Talked to other brands they've worked with, both on and off the record. In a fair number of cases, we've also done business with them ourselves, either as a client or as a partner on someone else's project.

We know what their decks don't say. Which categories they're genuinely strong in, versus the ones they list to look full-service. Which platforms they actually move volume on, as opposed to the ones they keep a token store on. How they handle a brand that's having a soft quarter, which is honestly more telling than how they handle a launch quarter. Whether they pay on time. And whether they actually care about your brand, or just the SKUs that move easiest off their warehouse floor.

You don't really get that from a scrape. You get it from showing up, year after year, and remembering who actually delivered.

Yes, we are a TP and a distributor too

Worth saying clearly. Beyond Border Group also operates as a TP and as a distributor in our own right. We run flagship stores, we hold inventory, we sell.

That isn't really a conflict, it's actually the reason the database is useful. The market is too big and too fragmented for any one operator (us included) to be the right answer everywhere.

So when we recommend a partner from BeyondCompass, it's because they fit your brand better than we would on that particular piece of the puzzle. Sometimes we run one channel and a partner runs the rest. Sometimes we don't run any of the operations and just help you set the partnership up the right way. The goal is the same either way: best coverage for your brand, not the most billable scope for us.

What it gets you

You waste less time meeting the wrong partners, and you spend more of it negotiating a real deal with the right one. You walk into China with someone who actually fits, who's been briefed properly, and with the rough structure of the relationship already worked out before there's a contract on the table.

The next page goes into how we actually work the database for a specific brand.