Textile import for B2B customers

With us, B2B textile import means you buy from a German company while the goods come straight off a production line in China. No wholesaler or European middleman sits in between. Our team in China negotiates with producers it knows personally, and we cost every article on its real specification, your quantity and everything it takes to get it to your door.

Your contracting party is DS Trading in Hamburg. You sign a purchase contract under German law and receive an invoice with a German VAT ID. Whether the order is plain T-shirts for your shop or a jacket developed to your own pattern, the paperwork on your side stays the same.

Felix Sander, one of our two founders, works in China with a whole team; Ben Detert is based in Hamburg. The team comes from sourcing and knows more than 100 producers personally, from the workshop for T-shirts and hoodies to the factory whose strength is technical outdoor trousers. If you want to know how a producer works or how far your order has got, someone from the team goes there and looks.

For many buyers an import from China is a black box, above all between the deposit and the goods arriving. With us, one European contact takes you through the whole project and makes it happen, from the first costing to customs clearance. We get in touch on our own when something shifts in production or freight, and we give you delivery dates that are realistic and do everything we can to keep them. Should a delivery show a quality problem, we call you straight away and visit you in person; trust is what our business runs on.

On price we are usually below sourcing it yourself or going through another sourcing agency. That is because we run the China leg and the Germany leg ourselves: we compare the options on both sides, such as producer and freight route, take the cheaper one each time and negotiate the best possible price with the producer. The goods reach you DDP, and the invoice for your import comes from Germany.

The times below come from our day-to-day work with the producers in our network. They depend on the article, so we confirm them for your order in the quote.

Every import starts with a sample, even for plain blanks. You pay for the sample and its shipping, and we tell you the amount before we order it. The series is only produced after you have approved that sample in writing, so you have held the actual article in your hands before you commit to 300 or 3,000 pieces.

We give you dates we consider realistic and do everything we can to keep them. If production or freight slips, you hear it from us before you have to ask. Around Chinese New Year delays are possible, so for orders placed in winter we plan that in from the start.

Customs needs three documents for every shipment: the commercial invoice, the packing list and the transport document, which is the bill of lading for sea freight and the air waybill for air freight. We make sure quantities, goods value, number of cartons and weights match on all of them, because a single mismatch can hold up clearance. Each carton carries a shipping mark with order number, article, quantity, and gross and net weight.

We set the customs tariff number for each article. It depends on material and construction: a cotton T-shirt is classified differently from a polyester jersey, knitted garments (chapter 61) differently from woven ones (chapter 62), and caps have a heading of their own. For most garments from China the EU duty rate is 12 %, for textile caps it is 2.7 %. Before we quote, we check whether anti-dumping duties apply to the article.

We always declare the real value of the goods. A value set too low may save some import charges, but it leaves you as the buyer with a risk we will not take. The care label matters for clearance too: if the fibre composition is missing, customs can stop the shipment, which is why it belongs on the label from the sample onwards. Clearance runs through DS Trading, so you need neither your own EORI number nor your own customs agent.

We start at 300 pieces per article, well below the 1,000 pieces that classic wholesale often asks for. Each quote shows one figure per piece that contains every cost up to your address:

You can put that figure straight next to your current purchase price. An FOB offer from China often looks cheaper at first glance because freight, duty and delivery are still missing from it.

Per piece, sea freight usually costs clearly less than air freight but takes 50 to 65 days. Air freight arrives after about 15 days. On request we calculate both routes, so you can decide whether price or date matters more for this order.

Our network covers the articles B2B customers ask us for most. Each producer has its own focus, and we place an order with the one that makes exactly this kind of article every day.

Direct import through us suits retailers and brands that want to produce in China without setting up an import department of their own: boutiques, online shops, Amazon and eBay private-label sellers, white-label brands and dropshippers who want a German supplier. It also suits companies that buy from a European intermediary today and want to know who makes their goods and when they will really arrive.

If you already have vetted factories and a team that handles import and customs, you would be paying us for something you have built yourself. We tell you that openly in the first conversation.