That depends on the products you are looking to create. Plus, these days, you don’t need to visit China to make a product.

You visit China once you’ve found a connection, once you found a suitable factory to produce your product. After you’ve had samples made. After you’ve had samples sent to you in your own country. After you’ve hired an independent investigator to research the factory you selected. Only when you are doing a massive production run, do you yourself (or your staff) take a trip to China.

And guess what, in these days, you don’t even need to go to China yourself.

Most of anything you can manufacture these days in China doesn’t require high MOQ. (Minimum order quantity). You can do small batches of just about any products and get your own products created without spending millions.

The highest cost in any product design you’ll be making during the initial startup is the casting/mold costs. And these are done, and paid for during the samples stages. You don’t go to China yourself to do that.

Almost all of China has different areas that specialize in different types of products. You have some areas that have many wood factories. You have some areas that have many metal factories. You have some that have many natural stone factories. Every product you want to make has many options.

It is pointless for you to travel to China with the intent to manufacture a product. You can spend years there, bouncing around, city to city, touring thousands of factories that could potentially be a good fit for you. Such a waste.

Easiest thing for you to do, find a product specialist in a place like Yiwu. All roads from manufacturing in China for foreign buyers lead to Yiwu. Find multiple specialists from Yiwu and have all them do the work for you. Let them find you the factories. Let them find you the right company to work with you to design your products.

Then make samples with a few different ones, and pick the best one to produce your products.

But you don’t need to be in China yourself or visit yourself to do this. Anything under a $200,000 USD production run, you can hire a 3rd party company near the factory for you to supervise the factory production for your brand. They’ll know much more than you and will know what to look for.

Also, you may want to look into white label. Sticking your brand name/logo and creating your own packaging for an already existing no-name brand product made in China is 1000x cheaper than having a company design and produce your own product.

The fact that you are asking this question, tells me you don’t have the resources to produce your own line of products from scratch. When you have scaled your business enough and when you have enough funds to produce products from scratch in mass scale, then you’ll have advisers on your team, and experts working for you that will be able to do this for you blindfolded as well as answer this question.

There is hundreds of moving parts to creating a brand product in China. It’s not something that is simple. It’s a very complex thing. And it starts with demand, getting customers, and creating a need for the product first. You’ll be wanting to spend a long time doing research on this before you buy any plane ticket.

Damien Defranco

Original Question: What city in China should I visit if I am seeking to manufacture products in my own brand?