Factory sourcing, container loading, export packing, QC and freight tips for natural stone importers and distributors.
Plenty of contractors and tile-shop owners want to start selling stone panels. Very few make it past the second container. The ones who fold rarely fail because the product was bad — natural slate and quartzite sell the…
Stone cladding is one of the few building materials where the distribution business still rewards new entrants. Unlike commodity products where margin has been squeezed to single digits by online price comparison, natur…
Every stone panel quote from China arrives with an Incoterm attached to the price. That three-letter code — FOB, CIF, DDP, EXW — determines who pays for what, who carries the risk at each stage, and ultimately whether y…
A distributor's showroom is where stone cladding stops being a catalog photo and becomes something an architect can touch, a contractor can weigh in their hands, and a developer can picture on their building. The displa…
The first real negotiation in any stone-import deal is not about the price per square metre. It is about when the money moves. A buyer who pays 100% up front takes all the risk. A supplier who ships 100% on credit takes…
The sample arrives on a Tuesday morning. A courier box, maybe three kilos, with a padded envelope inside containing two pieces of stacked stone panel wrapped in bubble wrap. One is slate, the other is quartzite. You ope…
Lead Time and Production Scheduling: Planning Your Stone Panel Import Timeline Your installer is booked for October. The architect approved the stone selection in July. You place the order in August and discover that p…
A distributor in Atlanta signs a purchase order for two containers of slate stacked stone on March 4. The supplier quotes 25 days. The project manager has crews booked for April 21. The math works on paper. What the sup…
A single vague line in your purchase order can cost thousands of dollars in wasted material. Buyers who write "natural slate cladding, 15mm thick" without specifying tolerance, backing type, or packaging method often re…
You requested three quotes for the same stacked stone specification, and each came back with a different number. Opaque pricing is the most frustrating part of sourcing natural stone cladding from overseas, and it costs…
