Your supply chain in China and Southeast Asia, run on your terms.
FMT Flow puts a real operations team on the ground: people working inside your organization, on your factories and vendors, in a system you can open any morning. You own the relationships. We operate the link that makes that ownership real.
Talk to an FMT ArchitectLooking for a sourcing agent alternative? Start with why you're looking.
The traditional model earns from the factory side. An agent quotes you a price with a margin baked in, often 15% to 50%, that you will never see. The person you hired to get you the best price has a direct financial reason not to.
Trading companies and contract manufacturers are a different case. For some products they can be the right call: consolidation, custom packaging, small runs, mixed categories. The risk is not the model, it's the blind spot. When your vendor subcontracts, you need someone on your side who sees what happens behind the invoice.
You don't need another agent. You need a team that's yours.
What is FMT Flow?
FMT Flow is a managed operations service for Western brands manufacturing in China and Southeast Asia. Your brand keeps direct relationships with its suppliers (factories, contract manufacturers or trading companies) and pays them directly; FMT Flow's team on the ground operates the daily work (developments, production follow-up, QC, shipments) inside a shared system where every decision is logged. FMT Flow never takes title to goods, never earns from the supplier side, and never adds margin to a supplier's price. Its fee is the only number you pay it, and you see it.
Three things, working as one
The Team
People in China who work as your team: they follow your priorities, join your calls, and answer to you. Recruited, managed, and backed up by FMT Flow, so you get continuity and coverage without a local entity or local HR.
The Execution
Developments, orders, production milestones, QC oversight, shipment coordination: run day to day and tracked in a portal you log into. Every order line, milestone, shipment, and claim, logged as it happens. You see problems while there are still options.
The Flexibility
The on-the-ground work agents won't touch: finding new suppliers in the open (every candidate named, introduced to you directly), factory visits on short notice (including the factories behind your vendors), sample consolidation, product photoshoots, representing you at trade shows, coordinating testing, legal, and IP filings.
How FMT Flow runs
- You own the vendor relationship and the information. Factory, contract manufacturer or trading company: you choose. Who makes your product and where, negotiations, molds, tooling, IP: all in your name and in your system. We facilitate; we never sit between you and your vendor.
- Embedded, not external. The team shows up as part of your organization, to you and to the factory. One team, one set of priorities: yours.
- Logged and verified. Every decision, price, and status change lives in the system, with a name and a date on it. Not in someone's WeChat.
- You pay your suppliers directly. You are the buyer of record: your purchase order, your payment, the supplier's own invoice. Our fee is a separate line you see.
- Information moves with the work. You hear "the fabric is late" the day it's late, not at pack-out, when your only option is to accept it.
Who this is for
Founder-led brands doing roughly $500k–$10M a year in purchasing, in cut-and-sewn categories: bags, accessories, apparel. Big enough that mistakes in China cost real money; not big enough to justify your own office there. If you've outgrown trust-me arrangements, this is the structure that replaces them.
See the model in detail
How the team works, the three engagement levels, and what "buyer of record" means in practice: Managed Operations.
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