You don't have a pricing problem. You have a landed cost problem.
Most brands price off the factory quote plus a guess at freight and duty. The real number carries stacked tariffs, port and drayage, inspection, tooling, the defects nobody counts, and ninety days of your cash sitting in a container. The gap is usually 15 to 30 percent. Build yours below. It takes about five minutes and costs nothing.
Zero commission from any factory, forwarder, or broker. Ever.
The landed cost bench
Nothing is sent anywhere. Everything below runs in your browser.The SKU
Origin and duty
Getting it here
The costs nobody counts
What you have been using
| Per unit build-up | USD |
|---|---|
| Factory price, FOB | 0.00 |
| Duty, stacked | 0.00 |
| Freight, port, drayage | 0.00 |
| Defects, returns, shortfalls | 0.00 |
| Cash carrying cost | 0.00 |
| Inspection and testing | 0.00 |
| Tooling, amortized | 0.00 |
| True landed cost | 0.00 |
| The number you have been using | 0.00 |
0% over your estimate
The same SKU, made somewhere else
Holding your factory price constant, which it never is in practice, this isolates what the tariff stack and freight lane alone are doing to you. The last column is the number that matters in a negotiation: the factory price another country would have to quote you to beat what you are paying today.
| Origin | Stacked duty | Landed at your FOB | Versus today | FOB needed to match you |
|---|
Want this as a model you can actually work in?
Send it to yourself and you get the full build-up as a spreadsheet, plus the weekly teardown where one real brand's SKU gets rebuilt in public. One email a week. Leave whenever you want.
Your inputs ride along so the model comes back filled in, not blank.
We take zero commission from any factory, forwarder, or broker.
Sourcing agents get paid twice. Once by you, and once by the factory they steered you toward, usually somewhere between three and eight percent buried in your unit price. You will never find it on an invoice. That is the entire reason brands do not trust sourcing help, and it is why we do not take a cent from the other side of the table. You are the only one who pays us, so you are the only one we work for.
Four ways in, depending on how much of this you want to own yourself.
The bench above is free and always will be. These are for when you need the work done rather than explained. Every one of them starts with an email, and every one of them is a flat fee you agree to before anything begins.
The Teardown
One real brand's SKU, rebuilt in public. Every layer, every leak, the actual number at the end. Your brand can stay anonymous. The number cannot.
- Put your SKU forward for a public teardown
- The finished model, free to keep
- Tariff moves that hit your category
Landed Cost Audit
You send the quote sheet, the commercial invoice, and the tech pack. You get back a model built on your real documents, with my name on the classification call and a written recommendation.
- Full build-up on your own paperwork
- Tariff exposure through the November step-up
- Two alternative origins priced out
- Back in five business days
- Credited in full against a Sprint
The Sourcing Room
A sourcing department you share with other operators instead of hiring one for $140K a year. Founding seats are $149 a month locked for as long as you stay, capped at ten.
- Monthly live office hours with your files open
- Vetted factory index across ten countries
- RFQ, tech pack, QC and terms templates
- Quarterly tariff exposure review on your SKUs
- A private room of operators with the same problems
Sourcing Sprint
Supplier identification through first production run, on your timeline. This is the one that moves a program to another country without dropping the ball.
- Landed cost model on your real numbers
- Factory identification, vetting and audit
- RFQ management and terms negotiation
- Sample rounds, QC protocol, first article
- Transition plan if you are changing countries
How paying works: there is no checkout here on purpose. You email, we agree the scope in writing, and an invoice follows with card and ACH on it. Nothing is charged before you have said yes to a fixed number.
Every week, one real SKU gets taken apart in public.
Anyone can claim expertise. Rebuilding a stranger's cost structure and being right about it is harder to fake. Each teardown adds a row to a public benchmark: category, country, and the gap between what the brand thought it paid and what it actually paid.
Send one SKU. You get back what it actually costs you.
No pitch attached. Tell me the product, the country, and the factory price, and the full build-up comes back to you. If the number is fine, you have lost nothing. If it is not, you want to know that before your next purchase order and not after.
The rules moved every two to four weeks all year, and they are about to move again.
De minimis is gone. Section 301 forced labor tariffs landed in July across a hundred economies. Roughly $85 billion in duty refunds is in dispute. If you have not rebuilt your landed cost since spring, the number you are pricing off is wrong.
Questions that come up before anyone hires anyone.
If you are working through this for the first time, start here. None of it is gated and none of it needs a call.
What is landed cost, exactly?
It is what one unit actually costs you by the time it is sitting in your warehouse ready to sell. The factory price is only the first line. Underneath it sit every stacked duty layer, ocean or air freight, port and drayage charges, inspection and testing, tooling spread across the units you will actually buy, an allowance for the units that arrive broken or short, and the cost of your cash being out from the day you wire the deposit to the day the goods are sellable.
Most brands never build the last four of those. That is where the gap comes from.
Why is my real number so much higher than the one I have been using?
Because the common method is factory price plus a flat percentage, and that percentage was usually set years ago when duty was one rate rather than several stacked on top of each other. Add tooling amortization and a defect allowance and the figure moves again. Across the brands I see, the difference runs 15 to 30 percent, and it lands entirely on gross margin.
It shows up as a business that grows revenue without ever quite growing profit.
Do I actually need a sourcing agent?
An agent is paid twice. You pay a fee, and the factory they place your order with pays a commission, usually three to eight percent worked into your unit price where you will never see it on an invoice. That is a workable arrangement if you know it is happening and you price for it. The problem is that the advice about which factory to use is coming from the person being paid by the factory.
The alternative is to pay one flat fee to someone with no other revenue in the deal. That is the entire premise here.
How do I decide whether to move production to another country?
Never on factory price. Work out what an alternative origin would have to quote you, at the factory door, to match the landed cost you pay today once duty, freight, defects, and carrying cost are all in. The bench above calculates that figure for eight countries.
Then take it into the room. A supplier who knows you have priced the alternative negotiates differently than one who thinks you are guessing.
Is any of this customs advice?
No. It is decision support. The duty rates in the bench are indicative stacked rates for modeling, not a binding classification of your goods. Before you place an order or file an entry, verify against the current HTS and confirm with a licensed customs broker. On paid work, classification questions go to a broker as a matter of routine, and I say so in writing.
A buyer, not an agent.
Geoffrey Boone has spent fifteen years in global sourcing and supply chain leadership, currently as a senior sourcing and operations manager running product categories for a major consumer brand group. Custom window treatments, rugs, cleaning products, semi-custom pillows. Real programs, real volumes, real retail compliance.
Before that, a Marine Corps logistics NCO, and an intern in China as the only American on a sales and marketing team. The work since has run across textiles, consumer goods, and chemicals: supplier diversification, landed cost modeling, and what happens when a factory misses.
The point is simple. Nobody on this side of the table is paid by the factory. That changes what advice you get.
- China
- Vietnam
- India
- Pakistan
- Taiwan
- Thailand
- Turkiye
- Mexico
- Guatemala
- Georgia
- Europe