About · Source with Tophney
Who we are
We're Tony and Daphne — a Taiwanese-Canadian couple running a boutique sourcing agency out of Zhongshan, Guangdong. We've been on both sides of the table: we grew up in manufacturing, sold to Western buyers, and now source for them.
▶ Our story ↗
Experience
We came up on the factory side
Most sourcing agents learn the trade from the buyer's side — quoting, chasing samples, managing a spreadsheet of suppliers. We learned it from inside the factory.
Tony's family runs a yarn manufacturer supplying the US and European markets, and we both worked in it: in management, handling international clients' orders. We led the digitalization of the factory's operations, and exhibited in New York and Paris to win new accounts.
That background changes what we notice. We know what a quote leaves out, because we've written them. We know which lead times are real and which are optimistic, because we've had to hold them. And we know what it feels like to be the supplier on the other end of a nervous overseas buyer's email — which is the single best preparation for representing one.
It also means we've sat where our clients sit. Exhibiting in New York and Paris, we were the ones trying to convince a Western brand that a Chinese factory could be trusted with their product. Now we do that verification on their behalf.
Dongfeng Town · Cross-border Commerce Assoc.
“AsDongfengTowninvestmentambassadorsandSecretary-GeneraloftheZhongshanCross-borderCommerceAssociation,we’renotjustsourcingagents—we’retrustedconnectorsintheChinesemanufacturinglandscape.”
Access
They put us in rooms with factory owners and town officials. A cold inquiry from an overseas company gets a sales rep and a stock quote; an introduction through the association gets the owner, the real capacity, and an honest answer about whether they can actually make your product. That's where supplier vetting genuinely happens.
Standing when something goes wrong
Production problems aren't rare — they're routine, and what matters is how fast they get resolved. A foreign buyer chasing a factory by email is easy to deprioritize. A local party with standing in the Zhongshan cross-border business community is not. When we escalate, it gets taken seriously, and quickly.
Who we are
With years of experience in the family textile factory, we truly understand how a factory works. With deep roots in both Eastern and Western cultures, we bring language fluency, cultural sensitivity, and decades of on-the-ground know-how to the sourcing process.
In practice that means we negotiate in Mandarin on the factory floor and report back in English on your timeline. Most sourcing failures happen in that gap — a spec that meant one thing in the brief and another on the production line, or a problem that stayed quiet because nobody wanted to deliver bad news across a language barrier. Being fluent on both sides isn't a soft skill here; it's the job.