About
TL Sourcing is not a corporation with a sales department. You speak to the people who also handle your order — in Europe and in Asia. That is the reason we do not take on an unlimited number of projects at once.
Why we exist
Importers rarely lose money on freight. They lose it where a trading company was taken for a manufacturer, where a sample was never properly checked, or where two sides read the same specification differently. None of that shows up until the goods are in the warehouse — and by then the deposit is long gone.
That is exactly where our effort sits: at the front, in selection and verification. It is the unglamorous part of the work, and the part that decides the outcome.
Set-up
On your side everything runs through one person — brief, quotation comparison, recommendation, no changing case handlers. In Asia the work happens in the local language and time zone, not by email from Germany.
Background
Behind TL Sourcing is Thomas Lee — more than twenty years moving between Europe and Asia: first in plant exports, then in international business, then eight years in e-commerce. Each of the four stations below explains part of how this company works. The mistakes we warn about are not textbook examples — they were paid for.
The reason we work with our own people on the ground rather than through an agency in between belongs to that story too: what gets said in a meeting in Shenzhen or Hanoi otherwise arrives filtered — and the interesting sentences are precisely the ones that get lost on the way.
Asia comes at the start of this story, not the end: a degree at Sogang University in Seoul, then a year as a trainee at Robert Bosch Korea. Back in Germany, eight years as General Manager of Lee Maschinenbau GmbH in the Rhine-Main region: selling and brokering German and European machinery and plant equipment into Korea — for shipbuilding, aerospace and heavy industry. Six months as a consultant at Carl Zeiss Vision along the way. Once you have sold plant equipment into those industries, you know what a specification looks like when it is not up for negotiation — and you notice when a supplier has only skimmed it.
Three years in business development at Avant Korea Ltd. in South Korea: selecting partners and suppliers, negotiating, holding people to dates and commitments — from the Asian side of the table. That is where you learn how differently a „yes, no problem“ can be meant, and which questions make an answer worth relying on.
Eight years of hands-on work as an e-commerce and Amazon seller: buying, importing, selling, and answering for range, margin and every bad decision. Once you have paid for a container of goods built past the approved sample, you inspect differently — and you know what actually matters to a buyer.
The same work, but for clients rather than for his own warehouse — with people on the ground in China, Korea and Vietnam, and the effort placed where it decides the outcome: at the front, in selection and verification.
Education
Where we don't negotiate
If a project does not work in quantity, timeline or target price, we say so beforehand. An order that goes wrong costs us more than the fee brings in.
We do not source copies of protected products, and no branded goods without entitlement. Not even when „everyone does it“.
Payments run directly between you and the manufacturer. We hold no money and do not insert ourselves into the payment chain as a middleman.
Twenty minutes is enough to judge whether this fits. No sales pitch — if we are not the right partner, you will hear it in the same call.
Get in touch