There’s a principle in economics called Gresham’s Law: bad money drives out good.
The original observation was about currency — when two forms of money circulate at the same face value but different intrinsic worth, people hoard the valuable one and spend the inferior one. The inferior money dominates circulation. The good money disappears from the market.
The same dynamic plays out far beyond currency. It shows up in job markets, in second-hand goods, in commodities — anywhere that buyers struggle to distinguish quality before they commit to a purchase.
And it shows up, persistently and visibly, in the China sourcing industry.
The Zipper Problem
Consider something as ordinary as the hardware on a bag — zipper pulls, clasps, buckles.
Most of what circulates in the general market is unbranded, standardized, and adequate. Adequate enough that most buyers don’t think twice about it. And adequate enough that most manufacturers, chasing cost efficiency, use it without a second thought.
Until the zipper breaks three months after purchase.
The brands that don’t want that outcome — the ones that understand their product’s longevity is their reputation — take a different approach. They commission custom hardware with their own tooling. They specify YKK zippers, the industry’s recognized quality benchmark, at a meaningful price premium. They treat hardware as a brand decision, not a cost line.
But here’s the market reality: the custom hardware and the YKK zipper are not what circulates. They’re what gets specified, sourced through established relationships, and used by brands that already know what they’re doing. The general market is full of the unbranded alternative.
The good product exists. It’s just not in general circulation.
The Screw Analogy
Hardware screws follow the same logic.
Walk into any hardware supply shop and you’ll find standard fasteners in abundance — the ones that move fast, that everyone buys, that sit in high-turnover bins because their repurchase rate justifies the inventory cost.
Higher-grade fasteners exist. Precision tolerances, superior alloys, specifications that matter in demanding applications. But they move slowly. And slow-moving inventory has a capital cost — money tied up in stock that isn’t turning over. So the merchant charges more, stocks less, and the premium product becomes harder to find precisely because fewer people are looking for it.
The economics of inventory turnover select for the mediocre. Not because quality doesn’t exist, but because quality doesn’t circulate the same way.
How This Plays Out in Sourcing
The sourcing industry has a low barrier to entry. A laptop, a phone, some familiarity with Alibaba and WeChat, and a willingness to present oneself as an expert — that’s the starting kit. No certification required. No track record necessary. No physical presence demanded.
The result is a market saturated with new entrants: low-price operators with no office, no warehouse, no legal entity, and no years of accumulated relationships and hard-won experience. They’re visible, accessible, and cheap. They’re in general circulation.
The experienced operator — the one who has spent a decade navigating factory floors, resolving disputes, building supplier relationships, developing an instinct for which problems are fixable and which are catastrophic — is something different.
Think about how a factory’s chief engineer operates. Or a founder who has been running a serious manufacturing operation for fifteen years. They are not sitting at a computer refreshing inquiry platforms. They are not available on demand for whoever sends a message. Their time is finite, their attention is limited, and their value is concentrated in the problems that actually require their expertise.
The same is true of a genuinely experienced sourcing professional.
Which means they are not the ones you find most easily. They are not flooding LinkedIn with posts. They are not responding to every platform inquiry. They are engaged — with clients whose work is substantive enough to warrant their time, through relationships built over years rather than acquired through a cold message.
The good sourcing partner is not in general circulation. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the same logic as the YKK zipper and the precision fastener: quality that’s worth having tends not to be sitting on the shelf waiting for anyone who passes by.
What This Means When You’re Looking
If you’ve searched for a sourcing partner and found mostly low-price operators with polished websites and fast response times — you’ve experienced this dynamic firsthand.
The ease of finding them is not a signal of their quality. It’s closer to the opposite.
Here’s what actually correlates with a sourcing partner worth working with:
They have a physical presence. An office. A warehouse. A registered legal entity in China. Infrastructure that exists because the operation is real and has been real for long enough to justify it.
They have a track record that spans years. Not months. Not a series of rebranded attempts. Continuous operation, through market cycles, through difficult clients, through the problems that test whether a business is built on substance or on sales ability.
Their founder or principal has direct, senior-level experience. Not delegated to a team of recent graduates. The person whose judgment you’re relying on has actually exercised that judgment — in factories, in disputes, in the decisions that don’t have clean answers.
They are selective about what they take on. An experienced sourcing partner who will work with anyone, on any project, at any scale, for any price is not exercising the judgment that makes experience valuable. Selectivity is a feature, not a limitation.
They are not the easiest to find. This is perhaps the most counterintuitive signal of all. The operators who are most visible — most active on platforms, most responsive to cold inquiries, most available — are often the ones with the most time on their hands. Draw your own conclusions.
Who We Are
Tom Sourcing has been operating since 2020. We are registered in the United States and maintain our own office and warehouse in China. Our co-founder Thomas brings over 20 years of direct experience in international trade, factory auditing, quality control, and supply chain management — built inside multinational corporations before being applied to the work we do for clients today.
We are not the cheapest option. We are not the most visible option. We work with brands and businesses whose sourcing requirements are substantive enough that the difference between an experienced partner and an available one actually matters.
If that describes what you’re looking for, let’s talk.
Tom Sourcing is a US-registered sourcing company with its own office and warehouse in China. We provide end-to-end sourcing, product development, quality control, and supply chain management for US and EU brands.
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