About

We were the buyer before we were the supplier.

Groundwork Sourcing is the English-facing name of GD TRADE, run out of Yiwu, Zhejiang by two people: a Korean who spent years buying this product for a living, and a director who has spent 24 years making it.

The two of us.

Fred Lee

CEO, GD TRADE

You deal with him in English. Nothing about your order goes through an interpreter.

Five years in Melbourne, most of it on building sites, is where the English came from. From 2016 he bought and resold product in Korea — online and off — which is how he learned what a buyer is actually afraid of. The thing that moved him to China was the part of that job he hated: ordering from a factory he could not see, through someone who only relayed messages. He moved in 2023 and started making the product instead.

He is also Overseas Sales Director at Keumdo Holdings in Korea — see below.

Moonhak Kim

Director, GD TRADE

Describe the product and he matches it. Twenty-four years of knowing which factory can actually make the thing you asked for.

He has been sourcing out of Yiwu since long before we existed, across apparel, houseware, toys and electronics, and has shipped 400+ 40HQ containers. He lives there. When we say we were on the floor, he is usually the one standing on it.

His years in Yiwu are his own record, not the company's age. We started taking orders properly in December 2025.

Most of the competition sells you a catalogue.

An ODM reseller takes a product that already exists and ships it to you. We build the product you specified, in a factory chosen for it. Those are different jobs, and only one of them can go wrong in the way that ruins your season.

The buyer's real problem is never the price list. It is that the goods did not come out the way you asked — and that outcome is decided by how well someone can talk to a factory, in person, in its own language.
An agent who forwards your tech pack and forwards the reply cannot see a problem coming. There is nobody in the loop who has made this product before.
We take the spec, work out what always goes wrong on that product, and design it out before the order is placed. Two of those are on the home page in full.

At least three visits, every order.

A long-distance factory visit costs about a thousand dollars. That is why most agents never make the first one, and it is the cheapest thousand dollars in this business.

Before production

Is this a factory at all

Anyone can post a catalogue. We stand in the building before your deposit moves.

During production

Quality — and your delivery date

This is the visit people underrate. When defects appear, a factory quietly moves your order down its own priority list, and the delivery date goes with it. Catching it on the line keeps your slot.

At dispatch

One last look

Checked before the goods leave the factory for our warehouse.

Then, in Yiwu

Every piece, by hand

Goods land in our warehouse before they land with you.

Staff checking a QC sheet and inspecting finished garments on the floor in China

Why we check all of it, not a sample.

Sewing is handwork, so the defect rate is not a flat number across a run.

One operator having a bad day can push the failure rate on one part of the garment to thirty percent — for that day, on that station, on that seam. A sample pulled from the wrong carton passes; a sample pulled from the right one fails. Neither tells you what is in the shipment. So we inspect the whole quantity in our own warehouse, and the people doing it are former sewing operators, because knowing how the seam was made is what lets you see it is wrong.

Quantity is confirmed on our count, not the factory's, and then it ships. The full checkpoint structure is on Quality Control, and there is a real report on this page.

Not a company with nothing to lose.

Fred is also Overseas Sales Director at Keumdo Holdings, a separate family company in Korea. It is not Groundwork's revenue and we do not present it as ours — it is the reason you are not dealing with a burner account.

Buys end-of-season stock from Korean department stores and moves it through export, retail and live commerce — apparel, bags, footwear, accessories.
A single buy runs to five 11-tonne truckloads: tens of thousands of pieces at a time.
Its warehouse in Gonjiam, Gyeonggi has gone from about 18,000 sq ft to roughly 106,000 sq ft on volume growth.
Tier 1 vendor to a USD 3.6B B2B distribution and manufacturing group.

Palletised cartons and racked apparel inside the Korea warehouse — Korea, not China: the same person's other operation — warehouse, dispatch, retail floor.

A curtain-side trailer being loaded with palletised cartons — Korea, not China: the same person's other operation — warehouse, dispatch, retail floor.