01
DTC brands past $1M ARR
Humming · Atlas & Oak · Pelago Labs
19.4%landed-cost savings on Q4 2024 holiday replenishment
SHUGOU · CUSTOMERS · 02
2,400 sourcing teams. One platform. 14.2% landed-cost savings reported across the 2024 customer cohort.
The vetting cycle that used to eat 11 days is now 38 minutes. Humming, Atlas & Oak, Pelago Labs and 14 of the top 50 Amazon aggregators run their daily supplier work on Shugou — verified by name, measured by PO.
Trusted daily by 2,400+ DTC and cross-border sourcing teams.
$ shugou verify --factory "Shenzhen Jinyi Plastics Co." --po Q4-2024
› cross-referencing 47 Chinese registries…
› pulling 11y FOB history (380K SKUs)…
› querying Trust Index (n=1.4M factories)…
[ok] business license ACTIVE · 2014-02-11
[ok] ownership record no change · 1420d stable
[ok] export history 184 lanes · 11yr
[ok] on-time shipment 98.6% (A+ rated)
[ok] MOQ history 12 prior POs · clean
[!] price drift -3.2% vs 90d median
vetting_time: 38m 12s vs industry 11d 04h
landed_cost_delta: -14.2% on matched SKU basket
recommendation: ▍
02 — Customer cohorts
Five operator personas. One platform, measured per cohort.
Every cohort on Shugou runs the same core workflow — verify, price, PO, ship — but the metric that matters shifts by buyer type. Pick yours.
02
Amazon FBA wholesale operators
Northbeam Goods · Cobalt Shelf · 6 unnamed FBA leads
11d → 38mvetting cycle collapsed per PO; same-week replenishment now feasible
03
Aggregator ops leads
14 of the top 50 Amazon aggregators
98.6%on-time shipment rate maintained across portfolio rollups on A+ rated suppliers
04
Private-label brand managers
Brass Monkey Goods · Lumen & Linen
3.1×more SKUs vetted per quarter with the same headcount
05
B2B sourcing agencies
Forge Asia Sourcing · Halford Procurement Co.
220+active client POs routed monthly through shared Trust Index workspaces
03 — Case studies
Four POs. Four buyer types. Numbers, not adjectives.
Detailed before/after on the cohorts that named themselves in public filings, customer references, or 2024 CrossBorder Awards submissions.
19.4%
landed-cost savings on Q4 2024 replenishment
Before Shugou
- Vetting cycle11d 04h per factory
- Quoting round-trips6–9 emails per SKU
- PO volume Q3 202414 POs · 8 factories
- On-time shipment82% (industry avg)
- Margins on Q4 run26.1% net
After 90 days on Shugou
- Vetting cycle38m 12s per factory
- Quoting round-trips2 (Trust Index benchmark + counter)
- PO volume Q4 202431 POs · 19 factories · same headcount
- On-time shipment97.1% (A+ rated subset)
- Margins on Q4 run30.6% net
$2.1M
recoverable margin across FY24 portfolio rollups
What broke
Aggregator #07 ran supplier due diligence across 12 portfolio brands on spreadsheets and a handful of independent inspectors. Vetting a single new factory took 9–14 days, and portfolio-level margin leakage (price drift, missed MOQ tiers, late shipments) was running ~$2.1M/yr.
What Shugou changed
Daily registry re-crawls surfaced 3 ownership changes inside 6 hours, including one factory flagged mid-Q3 that would have shipped defective units into the FBA network. On-time shipment rate on A+ rated suppliers hit 98.6% across the portfolio in FY24, against a 79% baseline.
3.1×
more SKUs vetted per quarter, same headcount
What broke
Atlas & Oak's two founders were running supplier vetting themselves — reading Chinese registry pages, building price spreadsheets by hand, and accepting 11-day cycles on every new fabric mill.
What Shugou changed
Trust Index pushed a verified mill shortlist for every new fabric category in under 40 minutes. FOB price-memory flagged 3 of 4 quoted offers as above 90-day median in the first quarter alone. Founders went from vetting 7 new mills/month to 22.
220+
active client POs routed monthly through shared workspaces
What broke
Forge ran 28 DTC client accounts on a manual verification stack — and any single supplier quality incident on one client's PO risked the entire book.
What Shugou changed
Shared Trust Index workspaces let Forge give every client a private, read-only view of vetting evidence. Daily registry crawls flagged a Canton-based factory mid-shipment in March 2025; Forge pulled the PO before 38% of units had cleared customs, saving an estimated $74K in chargebacks.
04 — Platform-wide numbers
Across 2,400 sourcing teams, the platform-wide numbers look like this.
2,400+
DTC and cross-border sourcing teams on the platform
1.4M+
verified Chinese factories indexed across 5 industrial clusters
98.6%
on-time shipment rate among A+ rated suppliers in 2024
380K+
SKUs of historical FOB pricing, going back 11 years
11d → 38m
average supplier vetting cycle, independently benchmarked across 320 client teams
05 — On Shugou today
The named cohort, plus aggregate signals.
Every brand below has either publicly named Shugou in press, been verified as a paying customer, or is counted in the cluster totals we publish in the 2024 cohort report.
DTC — named
- Humming
- Atlas & Oak
- Pelago Labs
- Brass Monkey Goods
- Lumen & Linen
- Northbeam Goods
Amazon aggregator — cluster
- 14 of the top 50 Amazon aggregators
- Aggregator #07 (top-50, named under NDA)
- 6 unnamed FBA wholesale leads
- 220+ active POs/mo through agency workspaces
B2B sourcing agencies — named
- Forge Asia Sourcing
- Halford Procurement Co.
- 28 client brands routed through Forge
- Shared Trust Index workspaces
Industrial clusters indexed
- Yiwu
- Shenzhen
- Guangzhou
- Hangzhou
- Suzhou
“We used to lose eleven days on every new factory — that's a quarter of an FBA replenishment window gone before the first sample ships. Shugou collapsed that to under an hour and gave our ops lead something she actually trusts: a registry-stamped, price-benchmarked shortlist she can walk into a Monday planning meeting with.”