We receive inquiries every day from companies that want to be our sole agents in South Africa, Taiwan, or Turkey (for example). Many companies inquire about direct-importing from China and about exclusives for their territories. We'd love to say yes to everybody, but life is not so simple.

Here at Fred we are very involved with designing new products and finding the most reliable factories all over Asia to produce them for us. This means we work with lots of different vendors. All our goods are produced to our special order and immediately shipped to our warehouse here in the US. The factories are unable and unwilling to hold any inventory. Furthermore, the factories generally set very high minimum-order quantities in order to streamline their production. Small orders are just not practical for them. This creates big challenges for us in the area of international distribution.

We are exploring the possibilities of establishing a warehouse and logistics capability in either Hong Kong or China, but our progress is rather slow - it's not such an easy job! In the meantime we can only ship from our US warehouse - all  the details are spelled out on the Pricing, Shipping, Payments, and Policies pages of this website. Occasionally, if your order quantity for a single item is large enough, and if your order schedule matches our production, we may offer you the choice of direct shipment from Asia. Please leave this to our discretion - we will offer it whenever it is possible.

In regard to territory exclusives, our policy is "one step at a time." The only way we can know whether we can make an exclusive commitment to your company is through experience. And we can only build that experience one order after another. We really don't have a positive reaction when a brand new customer pops up and wants to propose that we sell to them exclusively in their country of 25 million people!