Isaac Hetzroni—or as he’s known to his more than 500,000 social media followers, The Sourcing Guy—may only be in his 20s, but he’s got decades of supply chain experience.
As a kid in Canada, his family owned a dancewear apparel company and he essentially grew up in a factory, learning the intricacies of fabrics and apparel production, he told Retail Brew. Then, when his father moved into electronics manufacturing in China, he, too, traveled to the factory there, developing an “unbelievable fascination” with manufacturing. In college, he started his own gig making merch sourced abroad and brought in more than $1 million in revenue.
Aiming to diversify this supply chain amid the onset of Covid-19, he toured, and began posting content about overseas factories from Turkey to Thailand. But he’s gained the most traction in the last year, as tariffs have “made sourcing and supply chain sexy,” Hetzroni said.
As tariffs have sent brands scrambling to save their margins, global supply chain expertise has not only become a coveted skill in the retail industry, but also, more surprisingly, a viral topic on social media, as Chinese manufacturers piqued consumers’ interest this spring by sharing the behind-the-scenes of where consumer products are made—even if many of those claims were misleading.
With The Sourcing Guy and his own sourcing agency, Imprint Genius, Hetzroni said he’s capitalizing on both, en route to helping build a “unified global economy through manufacturing.”
Social climber: Across Instagram and TikTok, Hetzroni has shared stories of luggage suppliers in Trinidad and Tobago and a backpack maker from Vietnam; spoken with manufacturers of leading brands of puffer jackets, work boots, hair dryers, and water bottles; pulled back the curtain on events like giant Chinese import and export event the Canton Fair, and dug into the business of trading companies and white labeling.
At first, getting manufacturers to open up their doors to the internet wasn’t easy. He started with those he already worked with closely, but as the videos have taken off, most of the factories are now coming to him. Before a recent trip to India, he posted to social media looking to fill some filming slots and he said his inbox was filled with more than 100 DMs, and recently filmed in eight factories across two days in Portugal.
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It’s a win-win for the factories, who now get customer inquiries from the videos, giving Imprint Genius a small commission for the business it sends their way. Plus, Hetzroni can use those factory tours when pitching clients to “paint a better picture” of who they’d be working with.
“We’re able to build a lot more relationships with really cool factories through the content,” he said. “Now that we have the relationships, our agency side of business is able to then more confidently go and manufacture products with those specific factories, because it’s a deeper relationship.”
Chain reaction: Through Imprint Genius, Hetzroni said he currently mentors ~400 brands across categories like apparel, accessories, and supplements, doing more than $1 million in sales, “troubleshooting” their supply chain issues, and working on diversifying supply chains, lowering costs, and launching new products. It also offers resources for new brands to learn the basics of manufacturing and sourcing.
Tariffs, of course—how hard they’ll be hit, and how to figure out where to move manufacturing next—have become a top issue for brands he consults. Still, issues like on-the-ground quality control—which prevents a brand from, say, receiving a $100,000 order of shoes from China in the wrong color—remain evergreen.
“Because I’ve been studying this for so long, I can very quickly hop on a 20-minute call and help these companies make really large decisions during all the craziness and really work with them on solving their supply-chain headaches,” he said.
Videos on freight forwarding and quality control aren’t exactly the most riveting, so the more entertaining behind-the-scenes manufacturing content has acted almost as a Trojan horse to get the right people to the right education content as they engage with and share it, he said. While his videos (and follower count) benefited from their similarity to Trade War TikTok, he believes he’s built up the trust with his follower base, largely by having his own boots on the ground, to be a reliable source.
“My larger purpose here is trying to be that guiding light for the aspiring entrepreneurs on how to manufacture in all these other countries that have fantastic infrastructure and have fantastic factories,” he said. “There just isn’t enough education or visibility on how to do it.”