Nothing stops you. Polish manufacturers sell direct, they are easy to find, and you will pay the same factory price we would get you. If your requirement is a full trailer of one specification you already know, going direct is the right answer and we will say so.
This page is about the other case, which is most of them.
What the process actually is
Between a factory’s e-mail address and a delivered pallet that meets your specification, there are six pieces of work. None is difficult. Together they take about a fortnight of a purchasing manager’s attention, spread over six weeks of waiting.
1. Writing a specification a plant can quote against
“Heavy duty bin bags, 200 litre” is not a specification. It is a request that four plants will answer with four different products, and comparing those answers is impossible because none of them is answering the same question.
A quotable specification names the polymer, the gauge, the tolerance you accept on that gauge, the flat dimensions, the sealing method, the case and pallet configuration, the print if any, and the standard the product is claimed against. Get one of those wrong and the price you are quoted is for something you did not want.
2. Getting quotations that can be compared
Three plants quote in three formats. One prices per thousand sacks, one per kilogram, one per pallet. One is EXW, one is FCA, one quotes DAP but has not said whether unloading is included. One has read the gauge as nominal and one as minimum, which is a 5–8% price difference hiding inside a number that looks like a like-for-like comparison.
Normalising those onto one basis is an afternoon’s work if you know what to look for, and a source of expensive mistakes if you do not.
3. Judging a sample
A sample is a sample. Whether it represents what the production run will produce is a different question, and the honest answer is that you cannot tell from the sample alone. What tells you is the plant’s process control, its tolerance discipline on previous runs, and whether the line that made the sample is the line that will make the order.
4. Being at the plant when the batch is made
This is the piece that cannot be done from another country. A gauge that drifts 5% under nominal across a run is invisible in a photograph and obvious with a micrometer at the line. Finding out after the load has arrived means arguing about goods you have already paid to transport.
5. Language
Polish plants quote in English when asked. They do not think in it, and the precision you need lives in the details that go missing in a second language — in both directions. A specification clarified in Polish is clarified once.
6. The document pack
PPWR, EPR registration numbers, the Declaration of Conformity, material composition statements, ISPM 15 certificates where wood is involved. Every one exists at the plant. Getting all of them, correct, and matched to the goods that actually shipped, is a task somebody has to own.
What that costs you
Roughly two weeks of a purchasing manager’s time on a first order, and the risk that a specification error is discovered on a pallet rather than on paper.
For a large repeat programme, that cost amortises and going direct wins. For a first order, a changing specification, or a buyer running three categories alongside a full job, it does not.
What it costs through us
Nothing. The manufacturer pays our commission, at the same rate across every plant in our network. You pay the factory price, and the contract is between you and the factory — the same contract you would have signed yourself.
The reason the rate is the same everywhere is that it removes the question you should otherwise be asking, which is whether the plant we recommend is the plant that pays us most.
When we will tell you to go direct
- You buy full trailers of one specification you already have written down.
- You have Polish-speaking procurement, or an agent already.
- Your volume is below a pallet, where freight per unit makes any import worse than buying locally.
We would rather say that in the first reply than take a first order that was never going to repeat.
Send us a specification — or, if you are weighing us against the supplier you already have, read why not simply use your distributor.