Full transcript

How does a China sourcing agent source pergolas and awnings for a hotel, resort, or school project? Guangdong has a strong cluster of aluminum pergola and awning factories — louvered pergolas, retractable awnings, glass sunrooms, carports.

FBM Sourcing is a building material and furniture sourcing agent in Guangzhou, China, focused on commercial construction projects, with more than ten years of hands-on project experience. We have sourced shade structures as part of the building material package for school and hotel projects — the awnings you just saw went to a four-star hotel in the Caribbean, tens of metres from the sea. Three years after installation I visited that client and looked at the units myself: no corrosion, no rust, everything still working.

Shade products are a family of their own: louvered pergolas with motorized blades; retractable awnings, manual or motorized; fixed pergolas and gazebos; glass sunrooms; carports; parasols and umbrellas; PVC awnings and canopies. Each type has its own structure, its own motor and control options, and its own specialist factories — and a hotel or school project often needs several of them on the same site.

Here at FBM Sourcing the work starts when your drawings and BOQ arrive, together with the site conditions — wind and snow loads, for example: the exact dimensions and how many units; what each structure fixes to — slab, wall, or posts; and the wind and rain conditions where it will stand. Those answers decide the profile, the motor, and the drainage — and they are what the factory’s shop drawings are built on.

The shop drawings go back and forth with you until signed — and only then does production start.

When the units are finished, we go to the factory for the inspection: the factory assembles and commissions each unit, and our FBM Sourcing QC team checks dimensions, color, finish, voltage, motor, plug, fixings — and every motorized cycle, open, close, open again — recorded on video for your inspection report. Before an awning leaves the factory, it has run its cycles on camera. A unit that does not run right does not ship until it does.

The structures are knocked down into labeled bundles and crates, packed for ocean freight, and shipped as full containers. Sometimes, on a large project, the shade structures alone fill full containers; sometimes the shade structures share containers with the other product categories of the same project; and sometimes, in one batch, we combine a dozen or more product categories from several projects of the same client into a few containers — always full containers, and for us this is routine, well-practised work. The loading report lists the crates by unit, so your installer can lay one structure out at a time.

Installation drawings and wiring diagrams come with every shipment, and if your installer has a question on site, you ask us directly. All products come with a warranty period; within it, we take responsibility for after-sales issues caused by product quality and replace the parts — the client covers only the freight.

Planning a hotel, apartment building, office, or other commercial building? For full-container projects, send us your drawings and BOQ. FBM Sourcing — your China sourcing agent for building materials and furniture. FBMSourcing.com.