Full transcript

How does a China sourcing agent source the doors for a hotel or apartment project from China? This video covers three kinds of doors: entrance doors — steel, aluminum, or wood; interior wood doors, fire-rated and non-rated; and hollow metal doors, fire-rated and non-rated. Aluminum doors themselves are covered in our separate video on aluminum windows and doors, so this one does not go into them. The three kinds come from different kinds of factories, and Guangdong has large clusters of all three. A building project usually involves buying all of these door types, and fire requirements differ from country to country — the United States, for example, requires US-standard fire certification.

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 source the complete door package — all the door types just mentioned — for apartment buildings, hotels, schools, hospitals, and other projects, and we also source the other doors a project may need: cold-room doors and lead-lined doors, for example, are both types we have bought for projects.

Everything starts with the drawings and the door schedule. Here at FBM Sourcing we go through your plans door by door: certification, location, size, swing, door type, finish, all the hardware, and so on. For rated doors we first confirm that the factory holds the test documentation for that exact door type; only then do we compare quality and price. The factories we place these orders with are large, established door makers — not the low-end market. Doors can ship assembled or knocked down — leaves, frames, and hardware packed separately — and that choice is confirmed when the order is placed.

The shop drawings for all the different door types go back and forth with you until they are signed, and no door is made before that.

In production, the wood doors are pressed, faced, edged, and finished on one automated line, and the hinge and lock positions are machined to match your frames — so several hundred leaves come out identical. The entrance doors have their locks and hardware fitted and tested at the factory and the finish matched across the whole order. The hollow metal doors are cut, bent, welded, filled, and powder-coated to the same specification, with closers, panic bars, and seals supplied to the schedule.

When production is finished, our FBM Sourcing QC team inspects the goods — dimensions, thickness, finish, hardware function, how each door hangs and closes, that every rated door carries the correct identification label for its type, the packing, and every other detail. You get one inspection report, with photos and video, covering the whole door package. Whatever does not match the signed drawings is put right at the factory first.

The doors are packed in wooden crates or on wooden frames for ocean freight, or wrapped in bubble film and loaded with care. Sometimes, on a large project, the doors alone fill full containers; sometimes the doors 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. After loading we give you a very detailed packing list, a loading report, and installation instructions; the loading report tells the site which container holds which floor’s doors. If your installer has a question, you ask us directly. Every product carries its own warranty period, and if a product quality problem appears within the warranty period — a lock fails, for example — we provide free replacement; you cover 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.