Maple Sourcing

Maple Sourcing is a small Shenzhen sourcing agency run by an engineer, with a famous pizza oven in its back catalogue. It works out of an office in Nanshan for small and mid-size buyers in the US, UK, Australia and Europe. It takes products from drawings, prototypes or reference samples through supplier selection, sampling, tooling follow-up, production and inspection. The founder puts it simply: "I am not a salesman. I am an engineer who happens to run a sourcing company."

That founder is Aaron Li. He graduated in engineering in 1997 and spent five years as a quality inspector, visiting more than 200 factories across southern China. Then he joined UQS Global, an American-founded trading company in Shenzhen, as quality manager. He spent a decade there on product development, testing and certification for QVC-style TV-shopping hits such as Miracle Blade knives. In 2012 he started Maple Sourcing for the small overseas buyers that big factories ignored and trading companies kept in the dark.

The best story is Ooni. Li met founder Kristian in October 2014, when Ooni was a two-person Kickstarter startup, and Maple has supported its China manufacturing across several product lines ever since. That included a custom powder coating designed to last two years outdoors. Ooni went on to become the world's No. 1 pizza-oven brand with more than 3 million ovens sold, and US customs summaries still show Ooni as Maple's main consignee in 2026. The other jobs are just as concrete. They built 400 laser-cut cabinets for Finnish startup Vext without a single mold. They caught a pedometer bug for Bodytronics before 20,000 units shipped. For Smile Brilliant they rejected a batch with a 30% defect rate, and the project turned into five years of repeat orders.

Maple has worked with more than 300 clients since 2012, some for 8 to 14 years, and each project stays with one experienced team member from sourcing to shipment. Contracts and payments go through its Hong Kong company; the team and factory visits are in Shenzhen. "Very professional, very reliable and everyone speaks great English," says Zak Maqsood of Rise Traveller.

Maple suits overseas startups and small companies developing custom hard goods, consumer electronics or metal parts who want a long-term partner with technical judgment. It says plainly that buyers who only want the lowest price probably aren't a fit.