Export Now In the News: Businessweek and China Daily

Lavin’s connections are helping him build a new kind exporting business. Export Now (it shares his book’s title) is a middleman for U.S. manufacturers that want to sell their consumer products in China. Headquartered in Akron, not far from Lavin’s hometown of Canton, Ohio, the 15-person business handles the headache-inducing back-end work for its clients, from customs clearance to trademark registration to order fulfillment. Lavin says Export Now, which also has an office in Shanghai, is backed by “a few million dollars” in equity capital. Rather than negotiate with retailers as a traditional distributor would, Export Now posts product descriptions on its storefront on Alibaba Group’sTmall.com, an Amazon (AMZN)-like shopping colossus in China that is adding more foreign retailers as demandamong its nearly 500 million registered users increases for U.S.-branded goods.

The idea for Export Now arose in December 2010 after months of talks with Alibaba Group, China’s biggest e-commerce provider, through Tmall.com and Taobao, another online shopping site. “Tmall.com shares a common objective with Export Now, which is to enable a more-rewarding trade experience through e-commerce and provide access to a wider selection of high-quality and authentic products, be they domestic or international,” Alibaba spokeswoman Florence Shih said. A surge in demand for US brands through Tmall.com, she said, reflects Chinese consumers’ increasingly sophisticated demand for high-quality goods and services.