Bringing Vietnamese goods to the world trade floor

Starting a business in a new and promising field, Tran Tien Khai (26 years old) has the ambition to bring Vietnamese products to international e-commerce platforms.

Tran Tien Khai (second from right) and his Gen Z teammates at the company - Photo: MY LE

From an electrical and electronic engineer, life has led Tien Khai to become a salesman, and now he works in a service to support others in selling. The young owner of a company with 30 employees, all of whom are Gen Z, summarizes the difficult journey he has just gone through.

I want and am realizing my desire to create US income for Vietnamese manufacturers with "fearless youth". Many good quality Vietnamese products are already on international trading floors, but they have not brought their true value.

TRAN TIEN KHAI

Start selling from trend

Yet Khai's startup has just turned 4 years old. Perhaps Khai is also a common story of young Gen Z people jumping into the wave of business and selling on e-commerce platforms: dropshipping and POD. Because he graduated as an electrical engineer.

The journey began with Khai relying on search engines and SEO to find out what Americans were looking for, then ordering factories in Vietnam to make those items and sell them to Americans. "I literally didn't think at all, I did exactly what others did. I went to any website that people visited, got the exact keywords they searched for, and did the same. In essence, I just imitated others without understanding that it was market research," Khai shared.

Many young people like Khai have made a fortune with the online sales model when entering the market early. In 2021, Khai and his teammates founded an online sales company and had a revenue of up to millions of USD in the first three years. But the incident happened when his partner changed direction, the company from the original 12 people was reduced to only two people.

For Khai, that was the turning point to break out of the sales role and decide to change roles. "Looking back, I think that fall was lucky. I took courses, learned about lean management thinking, met many people and had the idea to change the path the company was taking," Khai confided.

The retail business owners he met from the courses were financially strong and had been selling for a long time in the market. He wondered why these people could not sell abroad when they had good products and plenty of potential? It turned out that they were afraid of the risk of doing it themselves, many people told Khai.

The idea of ​​setting up a company to sell to foreigners appeared in Khai's mind. People were afraid to do it themselves, so he would do it for them. Khai thought so and started to do it, changing the direction of the company. That was also the most memorable turning point in his life, as he said.

Selling Vietnamese products to the world

At 26 years old, he is also a veteran with many years of experience selling Vietnamese products to customers in the US and many other countries on e-commerce platforms. That experience helps Khai be more confident in supporting units that want to sell internationally, knowing the potential and weaknesses of Vietnamese products.

Khai said that many Vietnamese products are of good quality and have low prices compared to goods in developed countries. The innovation index of Vietnamese products in recent years has been very good. For example, with denim products, Vietnam has many good quality products and very popular designs.

The problem is how to create a good brand for products with available quality and great potential, of which textiles and footwear are clear examples. Instead of depending on foreign-owned brands and distribution channels, we need to directly bring "made in Vietnam" products to end customers. This helps product makers directly gain profits, and also optimizes production capacity.

When researching the market, Khai found that on international e-commerce platforms, including Amazon, there were stores owned and operated by foreigners valued at up to 1.4 million USD, but most of the goods were imported directly from Vietnam. They ordered from Ben Tre , Dong Thap and then sold all over Europe, proving that they highly valued products from Vietnam.

"These data show us the fact that Vietnamese goods have been successfully sold on the platforms. And Vietnamese businesses selling Vietnamese goods can absolutely own highly valued online stores like that, why can't they do it?" - Khai shared.

TTK Global Ventures, founded and run by Tien Khai, is working in parallel in two directions. One is to provide services for initiating and operating cross-border sales businesses for small and medium-sized enterprises to micro-enterprises in Vietnam. The other direction is to act as a broker so that Vietnamese people can easily buy international e-commerce stores to sell across borders faster and more effectively, shortening the process of owning an e-commerce store in the US from about two years to 4-6 months. After a short time of changing direction, TTK has successfully supported more than 100 Vietnamese customers to sell cross-border. As an example, Khai said that one of TTK's customers is a micro-knitting business with only five people. They have mostly sold handmade wool products for babies on the Shopee platform. But when selling to the international market, customers really like it and in the first month of selling on the US platform, their revenue increased five times. "TTK is still supporting this business to continue expanding. Similar products when put on international e-commerce platforms can completely generate US income for Vietnamese manufacturers" - Khai confidently said.

Tuoitre.vn

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