Our Mission

Direct Equipment turns the factories Kevin Walden vetted on his Inside China Business YouTube channel into ones you can actually order from — direct, with no middleman markup.

About Kevin

I spent my early career on Wall Street learning to read markets, analyse businesses, and spot mispriced opportunities. Then I moved to China — and I started seeing those opportunities everywhere I walked.

The pattern was always the same: a factory making world-class products at a fair price, run by people who'd never had a marketing budget, sold to a customer base that ended at the next province.

My YouTube channel, Inside China Business (169K+ subscribers), is the long-form record of those factory visits. Every video is a real factory, a real founder, and the kind of unfiltered tour no PR team would sign off on.

Direct Equipment Corporation is what comes next.

When I verify a factory on camera, you should be able to buy from it directly. No Amazon middleman. No private-label markup. No drop-shipper taking 70% of the margin. The factory ships, you receive, the price is honest. That's the entire idea.

I live in Qingdao, film across China, and answer my own email.

— Kevin Walden

Why this company exists

After years of running the YouTube channel, the most frequent question from subscribers became: "Kevin, can you help me get one of those?" China's manufacturing cost advantage is real, but overseas buyers usually get stuck in two places: (1) they can't find actual factories and end up paying middleman markups of 30-50%; (2) they don't trust suppliers they haven't personally vetted. Direct Equipment solves both — every factory we work with has been visited in person by Kevin, and prices come straight from the manufacturer.