Episode #34 - Isaac Hetzroni

#15MinuteFounder

Isaac Hetzroni is known online as “The Sourcing Guy.” He started selling merchandise out of his college dorm room and turned it into a multimillion-dollar company before he graduated, becoming one of the fastest-growing companies in the promotional products industry along the way.

Today he runs a global product sourcing agency, teaches people how to start their own sourcing businesses, and is building a solution for distributors who land orders too big to manufacture on their own.

In this episode, Isaac explains sourcing like you’re five, walks through the $26 billion promotional products industry almost nobody talks about, and breaks down the #1 supply chain mistake mid seven-figure brands make.

He also covers why Lululemon doesn’t own its factories, where tariffs are headed, and why he thinks humanoid robots will change manufacturing for good.

Isaac’s first orders came out of a dorm room with zero startup capital. When you’re ready to start your own sourcing or merch business, doola forms your US LLC and gets you set up to send invoices and collect payment, so you can focus on winning customers.

Highlights From the Chat

Explain sourcing like I’m five.

Sourcing is the oldest business in the world, and it is trading product. Businesses buy product. Why can’t they buy from you?

Whether it’s the cups Starbucks buys to fill up every coffee, the hoodies you buy for your business, or the furniture to decorate this entire building, how can you go and find amazing factories to produce that product with the best pricing? Then you find the right customer who buys the product, and you broker the deal.

You middleman it, and you become their supplier.

How does someone actually make money doing that?

What we teach people is how to start, mostly, a merch agency. Selling custom hoodies and t-shirts and all those core products. It’s what I did in college. You make a couple thousand dollars on an order, you collect money first, and then you fulfill the order.

So, you don’t need any startup capital, and you can do it part time. As you get better and better, maybe you get to 100K in the year, you make like 40,000 profit, you can quit your job.

And where you eventually get to is what I do now, which is booking large six-figure deals and doing hundreds or thousands of units. It’s a skill thing.

What does that first level look like?

The first level is using domestic suppliers that are built around being suppliers of promotional products. You, as a distributor, sell off of a catalog and you make 40% margin.

No one talks about promotional products and custom merchandise, and it’s like $26 billion a year in the US. It’s super easy to run, and there aren’t a lot of young people in it.

You get the certifications, you pay to be part of an association, and you get access to like a thousand domestic suppliers that warehouse hoodies and t-shirts and mugs.

When you get an order, you send them a purchase order through the industry software. It takes like five minutes. They print on it and blind ship it directly to your customer wherever they are in the US.

How do you win the order? You talk to people. You network. You do outbound.

Why did your company grow so fast?

Everyone’s selling off of catalogs. That’s fine for 100 pieces. But once you get into a thousand pieces, if you’re able to go direct to factory, you can make like a 50% or 60% margin and provide a more unique, premium product to the customer.

And 99.9% of distributors don’t know how to source from overseas effectively.

The new business we’re building solves for those distributors. A company like Custom Ink gets an order for 20,000 jackets. They don’t know how to go to Cambodia and manufacture 20,000 jackets cost effectively. We do.

What’s the biggest sourcing mistake a mid seven-figure e-commerce brand makes?

Once you get into the mid seven figures, most e-commerce brands are still using the same supply chain they built when they got started.

Different suppliers are built for different sized businesses. The best factories in the world typically have really high minimums and high expectations.

You can’t just go up to the factory behind Lululemon and say, “I’m going to start a brand, make me leggings.” They’re going to say you have to commit maybe half a million or a million dollars of purchasing a year just to start talking to you.

But you get so much unlock from a pricing perspective, a service perspective, and a technology perspective when you work with those top manufacturers.

Why brand yourself as “The Sourcing Guy”?

So many people told me that if you’re going to be successful, you have to focus on one thing. I love the book The One Thing by Gary Keller. I realized my skill set and my passion was product sourcing.

When I started the brand, you have a little bit of imposter syndrome. Am I really the sourcing guy? There’s probably some 60-year-old supply chain wizards who are better than me, for sure.

But I knew that if I keep doing this, play the part, and think about product sourcing all day, every day, visiting the top factories around the world, naturally I’m going to become the sourcing guy.

For the next 60 years, I’m going to be the sourcing guy.

Why doesn’t Lululemon just own the factory?

Some brands do own their own factories, but very few.

Factories typically specialize in one product category, and a brand like Lululemon has womenswear, menswear, different materials, tops, bottoms, shoes, socks. What you want from a factory is to produce as much of the same product as possible to create efficiencies.

It’s also a focus thing. Running a factory is very cash intensive and very difficult. And as tariffs change, brands can migrate production to different countries and factories. If they owned the factories as their assets, they’d be kind of stuck.

What’s the biggest mistake new dropshippers make?

People don’t realize there are two kinds of factories: factories that produce product for dropshippers, and factories that produce product for brands. The product made for dropshippers tends to be generic and not the highest quality, because they’re pre-producing all that inventory and don’t want the risk if the trend fails.

You can start with regular dropshipping while you get your feet wet. But as soon as you can, start working with great factories and developing product, even if you’re only changing 10% of it to make it unique in the marketplace.

The reason people don’t start there is cost. Buying 500 units of a $10 product is a $5,000 investment, and a lot of people starting out aren’t comfortable taking that risk on inventory.

Do tariffs actually matter going into 2026?

I think tariffs are going to stay, and they’re going to be used and adjusted. It does make it really hard for brands. If you can diversify your supply chain, that’s always a positive.

But it’s very difficult, because China is the king of manufacturing. Almost all the raw materials and components for your product are probably still coming from China, even if it’s not made in China.

The honest answer is no one knows. But diversify if you can.

Which has a bigger impact on sourcing: AI or humanoid robots?

Over the next 15 years, humanoid robots. But right now, AI is a huge unlock for product sourcing, and people don’t realize it.

Product sourcing is sorting through a million factories to figure out which ones fit a specific project based on factory size, MOQ, certifications, quality, and the brands they work with.

AI can index the world’s manufacturers, find the 10 or 20 best fits, then do the outreach in the local language, in Mandarin if it needs to. It can do like 80% of the sourcing work.

The final 20% is the brand or sourcing agent picking the right factory and moving the order forward.

What advice would you give your dorm-room self?

Start making content. Content has been the biggest unlock of my entire life. It’s the opportunities it brings and the people you get to meet.

You don’t need a ton of followers to make a big impact. My friend Kian makes sourcing content on YouTube, and years ago he showed me how much business he was getting at like 10,000 subscribers. That was the big unlock for me. I don’t need a million followers. Even 10,000 can change my life.

If you’re picking one platform, LinkedIn from a lead perspective and a door-opening perspective is unbelievable.

What’s your best productivity hack?

I buy these daily to-do sheets that break down every 30 minutes of your day, with your top three most important tasks and all your remaining tasks. They’re like $7 for 100 sheets on Amazon.

Especially if you’re kind of ADD like I am, it will literally get you twice the work done. My entire team does it.

If you had a billboard in Times Square, what would it say?

Just get started. I started my business selling cell phone fans out of my dorm room, and it turned into a global product sourcing agency. The best opportunities usually come when you’re deep within a specific industry or niche and you find a gap in the market that big companies are willing to pay for.

But you’re never going to get to that idea unless you’re actively working in the space and doing business.

TIMESTAMPS

0:00 – Meet Isaac Hetzroni, “The Sourcing Guy”

0:29 – How Sourcing Actually Makes Money

2:01 – Inside the $26B Promotional Products Industry

4:38 – Why His Company Became the Fastest-Growing in the Industry

6:24 – The #1 Sourcing Mistake 7-Figure Brands Make

8:06 – Why He Branded Himself “The Sourcing Guy”

9:18 – Why Doesn’t Lululemon Just Own the Factory?

11:55 – The Biggest Mistake New Dropshippers Make

14:31 – Inside His 3-Part Business: Agency, Education & Beyond

18:00 – Do Tariffs Actually Matter Going Into 2026?

19:47 – His Big Bet: Humanoid Robots Will Reshape Manufacturing

20:57 – How AI Is Already Disrupting Product Sourcing

22:15 – Rapid Fire: Content, Platforms & Personal Branding

25:35 – Sleep, Routines & His Favorite Books

28:01 – Productivity Hack: The 30-Minute To-Do List

29:19 – First Time Walking Into a Chinese Factory

30:41 – Final Advice: “Just Get Started”