Built a bilingual B2B platform connecting US furniture retailers with premium Chinese suppliers

Summer 2025 turned into an unexpected entrepreneurial adventure when my friends and I decided to help a Chinese furniture manufacturer we knew break into the San Diego market. What started as a simple idea - 'let's connect them with local furniture stores' - quickly became a fascinating technical and business challenge. The biggest hurdle was taking dense Chinese product catalogs and inventory data and transforming them into clean, professional English content that American retailers would trust. I spent countless hours building a system to parse and translate product specifications, creating structured data for 10+ furniture pieces including luxury leather beds, modern sofas, and premium chairs. The technical implementation was straightforward - Next.js 15, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS - but the real challenge was understanding both markets: what information Chinese manufacturers track versus what US retailers need to know. I implemented comprehensive SEO with Schema.org markup, Open Graph tags, and XML sitemaps because I knew we'd need strong search visibility. The most rewarding part has been taking this website door-to-door to furniture stores in San Diego. Watching store owners navigate the site on my laptop, seeing them genuinely interested in the product catalog, and discussing wholesale opportunities made all the late nights worth it. This project taught me that web development isn't just about clean code - it's about building bridges between cultures, markets, and business opportunities. We're still actively pursuing partnerships, and every meeting teaches us something new about what retailers need.