About us
Three founders, two sides of the industry.
Two of us built fashion brands and fulfilled them from China. One of us spent his career inside China's fulfillment industry. Silk Road is what happens when both sides build one company.
Two of us built fashion brands and fulfilled them from China. One of us spent his career inside China's fulfillment industry. Silk Road is what happens when both sides build one company.
Norman and Markus grew up in the same small town in Estonia, started their first business together as kids out of school, and reunited years later around ecommerce, running fashion brands and fulfilling them from China.
In October 2025 we flew to Shenzhen to visit the logistics company shipping our orders. The man who received us was Peng, their CMO, and the person quietly running half the operation. He’d built his career inside China’s fulfillment industry, starting at one of its biggest companies, and he spoke better English than anyone in the building, so guests were his job. That same night he drove us around the city. Over the next weeks came the gym sessions, the restaurants, and eventually an invitation to his family’s home, where we sat around his father’s tea table until late.
The more time we spent together, the more we compared notes. We knew what brands go through with Chinese logistics companies, because we lived it as customers. Peng knew how these companies run from the inside, and how far most of them are from what they could be. Somewhere over that tea, someone said it as a joke: we should build our own. The joke refused to die.
And when we researched the market seriously, we found the gap: hundreds of 3PLs in China, and not one built specifically for fashion brands. We were fashion people already, our brands, our interests, Peng’s degree in international fashion marketing. The niche wasn’t a strategy we invented. It was the thing we were already standing on.
Silk Road started in January 2026. The fulfillment and sourcing have to be excellent, that’s the entry fee, and we hold ourselves to it every day. But what we’re really building is the part no logistics company has ever offered: a company fashion founders actually enjoy being close to.
Clients who fly out get hosted properly, the factories, the markets, the city, the table. Founders in our circle know each other. And we’re documenting the whole journey as we build it, in public. Logistics is the business. The relationship is the point.
No sales layer, no account managers. The three of us run Silk Road, and when you message us, a founder answers.
Markus has spent years in marketing and media production, and he leads that side of our own brands. At Silk Road he turns the daily work into content you can watch, so nothing about how we operate stays hidden.
Your first conversation at Silk Road, and your ongoing one. Norman drives our own fashion brands’ growth, so the person you’re talking to deals with the same problems you do.
Our operations run from Shenzhen under Peng, who spent his career in China’s fulfillment industry and holds a Master’s in international fashion marketing. He also runs the fun: the dinners, the city, the good time when you come visit.