The people behind the pallets.

The founder’s story

A shipping label that changed everything.

Daniel Wu grew up in a family furniture workshop where the smell of sawdust meant dinner was paid for. At 22 he moved to California with two suitcases and a work visa, and took the only job he could find in a town he could barely pronounce: unloading containers at a warehouse near the Port of Los Angeles.

Standing inside his first forty-foot container, he noticed something odd. The wood products stacked in front of him — boards, trays, stools — were good pieces made by careful hands, but somewhere between the factory floor and the retail shelf they had been chosen for price, not for quality. Warped planks. Paper-thin finishes. Pallets that wobbled. He started photographing the defects, then started writing to the workshops that made them, asking why.

Those letters turned into partnerships. The workshops had always known how to build better — they just needed a buyer willing to pay for it. Daniel shipped his first container of honestly-made acacia and bamboo goods to a shared warehouse, sold it out in weeks, and kept going. When the business outgrew the shared floor, he signed the lease at 4621 E Guasti Rd, Dock 1-2 — the address that would become the company’s middle name.

“I never wanted to be the biggest importer. I wanted to be the one who never sent a bad batch. Quality is how we sleep at night, and honesty is how we keep customers.”Daniel Wu, Founder & Managing Director

Today YAWI LTD runs a fourteen-person operation out of Dock 1-2 — sourcing, quality control, warehousing and customer care under one roof. The furniture workshop from Daniel’s childhood still supplies our kitchen line, and the containers still arrive from the same family factories, chosen the same way: for the work, never just the price.