Sourcing outdoor furniture from Vietnam

Vietnam has become one of the largest sources of outdoor and garden furniture for European and North American retail, and the shift of sourcing out of China over the past decade has sent a lot of first-time buyers there. This guide covers the operational ground that a fair listing cannot: the material choices, the certification check, the season calendar, the geography, and the container arithmetic. It is written for retailers, importers, distributors and hospitality buyers placing their first — or first serious — Vietnamese orders.

Start with the duty position, because it has moved

Vietnam sits inside an unusually wide network of trade agreements: the EU–Vietnam Free Trade Agreement, CPTPP, RCEP, the UK–Vietnam agreement, and bilateral deals with South Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru. The EVFTA is the one most European garden retailers feel directly: it entered into force on 1 August 2020 and eliminates 99% of tariff lines between the two sides, with the EU’s remaining duties on Vietnamese goods phasing out on a schedule running to 2027.

Two cautions. First, preferential rates are not automatic — they depend on your supplier producing correct origin documentation, so make that an explicit contractual requirement rather than an assumption. Second, and more importantly: US duty treatment of imported furniture has been an active policy area since 2025 and has changed more than once. Any specific rate quoted in an article — including older sourcing guides still circulating that describe Vietnamese furniture as effectively duty-free into the US — may already be out of date. Get the current rate for your specific commodity code from your customs broker before you commit, and compare suppliers on landed cost rather than FOB.

Acacia, eucalyptus and the rest

Vietnamese outdoor furniture is dominated by two plantation hardwoods. Acacia is generally the harder and denser of the pair, with a warm reddish grain; eucalyptus is typically a little softer and grows fast, which is part of why it is widely planted. Both are dense enough to be used outdoors without the chemical treatment a softwood would need, though neither is maintenance-free and both will grey without care. Hardness and durability vary considerably by species and growing conditions, so treat any single figure a supplier quotes — a Janka rating, a lifespan — as indicative rather than a specification, and ask what it is based on.

You will also be shown rubberwood (harvested after the tree’s latex-producing life, so it is a genuine by-product and priced accordingly, but generally a weaker outdoor performer), bamboo and rattan for lighter and more decorative ranges, and increasingly aluminium, often combined with timber for corrosion-resistant patio sets. Teak is the one to question: it is chiefly an Indonesian resource, so teak offered by a Vietnamese supplier is imported material and you should ask where it came from and what documentation travels with it.

FSC: ask for the code, then verify it yourself

Sustainability claims sell garden furniture, and in wood the working standard is Forest Stewardship Council certification. The part buyers get wrong is treating “FSC” as a single yes-or-no attribute. It is a chain of custody: certification has to hold at every link that takes ownership of the material, from forest to factory to the exporter whose name is on your invoice. A certified factory selling through an uncertified trading company breaks the chain, and you cannot make the claim to your own customers.

So do three things. Ask for the certificate code — it looks like FSC-C0… — for every entity in the chain, not just the factory. Look it up in FSC’s public certificate database to confirm it is valid, current, and covers the product category you are buying. And ask who audits it; certificates are issued and re-verified by third-party bodies such as SGS or Control Union, and a supplier who is genuinely certified will answer all three questions without hesitation, because they get asked constantly.

One practical note for the stand: certification is easy to check afterwards and expensive to fake, so it is one of the few claims made at a fair that you can independently confirm the same evening. Do it before you shortlist, not after you order.

The season calendar, and why it decides when you travel

Garden furniture is the most seasonal category in the trade, and the Vietnamese production calendar that serves a Northern Hemisphere summer runs roughly like this. The buying season for the following year opens around mid-year and runs to autumn. Orders are typically finalised in October and November, because a supplier needs on the order of three months from signed contract to goods at the port: buying additional timber, drying it, manufacturing, quality control, and inland transport. Shipping therefore falls between December and February — which also suits retail warehousing, since seasonal Christmas stock has to clear before outdoor furniture can move in. Goods land and reach stores in April and May, in time for a selling season that peaks from June to August. Treat this as the shape of the year rather than fixed dates — lead times differ by supplier, product and order size — but the sequence, and the fact that the decision point falls in autumn, holds across the category.

Sitting squarely inside the shipping window is Tết, the Lunar New Year and by far Vietnam’s largest holiday, which falls in late January or February depending on the lunar calendar. Factories close for around a week, and staffing takes time to return to full strength either side of it. It is entirely manageable — established exporters plan their year around it — but only if it is in the schedule you agreed. Ask your supplier, in writing, how Tết and the early-January public holidays affect your specific delivery date, and build the answer into the ETA rather than discovering it in February.

The fairs are in Ho Chi Minh City. The factories often are not.

Nearly every buyer arrives through Ho Chi Minh City, and Vietnam’s furniture fairs are held there. Production is more spread out. The nearest concentration is the Bình Dương and Đồng Nai industrial belt just north and east of the city, roughly an hour’s drive, and a factory visit there can be done in a single day either side of a fair. But a great deal of Vietnamese woodworking capacity sits in the central provinces — the Quy Nhơn and Bình Định area is the classic example — which is at least 600 km, some 380 miles, from Ho Chi Minh City. That is a domestic flight, not a car ride.

The practical consequence: if central-Vietnam factories are on your list, add two days to the trip for the round trip, and say so when you request meetings, because suppliers will arrange the logistics if they know in advance. Buyers who make the trip regularly tend to chain several Southeast Asian fairs and factory visits into one journey rather than flying out twice — our Southeast Asia guide maps which shows fall close enough together to combine.

Manufacturing capacity is not shipping capacity

When a factory quotes an annual capacity of, say, fifty containers, that is a production figure, not a promise to hand you fifty containers at once. Finished goods have to be stored somewhere between the line and the port, and warehouse space is a real constraint, so large orders are often released in partial shipments with weeks between them. In peak season there is a second squeeze: container and slot availability tightens when every exporter in the region is shipping at the same time. Ask explicitly how an order of your size would be phased, and get the phasing into the contract.

The related figure most buyers underweight is packing density — how many units fit in a container — because it is what converts a freight rate into a per-unit cost. Stackable or knock-down product travels cheaply per unit; bulky assembled product does not, and the gap between the two is wide. The practical consequence is that a freight-rate movement can be almost irrelevant on one line and margin-eating on another, so a supplier who is cheaper on FOB is not necessarily cheaper delivered.

Two things follow. Ask every supplier for units per 40ft container alongside the FOB price, and compare quotes on landed cost per unit rather than FOB — the numbers are specific to each product and each supplier should have them to hand. And if you want to trial new designs without committing to a full line, ask whether they will build a mixed container, combining several styles in one box so you can test which designs sell before scaling the winners.

The two questions to ask before you sign

As demand has shifted toward Vietnam, order books have filled, and one failure mode that catches new buyers is de-prioritisation — a smaller or newer customer’s order slipping behind a larger one when capacity is tight. It is not universal, but it is common enough that experienced exporters expect to be asked about it, and you would find out in the worst possible week. The other is quality drift that only surfaces when the container is opened in your warehouse. So ask both directly:

Weight years of operation heavily. A supplier who has exported through the freight crises, the tariff changes and the demand swings of the past decade has a track record you can check with references; the lowest quote from an unproven counterparty is usually the most expensive option available. If the relationship is going to carry real volume, visit the factory — our trade-show preparation guide covers how to structure the fair-plus-factory trip.

Where to meet Vietnamese makers

The fairs where Vietnamese outdoor, garden and wood furniture manufacturers exhibit directly, with their next editions from our database. Each links to a full page with venue, airport and planning detail. For the European order-writing shows on the other side of the same calendar, see the outdoor & garden fairs guide.

Every Vietnamese fair we track, including the interiors and contract shows, is on the Vietnam country page.