Meridian Freight Solutions — We Ship to China

How it works

From spare room to destination country.

Meridian Freight Solutions exists for one specific customer: the person who has built a life in the UK and now needs to get it home. Boxes in a spare room. A sofa that won't fit in a suitcase. Fourteen years of accumulated belongings and nowhere to put them. We take those boxes. We put them on a ship. We send them to China.

Collect & consolidate

Drop your boxes at Unit 7, or arrange collection within the South Yorkshire area (Tuesdays and Thursdays, mileage charged at cost). Weigh, label, palletise. A consignment reference is issued. You can track the consignment from this point using the reference on your paperwork.

Sea freight

Your pallet is loaded into a shared container and travels by sea. Transit time is typically six to eight weeks depending on the sailing schedule. We do not control the sailing schedule. Nobody controls the sailing schedule.

Arrival

The container arrives at the destination port, clears customs, and is released. At this stage your consignment is logged as Arrived in our tracking system. This is the point at which the Meridian service, strictly defined, concludes.

Onward transit

Onward movement within the destination country is facilitated by our trusted local partners and forms no part of the Meridian contract. The consignment is in the country. It is, in our view, delivered. Tracking will read Delivered.

The Meridian Standard

We have never lost track of a single item.

In over four hundred consignments, across seven years of operation, the Meridian contents-tracking system has recorded zero misattributed items. Not one box has ever left our facility without its contents manifest matching, line by line, what is inside it. The system was designed by Dean. It is, by some distance, the best thing about the company.

412

consignments manifested

8,470

individual items catalogued

contents discrepancies on record

Every box is weighed, opened, photographed, and itemised on a per-consignment manifest before it leaves Unit 7. Every item gets a line, a quantity, and a description in Graham's handwriting, which Dean then transfers to the master spreadsheet. The master spreadsheet is meticulous. It has not lost a single entry since 2019. It knows exactly what is in every box Meridian has ever shipped.

This is the part of the operation that works, and it works completely. A client can ring the warehouse — Graham will pick up, walk to the pallet, and tell you, without checking, that the Le Creuset is on its side and the wedding dress is on the top. He is never wrong.

The contents manifest, however, does not interface with the routing system. The system that tracks what is in a consignment and the system that determines where the consignment is going are two separate documents, maintained in two separate applications, on two separate computers, by two separate people. We know, at all times, exactly what we have shipped. Where it has gone is a different question, handled by a different process, on a different desk.

About Meridian

Two men, one unit, one van, one country.

Meridian Freight Solutions was founded in 2019 by Graham Naylor and Dean Pollard, who met in the Woolpack on Printing Office Street and identified, over the course of three pints and a copy of Freight & Forwarding Monthly somebody had left on the bar, a clear and underserved gap in the personal-effects return market.

The gap was this: thousands of people in the UK, having spent a decade or more building a life here, needed to ship that life home to China, and the existing options were either too expensive, too opaque, or run by people who did not return phone calls. Graham and Dean did not know how to solve the expensive part, or the opaque part. But they did know how to return a phone call, and in 2019 that was enough to lease Unit 7, buy a white Transit, and register the domain.

Seven years on, Meridian has shipped over four hundred consignments to China, employs two founders, and operates from the same unit, with the same van, and broadly the same laminator. The margins, Graham often says, are in the consolidation. He has been saying this since 2019. Dean nods.

Graham Naylor and Dean Pollard outside Unit 7

Graham Naylor (left) and Dean Pollard (right) outside Unit 7, Carrside Industrial Estate, 2024.

Founder & Managing Director

Graham Naylor

Graham has spent over twenty years in haulage. He drove for Argos for seven years, ran a van-rental counter in Rotherham for four, and holds a Category C1 licence, a forklift certificate (expired, renewal pending), and a firm belief that the export documentation is the most underrated part of the job. He has a laminator. He has used the laminator eleven times this year. Graham looks after the paperwork, the warehouse, and the customer phone line on alternate Wednesdays.

Founder & Operations

Dean Pollard

Dean handles the operational side: container bookings, sailing schedules, carrier liaison, and the spreadsheet. He brings a genuine international outlook to the role, having visited Benidorm in 2014 and found it eye-opening. Dean is the one who books the ships. He is very good at booking the ships. He would like that on the record.

Our man in China

Wayne

Wayne has been on the ground in China overseeing local operations since 2019. Wayne's role encompasses port liaison, last-mile coordination, and partner management. We have not been able to reach Wayne since the spring of 2021 but his email auto-reply remains active and we have no reason to believe the situation is anything other than in hand.

The interior of Unit 7, with consolidated consignments awaiting shipment

Unit 7, Carrside Industrial Estate. Hold-and-consolidate storage and dispatch.

The facility

Unit 7.

Eight hundred square feet of racking, one forklift, a desk, and a kettle. Your boxes live here, dry and logged, until there is enough consolidated volume to fill the next container booking. Graham knows where everything is because Graham put it there. There is no warehouse management system. There is Graham.

The unit is not open to the public. It is open to Graham, to Dean, and to clients who have called ahead, which is everyone, because the roller shutter is normally down and the door is normally locked and there is no doorbell.

Storage 60 days free, then £2.50 per cubic metre per week. Forklift Yes. CCTV One camera, covering the door. Kettle Yes.

Client feedback

What our clients tell us.

The following are selected comments from our client feedback cards. We did not select only the positive ones. These are simply the ones that were legible.

"My mother's dining set was collected in February and had arrived in China by April. I cannot fault the speed. I have some questions about the specific city it arrived in, which is not the city my mother lives in, but I cannot fault the speed."

M.F., Nuneaton

"Graham talked me through the whole process on the phone for forty minutes. Lovely man. He drew me a diagram of how a container ship works and posted it to me. The diagram was wrong, but it was kind."

Y.L., Manchester

"I shipped nine boxes back to my family. Eight of them arrived in the correct province. The ninth arrived somewhere else. Graham said this was 'within tolerance.' I do not know what his tolerance is."

R.C., Birmingham

"In the end I just moved to the town where my boxes had been delivered. It was easier. Meridian were very helpful about updating my delivery address to match where the delivery had already gone."

S.W., formerly Leeds, now Lingwu

Questions

Frequently asked.

Where in China do you deliver?: We deliver to China. The service covers the destination country in full. Your consignment is shipped to China, cleared through customs in China, and released for onward transit within China. It arrives in China. This is what we do.
My tracking says "Delivered — Dongfeng." There are several places called Dongfeng. Which one has my consignment?: Your consignment has been delivered to Dongfeng. For the avoidance of doubt, it is in China. If you are able to travel to Dongfeng we are confident you will recognise your belongings on arrival, as they will be the ones in the box with your name on it.
My consignment was delivered to Suzhou in Anhui. I live in Suzhou, Jiangsu — several hundred kilometres away.: Your consignment was delivered to Suzhou, as addressed. Both locations are named Suzhou; your consignment is presently in one of them.
Can I provide my delivery address in Chinese characters?: You are welcome to send them for the consignee's reference. All routing runs through our Doncaster operations centre, which operates in English and pinyin, so we ask that the destination be supplied in romanised form. Local carriers will of course work from the characters; that part is a matter for them.
Are you a member of BIFA?: Our application is under review and has been under review for some time. We are not currently a member of the British International Freight Association, or indeed of any recognised industry body. We did attend a BIFA open evening in Doncaster in 2022, which Graham describes as "very informative."
Who are your "trusted local partners"?: We work with an established network of local handlers operating across the destination country. Due to the commercially sensitive nature of these arrangements we are not in a position to name individual partners. Rest assured your consignment is in professional hands from the moment it leaves our facility to the moment we stop being able to track it.
What happens if my consignment cannot be delivered?: Under the terms of the Meridian contract, delivery is defined as the arrival of the consignment within the destination country. A consignment that has arrived in China is, by definition, delivered. Situations arising after this point — including misrouting within the country, non-collection, or the consignment being opened by someone who is not the consignee — fall outside the scope of the service and are not grounds for a refund. We will, however, note the issue on the file.
Is my shipment insured?: Standard cover is included up to a value of £40 per consignment. Comprehensive cover is available at an additional premium. We recommend comprehensive cover. We especially recommend it if your consignment contains anything you would like to see again.

We ship
to China.

Where do you want to ship?