Sourcing sunglasses in Danyang, China

By Heymi Zhu, founder · Published 23 September 2026 · Last updated 23 September 2026

Danyang is a city in Jiangsu province and one of the world's main eyewear clusters. It makes about half of the world's spectacle lenses. The city has a large trade market full of stalls, and it has factories that make frames, lenses and finished sunglasses. If you want a factory, go to the factories. The market is for buying stock, not for finding a production partner.

What Danyang actually is

Danyang sits in the Yangtze River Delta, the manufacturing belt around Shanghai. Eyewear is the local trade. The cluster covers lens grinding, frame moulding, coating, assembly and packing, so most parts of a pair of sunglasses can be made within a short drive. That density is why the lead times and the prices are competitive.

The city is also home to a large wholesale market, usually called the glasses city. It sells finished eyewear to buyers from many countries. It is a good place to see the range of styles and price points. It is not the place to audit a production line, because the stalls are traders. Some of them are connected to factories, and some are not.

Trade market or factory?

If you need a logo, a specific lens material or a market-compliant label, you want the factory. If you need a fast first batch of a standard style to test a market, the trade city can work.

How to get there

Danyang is a short drive from our bases in Shanghai and Nanjing, so a day visit is realistic. Plan the trip around the factory's working hours, not your own, because the floor runs on a fixed shift.

Allow a full day per factory if you want to see production rather than a showroom. A useful visit includes the frame moulding area, the lens line, the coating room, the assembly bench and the packing and shipping area.

What to ask when you visit

• Which line will run my order, and what is its daily capacity?
• Are the lenses made on site or bought in? If bought in, from whom?
• Which lens material and category are you quoting, and does the test report cover it?
• What is the minimum order per colour, not per style?
• What tooling is needed for my frame, and who owns the mould?
• How do you handle a failed lens or frame in the batch?
• Can I see a recent order being packed for another customer?

The answers tell you more than the catalogue. A factory that can point to the line, name the lens supplier and show a packing list is a different place from one that answers in general terms.

The lens question

Danyang's strength is lenses, so the lens is the part to pin down. Ask whether the lens is TAC, polycarbonate, nylon or glass, what category it is, and which coating it carries. Then check that the test report for your market names that same lens. A report for a different material is the single most common gap we find, and we explain how to close it in our guide to sunglasses compliance.

Working with a factory you cannot visit

Most overseas brands cannot fly to Danyang for a first order. The next best thing is a recorded walk of the floor with the production manager, plus the registry checks that confirm the legal entity. Ask for one continuous clip that moves from the entrance to the line, the stock and the shipping area. Fixed frames and quick cuts usually mean the footage was staged.

We work from Nanjing and Shanghai and run these visits ourselves. See what the checks cover on the eyewear sourcing page, or read our method on the main page.

Written by Platinum Sky Sourcing, a service of Platinum Sky Group Limited (Hong Kong). We verify factories in China for overseas brands. Last updated 23 September 2026.