Importing looks like many businesses from the outside. Furniture. Stone. Tile. Cabinets. From the inside it's one trade with one skill set: factories, quality control at a distance, containers, freight, customs, timelines, and an honest read on what a promise from the other side of the world is worth.
That trade got learned on furniture, because hotel projects needed furnishing. And once it existed, a quiet fact appeared: a container doesn't care what's inside it. The factories change, the specs change, the inspection points change. The trade doesn't. So when the projects needed stone, the same capability ran again. Then tile. Then cabinets. Material after material, no new business each time. One capability, compounding.
Volume did the rest. Hotel-scale orders opened wholesale, commercial pricing, and that pricing never left. It followed into residential work, into clients' projects, into everything since. Material cost stopped being retail here a long time ago, and everyone the operation builds for inherits that gateway.
The lesson generalizes past shipping. Most capabilities are containers. The skill is rarely about the thing; it's about the motion around the thing. Learn the motion once, deeply, and every new "what" is mostly a matter of loading it in.