Invest a little of your redundancy in a holiday to China that takes in one of the huge trade fairs out there. Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzen (just north of Hong Kong) are the usual trade fairs. Specialist ones are sometimes elsewhere e.g the stone fair is on Xiamen.
Find a product that is small enough and light enough to ship using airfreight and doesn't have prohibitive minimum order quantities.
Find an agent that will handle everything for you in China.
Avoid anything that requires sea freight until your business has grown to a size where it's the only practical option due to economies of scale and volume and your cashflow can take having capital tied up for three months.
Open eBay and Amazon stores and off you go.
Rule 1. Do something you know. Product knowledge is paramount.
Rule 2. Do your homework on taxes, particularly import duties and find out the
commodity codes for the items you wish to import.
Rule 3. Do your homework on CE requirements for importation of goods. Example, if you bring in electrical goods will you need to register for WEEE compliance. Will your imports require Rohs certification etc.
Rule 1 is the most important rule of all of them.
The days when "Made in China" meant cheap rubbish are gone. China is the worlds factory.
You're probably sat reading this on a Chinese produced computer/phone, relayed through a Chinese made router, sent from a Chinese produced Server.
I used to visit a factory in Shanghai every three months to see a particular product being manufactured and check it in volume before shipping. The factory next door was ZF transmissions.
In fact you'd drive down this particular road and be forgiven for thinking you're in Germany if you were just looking at the factory names alone.
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