The 2005 office
A European appliance brand decided it needed its own people in China. I was the first person they hired. There was no office — I found one, fitted it out, wrote the processes, and hired every person on the team.
What that team did was not sourcing. It was running the brand's manufacturing at finished-product level: a full bill of materials, thirty to sixty suppliers, quality, cost, audits, tooling, and the awkward conversations that happen at 7am Chinese time because something has gone wrong before Europe wakes up.
Years later that operation stopped being a line on the brand's cost base and became an independent service provider. Same people, same standards — the brand kept the capability and stopped carrying the fixed overhead. I did not read about that transition in a case study. I was the thing being transitioned.
Today the same operation runs for an 80-year-old European small-appliance manufacturer and for a major European grocery chain. A brand and a retailer are not the same discipline — different audit regimes, different seasonality, different definitions of a defect. Running both is the evidence that this is a process rather than something shaped around one client.
The thirty years underneath it
Three decades designing and managing hardware for European and American brands — the kind of century-old companies where a quality failure is not a bad review, it is a recall across forty countries.
Over 366 projects and 50 million units, across kitchenware, electrical appliances, beauty and healthcare devices, smart products and industrial equipment. The lesson that repeated most often: most manufacturing problems are design problems in disguise, and the difference between a product that ships and one that dies is usually decided months before anyone cuts steel.
Career: Termozeta SpA · SEVERIN Elektrogeräte GmbH · Dickson Household Electric Appliance.
