Today is Friday and the students are on Fall Break. I went “casual Friday” today and wear a comfy t shirt dress that I acquired on sale from The Loft this week. Fri post today This dress inspired my Fashion. I tried on three different shirt dresses before I decided on the one I purchased. Clothing dresses are right now and they are so comfortable and versatile everywhere. I ended buying the grey dress. It is so gentle and comfortable that I couldn’t resist. It appears like a darker grey in real life actually. Friday look I have it on with tights and brown riding boots for a casual.
But as an intermediary, the business was squeezed between the growing power of the customers and the factories. Our margins slipped to 10%, then 5%, then 3%. WHILE I returned to Hong Kong in 1976 after teaching at Harvard Business School, my friends warned me that in ten years buying realtors like Li & Fung would be extinct. My buddy and I experienced we’re able to turn the business into something different, therefore we had taken it through several levels of development. In the first stage, we acted as what I’d call a regional sourcing agent and extended our geographic reach by establishing offices in Taiwan, Korea, and Singapore.
Our understanding of the region experienced value for customers. Most big buyers could deal with their own sourcing if they needed to offer only with Hong Kong — they’d know which ten factories to deal with and wouldn’t need any help. But working with the complete region was more complex. In textiles, quotas govern world trade. Knowing which quotas have been consumed in Hong Kong, for example, tells you when you yourself have to start buying from Taiwan.
Understanding products was also more technical. We knew that in Taiwan the synthetics were better, but that Hong Kong was the place to go for cottons. We could provide a package from the complete region than a single product from Hong Kong rather. By working with a larger number of countries, we could actually assemble components; we call this “assortment packaging. ” Say an instrument is sold by me kit to a significant discount string. The spanners could be bought by me from one country and the screwdrivers from another and come up with a product package.
That has some value in it — not great value, however, many. In the second stage, we required the business’s sourcing-agent strategy one step further and became a supervisor and deliverer of production programs. In the old model, the client would say, “This is the item I’d like. Please go and find the best spot to buy it for me out. ” The new model works this real way.
Starting using their designers’ sketches, we research the marketplace to find the right type of yarn and dye swatches to match the colors. We take product concepts and realize them in prototypes. Buyers may then look at the samples and say, “No, I don’t enjoy that, I love this. Can you do more of this?” We create an entire program for the growing season then, specifying the merchandise combine and the timetable.
- Customer bug reproduction and troubleshooting
- Tourism is an intangible product
- Omaha Steaks
- Current income and savings rates
We contract for all your resources. We use factories to plan and monitor production so we can ensure quality and on-time delivery. This plan of delivering manufacturing programs carried us through the 1980s, but that 10 years brought us a new challenge — and resulted in our third stage. As the Asian tigers surfaced, Hong Kong became an expensive and uncompetitive place to manufacture increasingly.
For example, we completely lost the low-end transistor-radio business to Taiwan and Korea. What saved us was that China started to start to trade, allowing Hong Kong to repair its cost problem by moving the labor-intensive part of production across the border into southern China. So for transistor radios we created little Kits — plastic luggage filled up with all the components needed to create a radio. We shipped the sets to China for assembly Then. After the labor-intensive work was completed, the finished goods came pack to Hong Kong for final testing and inspection. If you missed a screw you were in big trouble: the whole line stopped cold.