Sarah Lacey has publish a interesting article over at TechCrunch: Think the Term “Supply Chain” Is Unsexy? Meet the Kinky King of Beijing. The bit I like is somewhere toward the middle of the article.
Like a lot of entrepreneurs in China, Sloan is cagey about what I can and can’t say about how the operation works. That’s not because it’s illicit—it’s because it’s so incredibly lean, flexible and outsourced that he doesn’t benefit if competitors realize exactly what he’s pulled off business-wise. But suffice to say with a small army of employees peppered around the globe, Sloan—aka the “Kinky King of Beijing”—is looking at an incredibly profitable business that’s already generating more than $1 million in revenue and growing quickly. He’s exploited what each region does best: Romanians are his programmers and SEO, Indians and Brazilians do his Web design, and China does the manufacturing and fulfillment. He hired his whole staff without leaving his living room. His next act? Finding new products and following the same playbook.
As I’ve said before, we need to get over this notion that off-shore means the third & second world manufacturing products designed in the West, and for the West. People are using technology to completely reinvent our understanding of what makes a company. It seems that The World is Flat only scratched the tip of the iceberg.