It’s a two-day trip from Glastonbury to the manufacturing districts in southern China. It involves a 17-hour flight over two continents, a 12-hour leap toward the international dateline and a jet-lagged, 3-hour ferry trip into the mainland north of Hong Kong, home to much of the vast, Chinese manufacturing complex.
Jim Sener and David Mathieu, co-founders of industrial design firm Ideaz, make the trip every few months. They lose two days going there, one coming back. They pack as much in as they can during those trips. They meet with clients and their outsourced manufacturers, helping to guide their handiwork from smart-looking drawings and foam models dreamed up on a Nutmeg State drafting table to finished products on the shelves of warehouses and stores across the globe.
Ideaz specialty is in designing products that move. The company made a name for itself designing everything from in-line skates for K2, to contractors’ stilts, to automatic external defibrillators to simple ergonomic Pentel pens. They are products that, with the seismic global shift toward manufacturing in lower wage countries, inevitably rely on China to produce those wares more cheaply.
But much of the design of those products is done outside of China. And Chinese entrepreneurs and established industrial design firms have heeded the call to reinforce their businesses overseas.
Jets Lag
As manufacturing goes, so goes design. For companies like Ideaz, whose livelihoods depend on finding manufacturers with products in need of beautification or improvement, a presence in China has been a reality of their business for a decade. Late night phone conferences and 16,000-mile round trips are par for their course.
That growing market for established designers has lead Sener and Mathieu to open up a second location in Shenzhen, China. It’s a 600-square-foot space that will serve a base of operations for one person from Ideaz. But considering the lengths of time and miles Sener would have to go through to get to China regularly, what it gives the firm is priceless, he said.
“Having someone who can get out to the factories in less than two hours saves us a lot and gives us a real heads up,” he said.
For companies that contract with his firm, that kind of ability to check up on factories is attractive, Sener said. Quality control in some factories can be a problem, since the first time many companies see a product is when it arrives on a container truck — too late for production problem to be corrected, Sener said.
As an added bonus, said Mathieu, Ideaz will be able to extend its work cycle to 24 hours a day – thanks to the 12-hour time lag. Midnight in Glastonbury, when Ideaz headquarters sleeps, is noontime in mainland China. The overseas staffer can tweak, email and work on designs while the rest of the crew is out. They can pick up when they return to work, and changes, problems and requests from half a world away are waiting at their desks. “No more middle of the night calls,” Sener said.
Competitive Pressure
But there is one, more crucial reason why Sener and Mathieu felt they needed to make the jump: competition from overseas designers.
“Chinese vendors are taking on more and more development work, so for competitive reasons we felt we needed to be there,” Mathieu said. As the Chinese economy has grown, more and more Chinese firms are looking to establish themselves as design-options for foreign business like Nike, for example, who often design products outside of China but make them in its factories. Being an established firm with a presence among the factories makes Ideaz a more attractive partner for non-Chinese companies, Mathieu said, as well as for Chinese companies looking for cleverly designed products for their domestic market. Although some analysts voice concern over how China’s rising industrial sector might affect the American economy, the Eastward drift of the industrial design business has been a boon for Ideaz. At the same time it opened its overseas office this month, Ideaz relocated from a 2,500-square-foot leased space to a recently purchased 4,000-square-foot building nearby in Glastonbury.
“Our market has gone global all by itself,” Sener said. And this move better positions the small company to reap the rewards.
