East intersects with west in amusing ways in Mike Bellamy’s professional and personal life. The American founder of Passagemaker, a sourcing company that acts as a go-between for midsized western companies that supply retailers from factories in China, laughs when he describes how his teenage daughter symbolises this cultural ambidexterity. She picks “the eyeball out of a fish-head with chopsticks with one hand while helping herself to mashed potatoes” with the other.
Mr Bellamy’s office also offers a hint at this dual cultural identity. At its centre, harnessed to a stationary bike, is a work table whose construction is emblematic of a new model of doing business through vendors and suppliers in China. He says that while everyone wants the China price – ie the low costs associated with sourcing from the country’s factories – clients are just as concerned about being copied by suppliers who quickly become competitors. “We are a buyer-appointed firewall. Buyers don’t want the sub-suppliers to see too far up the supply chain,” he says.
The process used to manufacture his exercise bike-enabled desk is a case in point. Its steel legs are made by one manufacturer, the plastic table-top at another. The unit is then assembled at a factory owned by Passagemaker and shipped directly to Amazon – without even the middleman client in the US seeing the finished product. The manufacturer of the steel legs could have been used to make the whole product but breaking up the process allows the company to protect its intellectual property.