When I announced on LinkedIn that Robert Brown has taken over as CEO, I got lots of people asking all sorts of questions, so here’s my full story!
TDLR: After working in Taiwan and China for 25 years, my family and I have moved back to the Netherlands, chiefly for a more creative education for our 5 and 8 y.o. girls.
I have had a fantastic run in Taiwan, and will always love its people and its mountains. Straight out of school I came to learn Chinese, and had told my friends I’d stay for either 3 months or 5 years, because I knew it would take a bit of effort.
I found a job (thanks mom!) representing Dutch firm WeLL Design, and built that from just me with a stack of brochures, to an office of 12 designers and engineers winning a best of Comdex award.
Taiwan is manufacturers’ heaven, but my design boss had had a rather traumatic experience, and never wanted to touch manufacturing again. So with a couple of friends I started my own firm cleverly called Titoma, for Time To Market.
In the beginning, my idea was to repackage Taiwan’s ODMs, they had a seemingly unbeatable offer: designs 95% ready, low prices based on scale and mass purchasing of components, 10 years of experience in the category…. they just needed better design and communication!
That kinda worked, but it always took a lot longer than hoped for, if a factory is good they are busy, and a new product for a new client tends to be their very last priority. And we realized ODM has some other pitfalls: you’re locked in, at the mercy of another firm, not a great position to be in (especially not in these Times of Tariffs).
Leo joined me as a 23-year old intern, within 4 years he was CTO, and we decided to build our own teams of engineers. In the beginning, it was very hard. How do you answer “what does it cost to design an automated dog feeder with built-in webcam?” when you have never built one, but with the years we got better and better at it.
Leo is from Colombia, and with the electronics industry there still young, a lot of graduates were keen to follow his lead. So every 6 months we would select the 5 brightest from Colombia’s top university, and bring them to our Taiwan office for half a year of training. After that they continued to work in our Colombia office, led by Soleyda, and we now have some 55 amazing talents there!
Manufacturing meanwhile had largely moved to China, and many friends asked me what I was still doing in Taiwan. Finding the right factory was far from easy, but after kissing quite a few of what turned out to be frogs, we did find our princess in Poshton in Shenzhen, on the recommendation of our friends at ProQC. Poshton has a small but extremely dedicated team, great at DFM and fantastic at finding best value Chinese components. We’re now doing some 60% of their turnover.
When Trump’s tariffs first hit 7 years ago, our US clients asked us to move manufacturing to Anywhere But China (ABC). Relocation experts tell me that moving production to another country takes a good year, but we realized that if we put our assembly right next to the team that designed the product in the first place, things would go a lot quicker.
In Shenzhen, a lot of the QC on fit and finish happens as a matter of course during assembly, but in Colombia we no longer have the Shenzhen luxury of a replacement batch arriving in our factory within 1 or 2 days.
So before we ship our kits to Colombia we need all components to go through rigorous QC, to avoid losing the kingdom for want of a nail. This required us to set up a whole new level of Quality documentation.
Colombia turns out to have very strict laws, labor law for example requires us to have a stretcher in our office. Getting parts through Colombian customs initially was quite a struggle, but we learned!
Meanwhile Robert Brown had already started helping me manage the day-to-day in Taiwan, and seeing he was doing a better job than I ever did, I decided to make him our new group CEO.
Robert has been in electronics in Taiwan and China for a good 25 years, most of it at Magna International, North America’s largest car parts manufacturer. He has set up a state-of-the-art factory in China and managed the “right-shoring” of operations to several other countries. In Taiwan, he built and managed a 40-person electronic design team, achieving 100% on-time and within budget completion of all engineering programs.
As the owner I will of course continue to be very much involved in Titoma, and yes I will continue to write on LinkedIn. Looking forward to having some more great conversations with you there!
