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Country desk · Hong Kong
For Hong Kong companies moving from trading to brand owning
A large number of Hong Kong businesses have deep sourcing capability, established buyer relationships and no brand of their own. Building one changes the economics and it is a completely different discipline from trading.
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- Typical client
- Trading company or brand owner
- Sectors
- Consumer goods, electronics, homeware, industrial supply
- Markets
- India, Europe, Middle East, Southeast Asia
- Common brief
- Build a brand around existing sourcing
Why Hong Kong companies call me
The situations that bring Hong Kong companies to this conversation.
- We source well and own nothing. Margin sits with whoever owns the brand, and the move to owning one is mostly a marketing and positioning exercise rather than a sourcing one.
- We have a house brand nobody recognises. Created for a retail listing requirement, never given a proposition, and now competing against brands that have one.
- Our customers are buyers, not consumers. Which means the marketing capability you have built is procurement-facing, and consumer-facing work is a different craft.
- We want to sell direct in a new market. Marketplace or D2C, where the brand suddenly has to do work that a trading relationship never asked of it.
- We need this without building a marketing department. Which is precisely the case for a senior individual on a defined project or a part-time retainer.
What usually gets built
A brand platform from scratch
Name, positioning, proposition and the argument for a consumer or an end buyer rather than a procurement team.
Full identity and guidelines
Logo, packaging system, applications, and a document a factory and a marketplace can both follow. Brand identity and guidelines.
Packaging and listing content
Where most of the selling actually happens in consumer categories. E-commerce and D2C launch.
A website
Consumer-facing rather than catalogue-facing, which is a different structure entirely. Website design and build.
Launch into one market first
Proven properly before replication. Market launch programme.
Ongoing leadership
A part-time marketing head while the brand finds its footing. Fractional CMO.
The document that lets a factory and a marketplace agree
When you own a brand but manufacture elsewhere and sell through platforms, the guideline is the only thing holding the identity together.
It needs to be usable by a packaging printer, a marketplace content team and a distributor without any of them calling you. Eight sections, and the do-not list matters as much as the rest.
This is the asset that turns a house brand into something with resale value, which for a trading company is frequently the actual objective.
Questions overseas teams ask
Do you speak Cantonese or Mandarin?
I don't. We work in English. Chinese versions for your factory or head office are handled by colleagues on my team.
We have never done consumer marketing. Where do we start?
Positioning and the name, before anything is designed or printed. Trading companies frequently start with packaging because that feels concrete, and then discover the proposition underneath it does not hold.
Can you work with our factory in the mainland?
Yes, on the brand and packaging execution side. The guideline document is written to be usable by a factory team working in another language, which is a specific requirement and shapes how it is built.
What would you put your own name on?
If the answer is a product you already source well, there is a brand project here with a clear commercial case. Tell me the category and the market you would start in.
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Kunal Waghmare · Padmavati Hills, Mokai Vasti, Bavdhan, Pune, Maharashtra 411021, India
office@quiamo.com · +91 90216 02686 · English