Greeting from Yiwu, China.
Last week I was telling you about our new warehouse in Jackfuit Village in Bali, and the strange fascinating social requests attached to the lease.
You can read about it here.

Since then we have spent a mad week rushing round Bali finalising deals and designs, from there we flew to Kuala Lumpa to bond with our newly expanded IT team.
They are now busy working on a new generation drop-shipping system that (we hope) will revolutionise your business and allow you to sell across Europe - whether Mrs May wants you to or not.
I keep remembering that time at the Conservative conference when Mrs May was speaking the letters were falling off the sign behind her. It's all falling apart behind our backs folks.
Do your worst you Brexiteers! We will find away to trade :)

We had a working lunch with the team and bounced around ideas. So excited.. perhaps amazing things can happen, we will have to see how the team gels.
Our IT wizard Raul from Mexico (who lives in KL) is joined by Amila from Sri Lanka a can-do ex-navy guy bursting with big ideas and Sasi a quiet thoughtful South Indian guy.

We welcome them to the AW family and look forward to an interesting journey.

From there Tomas and I flew down to Hangzhou and met our driver who brought us to Yiwu.
Regular readers will know that Yiwu is giftware central in China. 88,000 showrooms are open year round in Futian market - the worlds biggest small items market.
We have offices and a warehouse here. Lots and lots of projects on the go.

It's been busy, like Christmas on steroids at AW we have been working like crazy to get your orders out, while taking in unprecedented amounts of stock as we stock up to cope with whatever happens.
It's all a bit surreal. Our europe customers are understandably worried about supplies and doing a spot of panic buying, but sales are up across all channels. What is happening? Everyone stop panicking.

Meanwhile here in China we are calmly looking for the next big thing, because as I always say it's about the product. Give your customers the right product at the right price and everything else will be ok.
The Packaging Guy.
We have a packaging guy, we used him for years in Yiwu and he can do anything. Anything and super quick. Our day starts in his office in downtown Yiwu, we bring him designs for the next range of packaging for a candle or diffuser or whatever. His office is stuffed from floor to ceiling with every product pack he ever had a hand in designing or producing - and perfect for prompting ideas. He is cool guy, wears funky tracksuits and a bright smile. Give him the ideas, print designs and put the product in his hand and he just gets what it is we want. Computer cad designs produced in minutes. By the afternoon after visiting suppliers and doing the deals we swing past his office to see actual pre-production samples. Tomas says what takes me five weeks in England and costs a fortune, is done here in five hours and is included in the price.
That's the thing about Yiwu, it's not just the products, it's the huge infrastructure you can draw on instantly. Here you really can get things done PDQ.

We should put the packaging man in charge of Brexit.

More news next week.
Keep smiling,

Take care

David