It is hard to believe that the Shenzhen ecosystem was built over just a few decades. Just over 30 years ago China moved from a period of cultural isolation to gradually opening up to the commercial world beyond its borders. The place to naturally start this was in Guangdong province close to the then British colony of Hong Kong. A small fishing village grew to become the workshop of the world. The growth of Shenzhen was driven by investment from multi-nationals and overseas Chinese. One of the earliest industrial areas was called Overseas Chinese Town or OCT. OCT has changed from manufacturing to retail and offices for the creative industries in the former factory buildings.
Hong Kong had built up capability and expertise in light manufacturing and clothing from the 1950s through the 1970s. It is still important for supply chain intermediaries. This was the ‘golden age’ of Hong Kong. This is how many of the Hong Kong oligarchs made their first fortunes; which they then invested overseas, in China and into the Hong Kong real estate market.
Globalisation had started after the second world war. But the opening up of China threw it into overdrive. Hong Kong industrials moved manufacturing plants for clothing, shoes, toys, plastic goods and electrical appliances to China.
They were joined by Taiwanese electronics manufacturers and then multinationals from Europe, America and Japan. Hong Kong clothing manufacturers provided China supply chain expertise to western retailers like Walmart.
The Shenzhen ecosystem was built on manual production. The deft fingers of Chinese women workers allowed a lot more precision than Japanese pick-and-place machines. Which meant a lot more flexibility in manufacturing using the Shenzhen factories. You wouldn’t have an iPhone if you used pick-and-place robots on the production line.
Electronics manufacturing
At first, these companies were used to fatten the wallets of customers who took on the marketing and distribution of electronics in the West. The dirty secret about many PC and laptop designs was they were standard underneath. Then this cost saving was passed on to the customer as people like Dell went for close to lowest price operator based on a direct mail / online direct ordering and cut out the channel.
Finally that wasn’t enough, and most of the laptop and PC resellers make no money. Instead the main people to profit from these sales were Microsoft which licensed it’s Windows operating system and Intel which provided the majority of compatible micro-processors capable of running Windows-compatiable applications. In the PC industry there is usually just two or three profitable manufacturers and one of them is Apple. Historically it was Dell, then Hewlett-Packard and now it is likely to have be Lenovo.
Shrinking PC-esque computing power into the palm of one’s hand was inevitable with the rise of flash storage and Moore’s Law facilitating power-efficient processors. The challenge is battery technology, packaging and industrial design. Apple pushed the envelope with suppliers. Hon Hai and other manufacturers installed hundreds of CNC machines to fabricate thousands of metal phone chassis. These radical changes in manufacturing capability were opened up to lower tier manufacturers raising the standard of fit and finish immeasurably over a few years.
Now Xiaomi and Lenovo product handsets that have better build quality than many Samsung and HTC handsets. The performance is good enough (again thanks to Moore’s Law) and the handsets run the same applications. Sony, HTC and Samsung handsets look as marooned as Sony’s Vaio PC range in the Windows eco-system.
Shenzhen’s ecosystem has been a great leveller of manufacturing and industrial design capabilities with Apple at the leading edge of what’s possible from an industrial design and materials technology.
More information Shenzhen Government Online – this loads slow like they are phoning the pages in from 2002, but is informative The smartphone value system – An earlier piece I wrote about the challenges of the Android eco-system
I spent some time in Shenzhen recently and here is some of the things that I found during my stay.
The pace of development is slower than it was before, the number of cranes I saw and ready-mix concrete wagons on the road was less than before. There is still a lot of building work but there is less of it
Odd products showing up in Shenzhen.
A case in point being an Orange-branded MiFi router that I used whilst I was there. It was your standard Huawei mobile internet Wi-Fi router as sold to Orange customers across Europe. We used it with a China Unicom 3G SIM in the device. It wasn’t just a case of badging, the device had an Orange admin page and served Orange-branded ‘no internet connection available’ error pages.
Just how did this device end up in Huawei’s back yard? Did the product ‘fall off the back of a wagon’? Are they being dumped in the marketplace? Is there some black market ‘carousel’ sales tax scam going on?
Smartphone users
Talking about mobile devices: a quick poll of a mix of people I met:
Advertising agency owner: Apple iPhone 5S
Creative industry entrepreneur: iPhone 5C for personal use, an iPhone 5S likely to be gifted
Professional photographer and interior designer: iPhone 4S
7 taxi drivers: 5 Samsung, 1 iPhone 4 and one Xiaomi handset
Businessman who owned a pharmaceutical distribution business and various properties: Samsung
Businessman: Samsung
Museum/ gallery curator: Samsung
Professional driver: Samsung
It is hard to explain the ubiquity and usage of:
Weixin (WeChat) – running out of your data package cuts you off more than running out of voice minutes. My friend has her 70+ year old mother WeChatting her incessantly
TaoBao – the impact of TaoBao can be seen on the streets with a volume of delivery people darting around the city. Electric mopeds were banned in Shenzhen for anyone who didn’t work for a delivery company as the devices were a silent killer who ran over unsuspecting pedestrians. Shenzhen still has electric bikes (more professionally handled) by delivery people delivering online shopping. TaoBao and its sister site TMall are the e-tailing game. Apple recently opened a store on TMall in parallel to the Chinese version of its familiar online store
The Chinese creative industries are coming on in leaps and bounds. I met with an advertising and design agency owner and was bowled over by the quality of the branding design that they had done for a new creative hub. Having worked alongside western big branding agencies in China working for Chinese clients I can say that the work was equal, if not better in quality.
This is also matched by the creative infrastructure that the Chinese central and regional governments are putting in alongside private enterprises. A classic example of this is the continued development of the OCT LOFT complex. This was once an area of factories run by Overseas Chinese as a separate Town, these sturdy concrete buildings have been converted into retail areas a la the Truman Brewery, offices, studio spaces, co-working spaces and social clubs.
There is a live performance space in OCT LOFT called B10 with a really well engineered sound and lighting system. This has managed to attract sponsorship from the likes of MINI. China is serious about building a creative class and is doing something meaningful about providing all infrastructure needed within a cluster.
Talking of live performances, I got to see a local band play at B10; I don’t know if this was just this band but the crowd did much more interaction with the band on stage, singing along, dancing, synchronised clapping and a lot less viewing the performance through their smartphone than I had been used to in the UK and Hong Kong.
Electric vehicles are big business; Shenzhen now has blue and silver taxis from local firm BYD that are electric powered. BYD is a famous battery company and Warren Buffett is a shareholder. Admittedly, the electricity probably comes from a lot of coal-fired power stations as well asnuclear-powered ones, but China is serious about the future of transportation.
Hailing a cab is pretty much done by app, the Chinese version of Hailo is as ubiquitous on peoples phones as Weixin.
Changing perception of western country brands. This is just anecdotal stuff speaking to a couple of people, but the brand of the UK in China has changed over the past couple of years. It used to be that the UK was thought to be a great nation to do business.
David Cameron’s recent trip to China and launch of a Weibo account was seen as an act of desperation to try and capture inbound investment. Now the view that I heard expressed is that Britain is a good place to visit and shop (for luxury goods), to get an education or learn English – but that’s it. Entrepreneur visas didn’t hold that much appeal to the people I spoke with.
There is a change in what it means to be made in China. Over the past few times that I have been in China there has been a move away from products that are good enough to providing a quality experience. Brands like retailer Emoi have been at the head of it, alongside Oppo whose Blu-Ray players give Denon and Onkyo a run for their money.
This time friends of mine have set up a venue, one of the primary purposes of the venue is to showcase quality Chinese-made products from craftsmen made ceramics, to furniture, modern art and vacuum-tube hi-fi amplifiers. Just as China is raising it’s creative game, it is also looking to make better quality products. However this isn’t a universal move; there are still value-orientated companies, particularly those in the business-to-business space. More china related posts here.
My first impressions of China are tied to a single number. China has a current economic growth rate of 8 per cent.
8 per cent growth
Even if the UK economy were overheating in a boom, it would be barely running at 3 percent growth. 8 per cent growth creates a huge amount of activity.
It is something that would be more familiar to our industrial age forebears who would have experienced similar growth in the likes of Birmingham, Detroit, Manchester or Yokohama. I saw building sites working around the clock and infrastructure being thrown in at a speed that would inconceivable in the UK.
The comparison to Victorian Britain also bears up in terms of the emergence of a middle-class and a large working-class population for whom getting a good job is extremely competitive.
In many respects the middle-class Chinese has more in common with their American counterparts than Europeans. Home-grown mini-vans beloved of ‘soccer moms’ are popular on the roads and I saw more Buick and Cadillac saloons here than I have seen anywhere else outside the US.
This viewpoint has probably been reinforced by the fact that Shenzhen, like Los Angeles, is such a car city. The city authorities are addressing that at the moment. However, these surface impressions of China belie the fact that Chinese middle class still earn less than their US counterparts and have to save half their money to deal with future health costs.
The city of Shenzhen are putting in four mass transit lines at once: for a comparison London took over three decades to get the Jubilee Line in place.
I got to try the mass transit system which has already been put in. It is of a similar standard to rail systems in Singapore and Hong Kong. The ticket system is completely paperless with single tickets looking like an old-time milk bottle token that dairies used to issue to customers as a payment system. There is nothing old school about these tokens as they seem to be RFID tags.
Impressions of China Dream, from the perspective of the middle class
A quick scan of English-language books for sale revealed an interest in finance, stock-picking, management – particularly Peter Drucker and quality improvement / process improvement – the Juran Institute works and The Toyota Way seemed to be pretty popular. All of these books give impressions of a China dream that is based on the kind of hard work and getting ahead that would have been familiar to Americans in the immediate aftermath of world war 2.
I have been staying in a condo which would not look out of place in Mountain View or San Mateo.
Again surface impressions of China may lead to false assumptions about consumption. The growth of Shenzhen is also very Chinese, you may shop at a 7-Eleven and sip a latte at Starbucks, but there are very few recognisable names in neon at the top of the skyscrapers – the only ones I saw were Hyundai and Samsung. Traffic is much more chaotic in terms of the way people drive than we are used to in the UK. Electric scooters are popular and are lethal, hard to spot like a bicycle and silent.
Alongside the growth is coming reinvention. In a set of TV factory buildings; an area called OCT-LOFT is being developed as a mix of galleries and workplaces for the creative industries. A few hours people watching in the spacious Starbucks down there saw a plethora of Mac laptops open and busily working away on the free wi-fi: kind of equivalent to the Truman Brewery in London.
If the West deludes itself that China can make stuff, but can’t do the knowledge economy then it is in for a rude awakening. Although Shenzhen is the world’s workshop, there is a transition going on to higher-value products and services.
I got a change to talk to a local web developer and could see the sophistication of this market catching up the UK digital sector sooner rather than later. Couple this with China Telecom offering business web hosting at 200 Renimbi per year and you get a sense that things could move on here very fast.
A thirst for technology
Looking around the markets here, there is a thirst for technology similar to what you see in Japan. Mobile technology was particularly popular, there were handsets on display that I previously thought were Japan or Korea-only models with large swivel TV screens on the handsets.
I used a PAYG SIM by China Mobile which provided me with both a Chinese and Hong Kong number. Mobile devices have also become a luxury totem here with Vertu and Porsche Design devices displayed alongside the latest models from Nokia.
Value proposition
Chinese consumers are not all about price. Yes Chinsese consumers like free stuff, gifts and status recognition through VIP loyalty schemes and experiences. However impressions of China consumers are changing from price to a more complex value proposition. There are many foreign-made products as well as foreign brands on sale in the department stores. Ones that I immediately noticed were:
Zwilling – the German manufacturer of quality kitchen knives, personal tweezers and nail scissors
Carrera sunglasses and goggles
Victorinox Swiss Army Officers Knives
Ray-Ban sunglasses
Porsche Design
Whilst China may embrace many aspects of the market economy, the government is very good at putting in infrastructure for the greater public good such as art galleries and public parks. It is amazing how green the place actually is. For every Shenzhen, there is a rust belt down in Hubei province with a dark dystopian vibe. Impressions of China from Shenzhen have to be tempered with a knowledge of the hinterland. Shenzhen is a special economic zone. It is part of the vanguard of where China wants to go. It is at the top of what China hopes it can direct into trickle down economics. More posts on Shenzhen here.
September 2025 introduction – (26) pick-and-mix edition
Where has the year gone? I am just thankful that we got a little bit of sun, given how fast and hard the autumn wind and rain came in this year. I am now at issue 26, or as a bingo caller would put it ‘pick and mix’.
When I was a child ‘pick-and-mix’ sweets were a way of getting maximum variety for the lowest amount of pocket money that I earned from chores. Woolworths were famous at the time for their pick and mix section, alongside selling vinyl records and cassettes. Woolworths disappeared from the UK high street during the 2008 financial crisis.
For Mandarin Chinese speakers 26 is considered ‘lucky’ given that it sounds similar to ‘easy flow’ implying easy wealth.
This month’s soundtrack has been a banging digital compilation put together by Paradisco and Disco Isn’t Dead featuring The Reflex, PBR Streetgang, Prins Thomas, J Kriv, Sergio Mendes & Brasil 66.
Right, let’s get into it.
New reader?
If this is the first newsletter, welcome! You can find my regular writings here and more about me here.
A post that took me too long to write about the favourite campaigns I had when on the jury of the PHNX awards.
I missed sharing a post I wrote last month that built on the work of Rob Estreitinho on ideas for being a good strategist.
Books that I have read.
I finished Moscow X by David McCloskey. (No plot spoilers). This is the second book my McCloskey after Damascus Station, which I read and enjoyed back in May last year. The book is like a more action-orientated American version of a LeCarré novel. The plot reminded me of LeCarré’s Single & Single and Our Kind of Traitor. McCloskey isn’t afraid to have strong female lead characters in his book.
Your Life is Manufactured by Tim Minshall. Minshall is a professor at Cambridge and heads up the engineering department’s manufacturing research centre. Because of his mastery of the subject area, he manages to provide an exceptionally accessible primer in terms of what manufacturing is, how it happens and what it means. More about it here.
Things I have been inspired by.
Election-winning opacity in influencer relations
I have been following Taylor Lorenz‘ work since she became the beat reporter for online culture and technology at the Business Insider. Her article for Wired magazine on how the Democratic Party in the US is working with paid influencers makes for an interesting read.
What would be the norm in the commercial world about influencer transparency where there is a paid relationship – isn’t happening in politics.
Ok, why does this matter? The reason why I think this matters is that people who do their time in the trenches of a presidential election campaign have a clear path into a number of American agencies.
‘I’ve have won a victory for X candidate and can do the same for your brand’ has been a popular refrain for decades in agencies.
I have been in the room when senior American agency people have tried to convince Chinese companies to buy their services based on their success in marketing a candidate in an election using western social media channels. There was no sense of irony when this was awkwardly delivered as a possible solution for domestic market campaigns to marketing teams in Guangzhou, Shenzhen and Shanghai.
Bad habits will be brought into agencies and sold on to clients.
Chart of the month.
Kim Malcolm shared a great report done by Zappi and VaynerMedia looking at The State of Creative Effectiveness 2025. Two charts piqued my interest. The change in distinctiveness of advertising by age cohort.
The overall emotion that an advert evokes by age cohort.
Causality of these effects aren’t clear. Empirically, I know that great adverts still put a smile on the faces of people of all ages and can change brand choice, even in the oldest consumers.
I had more questions than answers. VaynerMedia thought that the answer should be cohort-specific campaigns. I am less sure, since brands tend to better within culture as a common point of truth for everyone. Also, I don’t believe in leaping to a solution until I understand the underlying ‘problem’.
I could understand a decline in novelty as people gain decades of life experience and will have seen similar creative executions before.
Are the adverts lacking a foundation in strong cultural insights and cues that would resonate with these older audience cohorts?
What I did notice is a correlation with the age profile in advertising agency staff compared to the general public and the point at which the drop-off to occurs. But correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation.
It’s concerning that advertising effectiveness declines in older audience cohorts as economic power skews older within the general population. This is likely to continue as millennials inherit wealth from their baby boomer relatives as they enter their 50s and 60s. Which makes the old marketer line about half of a consumers economic value is over by 35 seem hollow.
Things I have watched.
Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 1 and Border 2. In the GITS storyline this is a prequel to the original film. It follows how the eventual team comes together. The technology looks less fantastical and more prophetic each time I watch it. The animation is still spectacular.
Ghost In The Shell Arise: Border 3 and Border 4. Following on from Border 1 and Border 2, this has Togusa and the Section 9 team following the same case from different ends – which eventually has Togusa joining Section 9 as its only unaugmented team member.
I bought up as many of the films I could in Johnnie To’s filmography after he criticised Hong Kong’s national security regulation in an interview, which was likely to be the kiss of death to his film career. I finally got around to watching one of his best known films PTU and the series of Tactical Unit films that came from the same universe.
PTU: One of the paradoxes of Hong Kong is the prevalence of triad and corruption dramas, compared to the real life which whilst not crime and corruption free is much more staid. Hong Kong is as different from its cinematic counterpart, as the UK is to Richard Curtis’ films. PTU like Akira Kurosawa’s Stray Dog is based around the search for a missing police pistol. PTU (police tactical unit) officers look to help out a detective from the OCTB (organised crime and triad bureau). While the film occurs over one night, it was actually shot over three years and is one of Johnnie To’s best known films. Shooting only at night, To provided the audience with a familiar, yet different, cinematic experience. The washed out colours of day time Hong Kong is replaced by vibrant signage and the sharp shadows defined by the street lighting. Officers walking with a street lamp lit Tom Lee music instrument store behind them, look like its from a John Ford scene in composition. Some of his tracking shots, due to the framing of photography and the distortions of the night give an almost Inception like feeling to the geography of Hong Kong streets, warping the horizon between buildings the night sky. PTU was successful internationally and then spawned, five further films from the same universe made in 2008 and 2009.
Tactical Unit: The Code was a one of a series of Tactical Unit sequels to Johnnie To’s PTU. In The Code several plot lines come together. The investigation of CCTV footage of officers beating up a triad , a police officer heavily in debt due to negative equity on his mortgage and a drug deal gone wrong. All this plays out in the Kowloon area of Hong Kong. When this film was made back in 2008, it would have been considered well done, but largely unremarkable. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.
Tactical Unit: Human Nature loses some of the cinematic feel of PTU. It’s not as masterful a film , BUT, the convoluted threads of the plot and the great cast who are now completely comfortable in their characters make it work well.
Tactical Unit: No Way Out. No Way Out starts with an impressive screne shot in Temple Street market. The film explores the Temple Street area of Kowloon and organised crime links to everything from cigarette smuggling to drugs.
Tactical Unit: Comrade in Arms is the penultimate in the series from the PTU universe of films. You still have the main cast of Hong Kong veterans Lam Suet, Simon Yam and Maggie Shiu. Plain clothes officer Lo Sa has been demoted to wearing a uniform and both Mike Ho and Sergeant Kat’s squads are still patrolling the Kowloon side of Victoria harbour. This sees the stars leave their usual urban beat and go into the hills of the New Territories after bank robbers. Much of it occurs in daylight, which sets it apart from the night time beat of PTU. Nowadays it couldn’t be made as it would in breach of the National Security Law. The irony is that this film is available on the iQiyi streaming service from mainland China.
Tactical Unit: Partners. Partners is unusual in that it revolves around the challenges of the ethnic minorities that make up Hong Kong from romance fraud ensnaring filipina workers to discrimination against Indians and Nepalis. While some of the show happens during late on in the day, it still captures much of the night time feeling of the universe
2001 Nightsis a 3D anime. While I admire the ambition and the technical expertise that went into the models, the characters as CGI fall down and distract from the storytelling. Also it felt weirdly like Space 1999 – and not in a good way.
Her Vengeance is a Hong Kong category III revenge movie filmed in 1988 that 88 Films recently release on Blu Ray. It borrows from another Hong Kong film in the early 1970s and I Spit On Your Grave. Despite being an low budget exploitation film it features a number of notable Hong Kong actors, probably because it was a Golden Harvest Production.
I found the film interesting because its opening was shot at Stanley Ho’s iconic Casino Lisboa in Macau. This was unusual because Hong Kong had lots of nightclubs that would have been fine for the protagonists management role without the hassle of the additional travel and government permissions. So we get a rare late 1980s snapshot of the then Portuguese colony.
When The Last Sword Is Drawnis a classic chambara (samurai sword-play) movie. It tells the complex story of a samurai, who unable to support his family on his meagre income as a school teacher and fencing master, turns his back on his clan and leaves to find work in Kyoto. Once in Kyoto he becomes embroiled in the battle between the declining Takagawa Shogunate and the Imperial Royal Family during the 19th century. Whilst the film does contain a lot of violence, it is used as a backdrop to the humanity of the main character and battles he faces between providing for his family and doing the honourable thing.
The plot is told through the recollections of others and finishes with the samurai’s youngest daughter getting ready to leave Japan with her husband and set up a doctor’s surgery in Manchuria (China).
Useful tools.
Playing Blu-Ray discs on a Mac
I have a Blu Ray player in my home theatre that enjoy using in lieu of subscribing to Netflix, which allows to me to explore more art house content than I can stream. Macgo Mac Blu Ray Player Pro gives your Mac the software capability that Steve Jobs wouldn’t.
One final thing, if you prefer to use Substack, you can now subscribe to this newsletter there.
The sales pitch.
I am currently working on a brand and creative strategy engagement at Google’s internal creative agency. I am now taking bookings for strategic engagements from the start of 2026 – keep me in mind; or get in touch for discussions on permanent roles. Contact me here.
Ok this is the end of my September 2025 newsletter, I hope to see you all back here again in a month. Be excellent to each other and get planning for Hallowe’en.
Don’t forget to share if you found it useful, interesting or insightful.
Your Life is Manufactured is written by Tim Minshall. Minshall is the professor of innovation at the University of Cambridge. He runs the Engineering department’s manufacturing research centre, so has a mastery of his domain. This is immediately obvious from his book, which he manages to write as an exceptionally accessible guide to what manufacturing is, how it is done and hints at why it’s important.
Before getting into the book to understand why it was so popular, I had a number of questions about the book:
What was Your Life is Manufactured purpose as a book?
Your Life is Manufactured looked to demystify how stuff is made. The book whilst accessible is aimed at adults and older children. Minshall keeps things very simple, only once touching on subject matter knowledge name-checking Japanese academic Noriaki Kano‘s work with a very simplified explanation of some of the principles of the Kano model of customer satisfaction.
His explanation as to why manufacturing is important is basically because everything around us is made. He avoids the economic reasons including:
Increased economic productivity
Increased growth
Widespread employment for skilled workers
The national security adjacent area of resilience
All of which are very important, pertinent points for the UK. Minshall’s choices about what he left out of Your Life is Manufactured is as interesting as what he left in. Whilst the book deplatforms the romantic notions of many environmentalists, Minshall assiduously avoids political territories.
Why is it needed?
When I was a child, I remember other children in my primary school didn’t know that milk came from a cow. They had no idea what happened before the jug of milk appeared in the fridge of their local supermarket. Urban living had divorced many people from nature.
I spent a good deal of my time on a small holding in the west of Ireland as a child, so got to see a cow being milked and the creamery tanker taking away from the milk from the churn to be processed. For those who hadn’t seen this process, city farms started to spring up as educational aids giving a basic if romantic view of farming life.
But we all had an intuitive view of what manufacturing was. While it seems arcane now Unilever’s local factory used to blow a steam whistle signalling the changing of a shift across its large industrial site. It marked the time when I set out around the corner to infant school.
Early on Sunday morning, there was a sharp blast which signalled the weekly cleaning out of the boilers, steam and smoke bellowed into the sky followed by the distinctive smell of the boilers contents.
There were similar sirens at the local shipyards and at other factories. Ships carrying cargo would regularly sound their fog horns. Lorries trundled in and out of factory gates and along nearby roads.
Large factories like the Shell Stanlow oil refinery, the Bowater paper mill and the Vauxhall car plant held open days where workers would take friends and family around the plant showing them what it did and inspiring young minds. Years later, as a student, one of my jobs was running the visitors centre for a terminal that processed natural gas.
There was innate curiosity about how things were made. I still have my collection of ‘How It Works’ encyclopedia that I had as a child. My parents sold the original early 1970s part works series in a cardboard box that my Dad had collected and sparked my interest in the version I now have, which we upgrade to when I was still in primary school.
During my career, I have seen several manufacturing processes including a giant printing works in Shenzhen, the infamous Foxconn factory complex and Global Foundries Dresden semiconductor fab.
Now with globalisation and delivery to the door many children of all ages are completely divorced from the means of production. Your Life is Manufactured is a small step in what would need to be a larger process to ground the general public in manufacturing and why it’s important, yet fragile.
Overall thoughts
That Your Life is Manufactured is considered a business book of note, says a lot about how deeply the British people are separated from how things are made – and that’s a frightening thought. Minshall’s book is a good first step in opening up British minds about manufacturing and its requirement of a place in our society. It’s immensely readable and woke me up to the collective ignorance surrounding me.
