My last piece looked at the direct-versus-dealer question for the big contract furniture brands. But underneath that decision sits a bigger one, the one that actually determines whether a manufacturer wins or loses business day to day: how do you build a supply strategy that lets you genuinely serve the customer, market by market, in a region as fragmented as APAC.
It’s tempting to treat this as a logistics problem. It isn’t, not really. Inventory, manufacturing location and dealer partnerships are the mechanics. The real question is simpler and harder: can you show up for a client in Jakarta the same way you show up for one in Singapore, when the two markets have almost nothing in common operationally.
Few regions pack in this much variation
Across my time working in this region, the thing that never stops surprising newer entrants is how little “APAC” behaves like a single market. What works in Singapore doesn’t translate to Jakarta, what works in Sydney doesn’t translate to Bangalore. A leadtime promise that’s easy to keep in one country is a liability in another, and local codes for materials or electricals vary widely enough that a compliant product in one market can be a headache in the next. Build one model and roll it out everywhere, and the region will find the gaps in it for you.
Earned, not copied
Manufacturers who’ve been here 30+ years didn’t arrive with an elegant supply chain, they built one market by market, usually the expensive way with deep pockets for global expansion at the time. What you see today, a blend of in-region manufacturing, imported stock, local warehousing and shared inventory management with distributors, is really a customer service system. Every layer exists because a client somewhere needed something faster, more reliably or more compliantly than the last setup delivered. That’s not a model you can copy on day one, it’s one you need to earn and build over many years.
The hard call for new entrants
For a brand entering APAC now, local manufacturing rarely makes sense from the outset, the volumes aren’t there and product strategies also need to be tested. Of course the customer cares about value, but they also care whether you can compete on leadtime for the day-to-day business, not just the project you had months to plan for. So the real question isn’t where to manufacture or stock, it’s what the customer needs from you before you’ve earned the right to build more infrastructure, and what’s the leanest strategy that still delivers that.
One overlooked lever: you don’t always have to compete for everything from day one. Being deliberately selective, favouring and targeting larger strategic project business over day-to-day spot orders, is a sensible way to test a market. Project leadtimes are built into the programme, which buys room to ship at scale rather than holding stock against demand you can’t yet forecast. You walk past faster-turning business, but for a new entrant that’s often the right trade.
What actually shapes the strategy
Beyond that, a few things new entrants underestimate, each a customer-facing risk in disguise:
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- Scale and labour cost. Local warehousing only makes sense above a certain volume, below it the customer feels it in your pricing or service.
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- Cross-border complexity. Money and goods often cross borders separately, transfer pricing and currency on one side, import duties and customs delays on the other, both eventually showing up as a missed leadtime and/or a hit on margins.
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- Logistics maturity. Where local third-party providers aren’t reliable, that reliability has to be actively managed, or the customer finds out the hard way.
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- Storage environment. Humidity as an example is a challenge, timber and upholstery don’t tolerate poor storage, and damaged stock costs you the delivery date promised, not to mention the cost of correction.
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- Local code and compliance. A range compliant in one country can be dead stock in the next until modified.
None of these are dealbreakers alone, but stack them together and it’s clear why established brands run a deliberately blended model, tuned to what each market’s customer actually needs.
Why the answer is usually sub-regional
Some have made the mistake of trying to solve this country by country, when the better answer is sub-regional. A hub chosen for logistics maturity, trade infrastructure and storage conditions, serving three or four markets, does more for consistent customer experience than a warehouse in every country you sell into. Eg. Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia and increasingly Vietnam get used this way, not because they’re the biggest end-markets, but because they de-risk the parts of this equation that are hardest to fix under pressure.
The strategy evolves
Whatever model a new entrant lands on isn’t the one they’ll run in five years. As the business earns volume and trust, a hub-and-spoke approach can grow into local assembly, then eventually in-region manufacturing, the same trajectory the established brands went through decades ago. The point was never to get the “right” model from day one, it’s to build one that’s honest about what you can deliver now, with room to grow. Distribution, inventory and manufacturing get discussed separately, but they’re really one conversation: what it takes to serve this customer, in this market, reliably.
The leadership this actually needs
None of this executes itself, and this is where I’ll put my recruiter’s hat back on. Getting it right isn’t a supply chain hire or a sales hire, it’s a leadership role that sits across both, commercially minded enough to judge which opportunities are worth chasing, operationally grounded enough to understand what that judgment costs on the ground.
What matters more than any specific skillset is a tolerance for ambiguity. A leader who needs a fixed model to feel confident will either move too slowly, or lock in a structure the business outgrows. The successful leaders treat the model as a live decision, and hold the customer, the supply chain and the wider market as one picture rather than three separate briefs. That’s a rarer profile than most job descriptions capture, and it’s exactly the kind of role where getting the hire right matters as much as getting the strategy right.
