The Toymaker by Liam Pieper

Author:Liam Pieper
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781760142735
Publisher: Penguin Group Australia
Published: 2016-05-16T04:00:00+00:00

First he tried Marketing, told them he was working on a new project and asked them to work out exactly how much they could cut from the charitable spend of the organisation. The answer was distressingly low; all of it was intricately tied up with their tax return, and nothing could be spared. He would find no help there.

His next stop was the production department and Shubangi, the head of product. She was by far his favourite employee. She had a knack for taking his ideas, making them workable and then presenting them back to him as his own. Better, she seemed to genuinely like him. If anyone could help him out of this mess, it was Shubangi.

‘Oh, hey,’ she chirped as he walked in. ‘What brings you to visit us long-suffering elves in design?’

‘Can you keep a secret?’

‘Possibly. This secret of yours, is it expensive?’

‘Very.’

He explained that he needed to find fifty thousand dollars in savings for a new project he was working on, that he couldn’t talk about it, and asked what could be cut from production. Shubangi thought about it for a moment, brows knitted in concentration, then sucked air in through her teeth unhappily.

‘There’s not really much I can do, imports-wise,’ she said. As it was, the vast majority of the products they sold these days were not Mitty & Sarah designs at all. Instead, once a year, Shubangi handed Adam a catalogue of inexpensive toys from generic Chinese manufacturers that were predicted to trend in the coming season, he selected a bunch, and Shubangi sent away for them to be branded in Mitty & Sarah colours.

The idea was the same as when Arkady had made the switch from hand-carving the toys he sold to buying them from factories. The maths was simple: make a toy for fifty cents, sell it for a dollar; or better: buy it for ten cents from a factory in the developing world, and sell it in the first world for ten times that.

It was a business model that had worked for half a century, and had survived wars, outlasted the Soviets, outlasted even Communist China, the powerhouse that had quietly packed away its revolution and emerged the most savage capitalist state the world had ever known. In the end, there was no army, siege engine, weapon of war or ideology that conquered the world as effectively as the conglomerate. McDonald’s beat Machiavelli, every time.

Unfortunately for Adam, the system was eating its young. As the money the West had pumped into China started to reproduce and send back its seeds to buy up huge swathes of Western industry, production costs in China were on the rise. Now there was nowhere you could buy the toy you needed for the price you wanted. China was no longer desperate for wealth, and there was no fat left to cut.

Because of this, there were, Shubangi assured him, no expenses left to cannibalise. ‘Our only really unnecessary overhead is the original flagship Sarah doll, which is a huge production cost.

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