The China Experts: Adam Sandzer of Hot Pot China on Distributors, Retail and What the Market Really Looks Like
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
In this episode of The China Experts, Kristina Koehler-Coluccia is joined by Adam Sandzer, Head of Commercial Strategy at Hot Pot China. Adam spent the best part of a decade in China building Speedo's business for Pentland Brands, first from inside someone else's distribution company and later as part of the team that took the business direct. He had also been back in China the week before this recording for the first time since 2019, which makes the second half of the conversation an unusually current read on what the market actually feels like on the ground.
Who is Adam Sandzer?
Adam Sandzer is Head of Commercial Strategy at Hot Pot China, a consultancy that helps global brands enter and grow in the Chinese market on both the brand and marketing side and the commercial side. He has worked with China for more than fifteen years, covering business modelling, financial planning, partner sourcing and partner management. He studied management with Chinese studies at the University of Nottingham, spent time at its Ningbo campus, and lived in China for roughly ten years across Ningbo, Beijing, Shanghai and Hangzhou. Before Hot Pot he spent eight years at Pentland Brands, mostly on Speedo. He is now based in the UK.
What this episode covers
How a last-minute change of university degree turned into a decade in China
Being embedded inside a Chinese distributor who assumed he had been sent to spy on them
Why he insisted on working a shop floor in Shanghai, and what he learned there
The Decathlon store observation that saved the account for another two years
How the business was taken direct in phases, and the thirty days that followed
What China looked and felt like on his first trip back after the pandemic
Why he thinks Double 11 has lost its magic, and what may replace it
What he would tell a brand to do in its first week on the ground
A change of degree that turned into a decade
Adam's route in was, by his own account, fairly random. An economics teacher who returned to China in almost every lesson, a gap-year trip on which he kept running into large Chinese tour groups, and then a course catalogue at Nottingham where management studies looked dull and management with Chinese studies did not. He changed his degree in the administration office rather than celebrating in the pub, and the second year on the Ningbo campus followed. His first Beijing experience was teaching at an English summer camp at Tsinghua in 2006, living in the dorms and eating in the student canteen.
He graduated into the 2008 financial crisis, took a research role at a private equity firm, put himself back into intensive language school for six months and taught English to cover the rent. Pentland then brought him back to the UK for eighteen months to learn the business properly before sending him out. That delay matters more than it looks: by the time he arrived, the company had someone on the ground it already knew and trusted, rather than a name it saw two or three times a year.
Winning trust inside someone else's distribution business
The hardest part of the job was not the market, it was the introduction. Adam arrived in a high-profile role and had to earn credibility with senior stakeholders who had no reason to take a graduate seriously, and then embed himself inside a Chinese distribution partner whose immediate assumption was that he had been sent to spy on them.
His account of how that thawed is disarmingly ordinary. He introduced himself in Mandarin, mentioned that in England people say something they like, and a sales colleague shouted out that Adam likes eating tofu, having heard he was vegetarian. He rolled with it and became Mr Tofu. More importantly, he travelled with them anywhere they went, ate what they ate, and sat through the dinners with their own customers. In time they decided a foreign face was useful in negotiations, and he became an asset rather than a threat.
What made the relationship work in both directions is that he carried real information home. The distributor told him the women's swimwear range was not good enough, that there was a quality problem with goggles, and that online was about to take off, and he went back to headquarters and unlocked resources against those points. That is the part most brands miss when they treat a distributor as a channel rather than a source of market intelligence.
Why he worked a shop floor
Early on, Adam insisted on selling in a retail store in Shanghai, which even the distributor found strange because none of their own management would have done it. The payoff came quickly. A customer came in for flip-flops for his daughter during the Olympics, Adam pointed out the Olympic-inspired collection, and the man left with a full set for himself, his wife and his daughter.
The sharper example came later, with Decathlon. The account was leaning towards dropping international brands in favour of its own labels, so Adam went and stood next to the goggles display in several cities and watched. Shoppers repeatedly picked up the Speedo goggle, tried it on, and then bought the own-brand one. His argument to the buyer was that the branded product was anchoring the category, and it kept the business for another year or two. He notes with some pride that Speedo outlasted Nike and Adidas on that shelf.
He also has a useful observation about how retail has changed. Store staff who once greeted you enthusiastically are now often looking at their phones, which initially read as rude until he realised the real selling is happening on WeChat with private clients. Customer service in China, as he puts it, now arrives with an emoji.
Taking the business direct, in phases
There was never a single board meeting where the company decided to go it alone. Control was taken in stages: product first, so the range suited the market; then brand execution and campaigns online, offline and in store; then e-commerce, because the platforms had turned into a race to the bottom with everyone selling the same product. The distributor was content to keep the offline wholesale business until online was taken away, at which point the emotional pull of the exciting channel had gone and they chose to exit.
That left roughly thirty days to convert about sixty wholesale customers into direct relationships. Adam picked the top twenty by sales performance and travelled the country with a Chinese colleague to sign them up directly, which most of them welcomed because it improved their margin. A subsidiary followed, with rapid hiring behind it.
That sequence is the practical heart of the episode for anyone considering the same move. The moment a brand takes online direct, it needs an entity that can invoice, employ and hold the platform relationships, which is what China company registration is for. It also needs the brand itself secured before that visibility arrives, and because China awards rights to whoever files first, trademark registration in China should be settled well before the first direct campaign.
Staffing is the other half. Building a subsidiary team at speed is a recruitment in China problem before it is anything else, and where people are needed before the entity is trading, employer-of-record hiring covers the gap. Once the team is on the books, cloud payroll services handle the monthly contributions, and the new entity carries its own cloud accounting and financial reporting and annual tax and audit obligations.
What he found on his first trip back
Adam is honest that he was nervous before travelling, more nervous than he had ever been about a country he used to fly to without a second thought, largely because of what he had been reading. What he found did not match it. He describes a buzz in retail and in meetings, better facilities, a higher calibre of people, and ambition still very much intact. He also found the place noticeably more orderly, down to neatly parked rows of new bicycles.
On the practical side he rates the digital experience as the best he has had. An eSIM worked seamlessly, Alipay and WeChat handled payments, Baidu Maps and Didi handled getting around, and he did not need a local colleague to help him function. He still had leftover cash and found people would take it, though nobody has change. His broader point is that he had kept in weekly or monthly contact with people throughout the closed years, so almost nothing he saw surprised him.
He is careful not to overclaim. The economy has slowed, as it has elsewhere, and the difference is mainly that China used to be the exception. Consumers are being more selective, which he reads as sophistication rather than collapse, and savings remain substantial. His conclusion is that the narrative that foreigners and foreign brands are no longer wanted was, in his experience, simply wrong.
Double 11 is losing its magic
Adam watched the numbers come in from a Tmall partner's office in 2012 and calls it a formative part of his China career, which makes his current read more striking. He landed in Shanghai on Double 11 and heard almost nothing about it. He saw no signage, and at dinner he was the one raising the subject.
His diagnosis is that the discount-driven model stopped working. Brands treated the day as a loss leader on the theory that they would acquire customers who bought through the year, but those customers simply waited for 618 and then for Double 11 again. Meanwhile offline still accounts for the majority of sales in most categories, WeChat private traffic feeding offline purchases may be both more popular and more profitable, and Tmall is expensive to operate on. He expects the festival to survive next year but is genuinely unsure about two or three years out, and he thinks category days and more targeted spotlighting may be where the attention goes.
What he would tell a brand to do on the ground
Asked what a brand should actually do on a first trip, his answer is refreshingly unstrategic. Visit retail, including the malls where your global competitors and the local brands sit. Talk to store staff. Watch consumers rather than just counting them. Visit your Tmall partner and, if you can, the platforms themselves in Hangzhou or Shenzhen. Meet agencies to get a feel for the creative scene. Then walk, ride the subway, wander through airport duty free, and leave yourself time to sit and reflect on what you saw.
His closing advice to his younger self is to pack for all seasons, and, more seriously, to get involved rather than hold back. The moments he half-committed to are the ones he would take back; the ones he threw himself into turned out to be the best experiences he had.
Watch the full interview
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