career Biography
JPproductservices was founded by John Pitts, he comes from humble beginnings in northern England, through perseverance and passion he has have bettered himself, becoming the first member of his family to go to university or live abroad, he has traveled the globe and in the process learned a great deal having become in the process, a world-class Product Developer
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He has setup, built up, or restructured ID, R&D, Development, Engineering, NPI, and Automation across multiple companies over the last 13 years to a budget and on time
Early Beginnings
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Originally from Leeds, England. John grew up enjoying tinkering with models and electronic sets along with writing stories and drawing.
He was first exposed to Design Technology in high school, which allowed him to work in a workshop. This fast became his favorite part of school and allowed him to make things he could imagine
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This continued into college where John made his own furniture and learned how to lathe, and weld, learning about material properties by actually using the materials
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After working for 2 years to raise funds, it became clear that 'normal' jobs would not be interesting to him and the only thing that had ever kept his interest was Design Technology so he decided to pursue this, studying BSc (HONS) Product Design at Nottingham Trent University
Finding direction
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In John's 3rd year of study, he took part in the ERASMUS student exchange program and traveled to Copenhagen to 'Design a Pico Satelite' this was his first foreign adventure and he learned from 60+ students all of whom spoke English as a 2nd or 3rd language making John (the only natural English speaker) everyone's translator, this forced him out of my comfort zone and helped me learn about peoples and cultures from around the world, this ignited an interest that he has pursued throughout the rest of my life
While designing the satellite, he was the only student to achieve a 100% passing grade having fully designed the satellite during his time and being the only member of the technical team to finish all work related to the project, a design which was followed throughout the remainder of AMSAT-OZ's Pico program
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After his Danish adventure, he found an internship in Holland to design Rehabilitation Aids for use mainly by patients who had walking mobility issues. During this, he traveled across Holland and produced Carbon Fiber samples by hand inside a professional medical supplier, a hands-on experience that again fuelled his desire to learn more
After returning to the UK and finishing his degree, John saw clearly he wanted to continue learning but had found the UK lacking in its ability to expand his knowledge base and he decided he wanted to design products that were real and that could be made. To do this John would have to go to the source, next stop, China!
Going deeper
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Cosmosupplylabs was a Swedish company that had become a main supplier of Apple Accessories, and given what John had learned at C2W they gave him an opportunity to help in the areas the company was lacking, mainly in Plastics.
His first project saw him travel to America to work with Apple on-site at their manufacturing base in Austin to produce the new Mac Pro.
His success in the first 6 months on this and other Apple projects saw him approached to begin the company's R&D department.
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John began and grew this on a shoestring budget to modernize the company's oldest factory, improve the companies tooling and expand its product, and customer base with a dedicated R&D team while also growing to run the factory's entire pre-production development team and become the company's lead technical sales representative with his final project being the Amazon Echo 2 Speaker
Taking the leap
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John was given an opportunity with China 2 West Services, a British sourcing and manufacturing consultancy in Zhuhai, China to join and begin their Design Division.
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Within his first week, he learned how tough it would be, working an 86-hour week to produce a full design development for a children's toy. It was this devotion that quickly saw the company ask John to start a Design Team, which proved successful and soon became an entire development division and then a sub-branch of the company - i2design.asia - that he ran entirely servicing dozens of customers simultaneously with a multinational multidiscipline team of 8 permanent staff and 4 interns which helped John process over 100 projects over a 3-year period
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However, John again found he had got to a point where he had learned all he could and to progress he needed a new challenge
Through the looking glass
John had come to the end of his learning experience at Cosmo and after consulting for OSM Group to train their PD managers he joined an exciting new startup, Bluesmart, which had invented a whole new product area, Smart Travel, through their invention of the world's first smart suitcase.
The team had never made a product before and had never worked in Asia, so John was brought on board to fix the product, raise the quality and expand the company's capabilities, which he did within 6 months.
He became the Head of Development and Asia Operations, reorganized the Asia side of the company, and developed the Black Edition and then Series 2, which required a whole new supply chain, new technology, and new materials and had to be achieved within 8 months on a tight budget, all of which we achieved.
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However, given the nature of the company's aims to be a technology company, not a luggage company, the US change to make Smart Suitcases tightly regulated the company was sold to Travelpro
It was Travelpro who John then consulted for, to review their product and supply chain along with their eco-planning for the next 2 years of products.
John began a Master's degree in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at HEC Paris simultaneously while continuing to consult for several companies covering FMCG, outdoor equipment, clothing, soft goods, technical goods and devices across multiple countries
Testing the Theory
Once John had completed his Master's, achieving over 90% for the entire program, he joined Brasport Group as their Regional Technical Director in charge of their 3 Asian facilities in Dongguan and Guilin, China along with their luxury facility in Bangkok, Thailand.
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Initially, he was in charge of all technical and quality areas of the company, after restructuring the teams and hiring additional staff he was able to focus on the product design and development teams.
John cut staff levels by 40% while adding ID and R&D capabilities, redeveloping the company's Soft Goods machines and tooling, and expanding their eco-materials knowledge, he also led the project to redevelop one facility from Engineered Soft Goods and into Elastomer Forming for Samsung and top European Luxury Fashion Brands like Mont Blanc and Givenchy.
During this, he also developed new tooling methods and processing to bring industry-leading practices for tooling and machines to increase the quality and efficiency of the product production
A little bit of everything
John left Brasport and joined Puzhen Life as their new Director of Product Development and began their push from leading Scent Diffuser producer for the world's largest Essential Oil companies and into an entirely new scope for the company in IoT Devices for life and well-being.
This required utilizing all the knowledge and skills he had developed throughout his career to be able to expand the company's technical capabilities, develop a completely new supply chain, and train the technical team to develop these new category devices within one year.
John achieved this before leaving the company at the end of 2022, ready for a new long-term challenge and adventure
2023 / 03 / 01