OEM isn’t the problem. Outsourcing product judgment is
A pair of earbuds selling for £35 in a UK retailer and a pair selling for £150 often come off production lines a few streets apart in Shenzhen. Distributors, brand owners, and private-label operators file through the same factory gates, drawing on the same component suppliers, sometimes the same assembly staff. The gap between a forgettable product and a category leader has more to do with who decided what went into the box than which factory assembled it.
Timur Mustafaev has spent the better part of a decade on both sides of that decision. Proove, the company he founded, designs and distributes consumer electronics across categories including audio devices, gaming peripherals, and electric scooters. Before starting it, Mustafaev ran distribution for Chinese-manufactured consumer electronics brands across Ukraine, watching how those companies made product decisions from thousands of miles away. He traced the pattern he kept seeing back to how those companies communicated between markets rather than to how they manufactured.
“We distributed brands that had strong engineering and strong budgets, and they still moved slowly and misread what the market wanted,” Mustafaev says. “The people deciding what to build sat too far from the people making it, and further still from the people buying it.”
That observation shaped how Proove was built. The company now holds a leading position in several consumer electronics categories across Ukraine. It has expanded distribution to dozens of countries, competing directly against established Chinese and international players on the same shelves. Roughly 60 to 70% of its portfolio runs through original equipment manufacturing or original design manufacturing (OEM/ODM), meaning products are built by a factory to a brand’s specification rather than developed in-house from scratch. It’s the same arrangement critics point to when they dismiss a brand as a reseller with a logo.
Mustafaev pushes back on that framing.
“Anyone can find a factory and put their name on a product. There are thousands of brands doing exactly that. The difference is whether you have a system that decides what to make, or whether you’re taking whatever the supplier offers you and hoping it sells,” he says.
A ten-component decision
He walks through the logic using a familiar product. A pair of wireless earbuds is built from roughly ten components: the housing, the driver, the microphone, the battery, the charging case, the firmware controlling sound tuning and battery management. Each component can be upgraded, and each upgrade adds cost. A brand competing at £35 retail cannot include everything a £150 pair from an established name offers.
“The skill is in choosing which two or three things change how the product feels to use, and leaving the rest alone,” Mustafaev says.
Proove built an equaliser that adjusts automatically based on the genre of music playing, a feature the team applied to a product priced well below where such calibration usually appears. That single upgrade lets the product compete on perceived quality within its price bracket, without matching the production cost of a flagship device.
The same logic applies across categories with very different engineering demands. In electric scooters, Proove operates in what Mustafaev calls the second tier of the market, behind brands like Xiaomi and Segway that dominate through scale and brand recognition. Xiaomi and Segway hold roughly 60% of the Ukrainian market, with the remaining 40% split among lower-priced brands. Proove has captured about half of that second tier, selling scooters at roughly $300 against the $500 retail price of the market leaders. The team studies what a scooter at that lower price point can credibly include: motor performance, suspension, battery range, companion software, and where corners can be cut without customers noticing, rather than competing on features those larger companies already own.
The approach relies on a working relationship between people who understand what a specific market wants to buy and people who understand what a specific factory floor can produce at a given price, rather than on proprietary technology. Mustafaev points to Proove’s Shenzhen office, staffed entirely by local hires rather than a layer of intermediaries, as the mechanism that makes this possible. Decisions about component trade-offs happen through direct conversation between the commercial and production teams, not through a spec sheet handed off and revisited months later.
Where the UK gap sits
The distinction matters for the UK specifically. The UK Innovation Report 2026, published by Cambridge Industrial Innovation Policy at the University of Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing, describes a persistent scale-up gap: strong research output and start-up formation that fails to convert into industrial competitiveness, export performance or manufacturing capacity. The report warns that the UK risks becoming “the lab of the world,” generating knowledge that gets built into products elsewhere.
Imperial College London responded to a version of this problem in March 2026 by launching Grapht Works, its first dedicated pilot and demonstration manufacturing facility, built specifically to help deep tech ventures move from R&D into repeatable production without leaving London.
The skill Mustafaev describes sits at that same junction. Turning a working prototype into a product a factory can build repeatedly, at a price a retailer can sell and a customer will pay, requires someone fluent in both product strategy and manufacturing constraints. China remains one of the primary manufacturing bases available to UK technology companies, and the facilities now opening to close the R&D-to-production gap are building the same kind of bridge Mustafaev has spent years operating. There’s a second layer to this shift. Since 29 April 2024, the UK’s Product Security and Telecommunications Infrastructure Act has required manufacturers of connectable consumer products to meet baseline security standards, extending responsibility beyond the point of sale into a device’s ongoing software life. Proove’s own trajectory, from physical hardware toward companion apps and firmware-managed features such as its gaming peripherals software, follows the same shift: a product’s value keeps accruing after it ships.
What this means for founders manufacturing abroad
Mustafaev’s experience points to a few practical checks for founders weighing overseas production:
- Ask who in the chain has the authority to decide what the product becomes, rather than whether the arrangement is OEM or proprietary. The label on the contract predicts less than where the decision-making happens.
- Watch where feature, price and segment calls get made. If a factory or an agent proposes the specification and the brand mostly approves or declines it, product judgment has already moved outside the company.
- Treat direct communication with the manufacturing team as a baseline requirement, not a step reserved for companies operating at scale. A founder shipping a first production run faces the same choice on a smaller budget: build a direct line into the process, or rely on whoever is easiest to reach.
None of these checks requires a bigger budget or a bigger team. They require someone in the company willing to sit with the factory and argue over which ten components matter, instead of signing off on whatever comes back first.
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