Ashton Udall
As a founding partner at Global Sourcing Specialists, Ashton Udall has led numerous product development and sourcing projects for clients across a wide array of product categories. In several client engagements, he has helped clients develop products, source manufacturing, and ramp their supply chains to support growth from the start-up stage to selling product lines through national and international retailers. Ashton has shared his international manufacturing expertise on seminar panels and as guest lecturer at Stanford University, the Industrial Designers Society of America, and led workshops with the Inventors Alliance of Silicon Valley, and Young Inventors International.
Prior to Global Sourcing Specialists, Ashton helped lead the establishment of a United States office for a Chinese trade and manufacturing company. He has worked closely with engineering, sourcing, and quality assurance teams inside Chinese offices, and has trade-related experience in China, Vietnam, and Indonesia.
Prior to the manufacturing and sourcing industries, Ashton conducted international trade policy research at the East–West Center, a research policy think–tank in Honolulu, Hawaii. While there, he worked with international teams of government officials and trade policy researchers on various trade projects concerning the Asia–Pacific region, including a U.S. Trade Representative sponsored study regarding the development of a U.S.-Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Trade Agreement.
Ashton has an MBA from Santa Clara University, an MA in Asian Studies from the University of Hawaii, and was a fellow in the Asia–Pacific Leadership Program at the East-West Center in Hawaii. He is a published author in the psychology Journal of Social Cognition and is proficient in the Indonesian language.