Topumbrella Turns 20: Team Celebration at Nankun Mountain

Company Milestone · 20th Anniversary

The full Topumbrella team at Nankun Mountain (南昆山), Huizhou, Guangdong — celebrating 20 years together.

Twenty Years — and a Day in the Mountains to Mark It

In 2006, Simon started Topumbrella with a single conviction: that craftsmanship, honesty, and a genuine care for the people doing the work were the only sustainable foundations for a manufacturing business. Twenty years later, that conviction has shaped everything — the quality of what we make, the relationships we have with our clients, and the culture inside our factories.

To mark the occasion, we did what felt most right: we closed the factory for a day, gathered the entire team — from both our Huizhou, China and Cambodia operations — and headed into the mountains together. The destination was Nankun Mountain (南昆山), one of Guangdong province's most scenic nature reserves, tucked into the hills of Huizhou just a short drive from our China facility. There was no agenda beyond a good day out — mountain air, a barbecue, and time to simply be together outside of the production floor.

This post is a record of that day. It is also, in a small way, a reflection on what twenty years of making umbrellas has actually meant.

The Day: Mountains, Barbecue, and People Who Have Earned It

Nankun Mountain is the kind of place that makes it easy to feel perspective. Waterfalls, dense subtropical forest, clean air, and ridgelines that remind you how small any single factory floor really is. The team arrived in the morning, split into groups, and made their way through the trails — some hiking higher into the reserve, others exploring the valley paths along the streams.

Barbecue at the mountain — the most reliable team-building activity there is.

By midday the barbecue was lit. There is something quietly equalising about a group of people standing around a grill together — production line workers, managers, designers, sales team — all doing the same thing, which is waiting for the food to be ready and talking about nothing in particular. That is exactly the kind of afternoon it was.

The lush mountain scenery of Nankun Mountain — subtropical forest, streams, and clean air, just a short drive from our Huizhou factory.

For many team members, this was the first time they had spent time with colleagues outside of the factory in the years they had been with us. For others, it was a reunion with faces they had not seen since before the Cambodia facility opened. Either way, the afternoon had the particular quality of time well spent — the kind you remember not because anything significant happened, but because it simply felt good to be there.

What Twenty Years Actually Means

The Topumbrella team 

Twenty years in manufacturing is not measured primarily in production volume or revenue — it is measured in what you have learned, and in the relationships that have accumulated on both sides of every transaction. We have worked with clients who were placing their first-ever OEM order and didn't know quite what they needed, and we have walked alongside some of them as they grew into significant global brands. We have seen trade policies change, shipping costs spike and fall, material trends come and go, and compliance requirements become substantially more serious. Through all of it, the core of what we do has remained the same: make a well-constructed umbrella, stand behind it, and be honest about what we can and cannot do.

The team that gathered on the mountain this year includes people who were with us in 2006, and people who joined us in 2025. Some have sewed thousands of umbrella canopies. Some have run quality inspections on tens of thousands of finished products. Some have spent years managing shipments to clients they have never met in person, building trust across time zones and language differences through nothing more than consistent follow-through. They are the reason any of this is possible, and the day at Nankun Mountain was first and foremost for them.

For our clients — past, present, and those we have not yet worked with — thank you for being part of twenty years of this. The next twenty start now.

About Topumbrella