The bicycle example is a good one in that regard. Clearly bicycles can be easily made for the mass market but getting distribution is an entirely different matter. For that you need a distributor who has distribution to lots of retailers and can provide the warranty and marketing for the product.

With the aforementioned example, the USP of the bicycle designed for the British market comes down to four holes. Bicycles designed for California do not need mudguards, in the UK we have rain and therefore mudguards matter. So get the four holes needed to accommodate mudguards and you can fairly claim that the bicycle is designed for the UK.

The rest of the bicycle product is a matter of specification, the parts are Japanese designed Shimano for the middle market (where there is sales volume and sufficient margin on units sold) and the general idea is to skimp on them and put Chinese/Taiwan made parts where the customer does not notice, e.g. the headset and bottom bracket bearings.

What has changed recently is that distributors no longer need retailers. So the brand website is nowadays with buy now buttons instead of 'find a shop' buttons. So long as the brand does not undercut retail all is good, but when shipping to the customer's door is free the local retailer is still at a competitive disadvantage. Bicycles are one of the few products hanging on, you can't sell electronics through a retail distribution model these days in the UK if you are a specialist brand, the High Street has died and you are not going to have stockists for something like a hobby level drone. With a bicycle you still need someone local to assemble it for the customer.

Where is gets interesting is when you have brands that go bust and get bought by Chinese companies. For instance, the company that made black cabs for the UK market went bust and now that is owned by Geely. They are doing great things to make the black cab electric, however, you can bet that the motor is not going to be wound in Coventry, even if the final production line assembly is done in Coventry. Same with Volvo. None of the electric Volvo cars are going to be made in Sweden by real Swedish people, they might change a few hub caps and do things that dealers used to do to cars, e.g. adding a rear spoiler and speed stripes for the 'sports' model, but the brand will be fine without it being a 'Chinese Volvo'.

In the deluxe car brands market there are things like Bentley, costing $$$,$$$ with the tank sized thing made in Eastern Europe, not Crewe. Or Jaguar Land Rover, you know that their electric cars are going to come from a contract manufacturer and not the West Midlands. But the buyers will be fine with that and wear the posh car badge as if there is nothing going on.

So long as the product has innovated and is new then everyone is happy. With British Leyland (Rover) it did not work out that way, we ended up with fake Rover cars made in China from scratchy plastics with lame engines and no crash protection that nobody in the UK wanted to touch.

The enemy in all of this is not crafty Chinese people stealing our IP it is the property speculator and the government that puts the land owning people at the top of the food chain. There have been four decades of policies that put the property speculators first so the only way to make money in the UK is through rent seeking. This works out if you can get a Ponzi scheme going but eventually it becomes impossible to have people doing things like teaching, working in shops or anything else that the rich actually need. The servants get priced out of their one-bedroom flats and cannot afford to buy.

But, we can pretend otherwise and wage war on China, selling munitions to Saudi Arabia to balance out the government books.