Silkdrive

Founded in 2015 and led by Patric Sawada, Silkdrive is a small growth marketing agency based in Amsterdam that focuses specifically on the corridor between Europe and East Asia. Its client base spans founders through to enterprise marketing teams across roughly 30 industries, including retail, automotive, energy, life sciences and logistics, all looking to expand in either direction between the two regions. The agency positions itself around cross-cultural expertise, market-entry planning and hands-on campaign execution rather than pure advisory work, and it operates in English, Dutch and Japanese. Services cover international digital marketing execution — including SEO, paid media, social and performance campaigns — alongside cross-cultural insights, localisation and cultural-adaptation work, growth marketing and market-entry strategy, and training or coaching programmes such as executive coaching and market-entry webinars. Its stated working method follows three stages: connecting clients with local market experts, adapting product, messaging and channels to how buyers actually behave in a given market rather than translating home-market campaigns, and then running and optimising live campaigns. Engagements are offered in several formats, including scoped project sprints, three-hour cross-cultural training workshops, a part-time fractional CMO arrangement, and a lighter monthly advisory retainer. All engagements are founder-led, with Patric Sawada supported by a network of vetted local experts, including cross-cultural training input from Takashi Kawatani of the Diversity Management Institute in Tokyo.