Name of Nominee: Ms Ho Ping Ping Name of company: Yapi Pte Ltd Name of Student Interviewer: Shahidah Bte Abu Date of interview: 19 th May 2017

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1 Name of Nominee: Ms Ho Ping Ping Name of company: Yapi Pte Ltd Name of Student Interviewer: Shahidah Bte Abu Date of interview: 19 th May 2017 Q1) What is the nature of your business? Nominee: We are in retail and wholesale of fashion ready to wear for ladies. We are planning to expand for men and children. Q2) When and why did you decide to become entrepreneur / take over your family? Nominee: I was working in the corporate world for 15 years after graduating from school. At that time I also started a young family. That s where I decided for better work life balance and more flexibility, I should considered trying out or starting a business on my own. Q3)Do your parents have their own business too? Nominee: No Q4) What inspired you to get into this industry? Nominee: In my 20 years working experience, I had always been doing retail management and brand management. It is naturally if I should start a business I would naturally go to retail. That s how I decided to challenge myself by starting a business on a very small scale. Q5) How did you put together all the resources need to start your business? (For example: getting the start-up capital, hiring staff, doing sales & marketing, advertising, etc.) Nominee: In the first 20 years of working, that where I had garnered all my resources. First of all I manage to save up a little bit of pocket money. I manage to have a very good network of business acquaintances, business associate and friends. That s the whole basis how I can start a business. A lot of the staff were ex colleagues or staff I used to work with. Marketing and advertising based on the connection and contact I had built over the years when I was working. All these have given me a very big heads up in starting a business. Q6) What are some interesting stories you have about your first few customers or first few years in business? Nominee: The first few years of business was interesting because I am my own boss and have to decide how I want to run a business, what directions we should go. In the first one to two years we had come across a very interesting customer. For an example, as we a new business, we had customers come in with complaints on quality of our garments. One particular incident where the customer came in claiming that our product has stained all her husband s clothes in the washing process and demanded that we pay for her husband s shirt. That was quite an unforgettable experience that I came across. Q7) What is your company vision and mission? Nominee: I started Clothier with the mission Dressing ladies in Singapore with classic cheongsam and Chinese Qipao that is made relevant to their modern lifestyle. This product had be of good quality, very well made, great value and everlasting. I had started the company on this mission and we are still keeping to it. Our vision is To grow the company into a brand that is recognisable both in Singapore and neighbouring country.

2 Q8) How do you communicate them to your employees? Nominee: We have a mission statement that we put in the selves. All staff are briefed with this mission statement during interview process or when they first start their orientation with us. During each staff meeting, we always recap on the company s mission and vision. Q9) What are some of the challenges you faced when you first went into business? Nominee: The biggest challenge would be creating brand awareness for a new brand, starting the whole infrastructure of staffing and logistics as well as the consistency of the product quality. Q10) How did you over these challenges? Please share some specific examples of the action you took to overcome the challenges. Nominee: For brand awareness, a lot of publicity has to be done in addition to the advertising that we had. In view of the high cost of advertising in Singapore, we have to do a lot of word of mouth publicity to create awareness with our products and level of customer service. In term of staffing, we had to be creative in our work arrangement so that we can recruit staff. In view of cost and resources constraint, we have to come up with the flexible work arrangement. We recruit staff that are willing to work on certain days per weeks. We put them together to cover the entire weeks work schedule. Generally we have to be creative in managing or overcoming this challenges given very limited resources. Q11) Can you share some of the lessons you learnt from overcoming your own business challenges that you think will help other businesses? Nominee: Having a very clear thinking process, knowing where your risk lies and managing our risk is very important. We must also have a very clear thought process. Even not doing anything should be the well-thought through decision. Q12) What are the biggest risk in business? Nominee: There are a lot of risk doing business. Financial risk, inventory risk and market risk. There is no one biggest risk. If there is one, the biggest risk would be not knowing our risk. Q13) What to you makes an effective leader? Nominee: An effective leader has to be one that has the balance of IQ and EQ. He or she would have to be very clear in what she is doing, what she wants to achieve and where she want to bring the team to. Q14) What do you think is the biggest factor for staff retention and motivation? Nominee: Staff would always be motivated with monetary incentives but that is not the only factor. The sense of wellness and security in the company that they are being taken care of is also very important. Q15) Are this methods practiced in your company? Nominee: Yes, I try to.

3 Q16) How do you think your business have made a positive impact or contribute to the community that you serve? Nominee: When we first started, we had a lot of difficulties in recruiting staff. To solve that problem we have to be creative about getting ladies to come into work. These ladies had left the industry because of family and had become redundant in the industry. They may not able to come back because of family commitment as well as being out of touch. We had invited ex colleagues and ex staff to come back to work with us giving them a very flexible work arrangement. We also let them try to get on back into retail customer s service area again. That s what we had done for the first few years that we started the business. In fact we had continue doing the same thing right up to now. We welcome back all the ladies that had left the retail industry for a couple of years. We welcome them back into our team with flexible working hours and longer orientation period. Q17) How green is your company? For e.g. recyclable product packaging, green web hosting, eco-friendly cleaning detergents recycling, energy saving lightbulbs etc Nominee: We are only in a retail business, we try to source for product that are eco-friendly. For example, eco-friendly organic dyes. Our carrier bags are reusable shopping bags. We encourage customers to come back with their own shopping bags. Q18) Can you describe the company culture that you have? How do you implement it? Nominee: I am a big believer of flexible work arrangement. I would like to give my team a sense of comfort and flexibility that they will be able to work with us, earning a salary, managing their family and fulfilling the roles of daughter or a wife and a mother. Q19) How does it contribute to the performance of your company growth? Nominee: The staff are a lot more motivated. They are happier because they now can manage both their work and family. They also now got their own private circle of friends not just be cooped up in with the household. The general well-being of the staff improve, productivity increase and they are happier working with the company. Q20) How do you deal with employees who have poor/fair work performance? Nominee: We try to coach them. If we really can t progress with coaching, it means that it is not a correct match between the staff and the company. Q21) What plan does the company have in term of expansion? Franchising opportunities, overseas expansion, additional branches. Nominee: Over the last 10 years, the company has taken in more franchise brand from overseas in similar product range and we have also gone into KL to do more pop up stores in department stores in KL. Eventually we hope to open retail outlet in KL and possibly in Indonesia. Q22) What are the risk venturing overseas? Nominee: I think going overseas the main difficulty is the infrastructure. You have to build the infrastructure in that local country from scratch. You must know the culture of that country, culture of consumers and shopping pattern.

4 Q23) How do you promote learning within your company? Nominee: We will send our staff for trainings in the areas that related to work such as fashion, customer service, in house trainings especially product knowledge in our own products. Q24) What are the training opportunities that you provide your staff? Nominee: Basically sending the staff to external training courses and we also send staff overseas for franchise training and meeting to gain more exposure. Q25) How do you reward employees who deliver good performance at work? Nominee: Additional incentives because we are in retail wholesale business. A lot of our incentives are related to sales performance and sales productivity. Q26) How do you keep your employees motivated? Nominee: We try to create environment where colleagues are just like friends, more family oriented working environment. Q27) Have you meet with any bad customers? Nominee: Many. Q28)How do you deal with them? Nominee: Stand firm but not compromising on service level. If the company is in wrong, of course we have to apologize profusely and make good on our mistakes. On the other hand if we are in correct position, I believe we have to stand firm and still mitigate the customer s expectation to reasonable level. Q28) What strategies do you have to retain your customers? Nominee: We always believe that we had to provide good value for money, good quality product and we believe our customers has to look fabulous in our dress. Q29) How do you get customers? Nominee: Through word of mouth, marketing activities (in the recent years would be social media marketing), exhibition and pop-up stores. Q30)What does entrepreneurship mean to you? Nominee: It means a lot of risk taking, hard work and determination. To be very driven, focus and creative. Q31)What are the top 3 skills/qualities that you have that made you what you are today? Nominee: Well I would say I am hardworking, Risk taker, has determination and perseverance. Q32) In your opinion, what other qualities does a person need in order to be successful in business? And why? Nominee: As a person is not just about IQ and education qualification, EQ and CQ are also very important. With good EQ, you would establish a very good network of friends and associates and staff. That would be very important for any business. Family support is important. To run you own business, it is very energy and time draining at times. That where family support is just as important. You must have a never-say-die attitude.

5 Q33)Who and what motivates and inspires you? Nominee: The one who motivates me would be my family. The thing that inspires me would be my self-actualisation. Q34) How was being entrepreneur changed your life? Nominee: I had learn to see a big picture. I had learnt to balance all expect of a business including managing the risk. This is something that one may not learn while working as an employee. Q35)With the changes in the market today, do you think it has become harder or easier to succeed in business? Why do you say so? Nominee: The market is very tough right now. In all market whether in good or bad, there will be little pockets that the entrepreneur would build their business on. This is all about how creative you are, how sharp you are in spotting that little pockets in building a business. There is no good or a bad market to do a business in. Q36)What advice would you give an aspiring entrepreneur? Nominee: Be prepared to work hard and solve very hard questions or hard problems. Be very mindful and very clear in your thought process. Be very creative in coming out with solution. Think out of the box.

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