I’m Sandra Boch, and I run kawaiifabric, a family-owned fabric store carrying more than 10,000 products. My hometown is Bregenz in Austria, but we were based in Hong Kong for fifteen years before we moved to Singapore. This is our pandemic story.
At the beginning of 2020, everyone was still learning about how the virus spread. No one was sure if it stayed on packages, and customers thought the virus was literally on our fabrics. Unfortunately, many who were considering ordering from us thought we were based in mainland China, when in fact there hadn’t yet been a single case in Hong Kong. Within days, our revenue was severely impacted.
The shop’s cash flow was so badly affected that we were close to shutting down the business or at least reducing salaries because of the climbing business expenses but lower order numbers. We spoke to our staff for the first time about salary cuts, which everyone understood. It was super stressful!
Within 2 weeks, however, the virus had found its way to Europe. In the race to make masks, we received an avalanche of orders that was overwhelming! These mask-making orders were an amazing gift.
Outgoing packages were piled so high on trolleys, in volumes we had never seen before. This surge in mask fabric orders lasted for about 2 months (the best 2 months in our company's history). Orders slowly went back to normal levels, yet we ended up not needing to proceed with salary cuts! The next bend in the road was coming very soon, though.
In June, a new national security law was passed for Hong Kong which was very restrictive. On the very day it was announced, we decided to leave Hong Kong. While the disruption to our business had already been difficult, the authoritarian law made us decide that we could no longer stay. The Wall Street Journal even interviewed me about why we took on this massive undertaking.
Leaving the founding team behind was really tough on Alan and me. We considered the team to be our second family. We talked with each of them personally to explain what was happening and why. We also gave them a heads up of a few months, because we didn’t want to surprise them with our decision.
In choosing a new location, we had to consider many things. Our highest priority was naturally from a business point of view. Things we needed to look at included: company registration, language spoken in the country, shipping costs from that country to overseas, whether a logistics hub was existent, employee pool and salaries, office rental and tax management.
From a family point of view, we looked at rent levels for a home, availability of schools including fees and whether the environment was family-friendly. We reviewed pretty much every Asian capital and eventually narrowed it down to Taipei and Singapore. We decided on Singapore because of the language advantage for me, as almost everyone speaks English here.
I moved to Singapore first, while my husband Alan stayed behind in Hong Kong and closed the office and warehouse there. This was very tricky because flights and cargo ships were delayed globally. We had to set up a day on which we officially closed the warehouse and from that point on only could we pack everything up. It was a very delicate balancing act because technically, the business kept running, but we couldn’t pack orders anymore.
In Singapore, I looked for a new location for our new office and warehouse. Trouble came in the form of finding a big enough space. Choices were limited as Singaporean businesses had set up their production here. This was happening because the border to Malaysia where these factories usually operate, was closed because of the pandemic. Lots of bigger spaces were already occupied.
When we eventually settled on this warehouse, we didn't expect that the space would be completely bare. Most spaces we looked at didn’t even have any electricity or lights set up. There were higher initial set-up costs than we planned.
Our things hadn’t yet arrived, either. In Hong Kong, we had made such a careful effort to pack our products and shelving, and it was all shipped to Singapore in containers. Because of COVID, the shipment became stuck for several days in a port in Malaysia because that harbour was over its capacity. Every day felt like an eternity because we had no estimates on when it would move again. The thought of it staying in port indefinitely was looming over us!
All this was made even more difficult by not being able to sort things out in person. We had to serve out quarantine notices at home - and even those rules and regulations were constantly changing. Our flights needed to be constantly switched to accommodate new regulations.
We hope that you will read the rest of this story on our blog!