Families in fashion

Fashion capitals used to be in Paris and Milan, but now the most successful clothing brands are not so much couture houses but rather fast fashion, where design, creation, marketing and distribution span not years or months, but weeks.

Inexpensive and innovative, fast fashion appeals to the youthful mass market, whose taste in trends change regularly, whether in gadgets, social media or clothes.

Asia is the home of iconic brands like Uniqlo (Japan), Forever 21 (South Korea) and G2000 (Hong Kong).

These brands originate not from professional clothing chains, but from family businesses.

Hong Kong

A century ago, many countries in Asia were built on the textile industry.  Take Hong Kong, for instance.

“As a garment export hub for much of the last century, Hong Kong is home to several other business dynasties that began in the textile and apparel trade before diversifying into manufacturing or retail,” says fashion business journalist Robb Young in the site BusinessofFashion.com.

According to Young, Michael Tien Puk-sun was able to create G2000, after being raised in the family’s textile business, founded by his grandfather and expanded by his father.

South Korea

According to Christina Moon, professor at Parsons, The New School of Design, South Korea began in the middle of the last century its march toward industrialization through exportation of garments mainly to the United States.

The Korean War had scarred the national psyche, and thousands of South Koreans migrated to the US, Brazil and Argentina, where they fell back on the trade they knew best:  making clothes, which did not require language fluency or huge investments.

When parts of South America became wracked by turmoil, these Korean families moved yet again, to California.

“The immigrant entrepreneurs who set up shop in the Los Angeles garment district up through the 1990s brought with them decades of industry experience,” says Moon in “Pacific Standard” magazine.

“They understood pattern-making, fit and quality control; and their diasporic connections to other Koreans working abroad in the trade connected them to fabric and trim sources, factories, managers, sample-makers and sewers in places like Brazil, China and Vietnam.”

The next generation

Competition was fierce, and only the fittest survived.  The older generation did not sufficiently understand US tastes, and by the turn of the century, several garment businesses folded.

Salvation lay with the second generation, who grew up in the family business.  They saw how hard their parents worked, and vowed to make their enterprise grow.

The young ones thronged universities to study management or finance.  Several went to fashion schools in the US and elsewhere.  Then they returned home to apply what they had learned to the family enterprise.

“The kids revamped their family businesses: rebranding, creating company logos, building showroom spaces to make them appealing to American wholesale buyers, and setting up sleek websites,” according to Moon.

“Their Americanized cultural identities and native English skills allowed (them) … to communicate fluently with domestic department stores and retail buyers.  Their design, marketing and merchandising skills allowed companies … to start making clothes on the cutting edge of fashion.”

This intergenerational family strategy worked.

“This simple change had a profound effect:  It brought nearly all parts of the apparel cycle—design, production, logistics, wholesaling, and marketing—under the purview of individual Korean fashion businesses.

“The levels of trust and coordination within each family business boosted the efficiency of the global production process.  And the fierce competition between young Koreans in these family businesses sparked an explosion of creativity.”

Asian values

“The younger generations are taught from a very early age to respect the legacy of the founding patriarch, and to know their duty in the hierarchy,” Singapore event organizer Olga Iserlis tells Young.

“In Asia, that means duty to the family and duty to the family enterprise.”

Even if the young generation have other interests, they inevitably choose to join the family business.

Hong Kong’s Melissa Ong, for instance, created London’s Met Bar but later chose to work in Club 21, her mother Christina Ong’s clothing conglomerate.

Victoria Tang, daughter of David Tang, founder of Shanghai Tang, first did fashion photography, before finally joining the family firm.

Queena N. Lee-Chua is on the board of the Ateneo de Manila University’s Family Business Development Center.  Get her book “Successful Family Businesses” from the University Press (e-mail [email protected]).  E-mail the author at [email protected].