Singaporean Entrepreneurs

Jonathan Kong shares the story of fabrikade, a webstore that showcases Singapore’s talent to the world and makes worldwide talent tee art readily available in Singapore. The person pictured above modeling one of the great looking graphic tees is NOT Jonathan :). MAKE SURE TO CHECK OUT THE SPECIAL PROMO ONLY FOR OUR READERS AT THE END OF THE ARTICLE.

So the business did not start out of impulse, how did it actually begin?
“The birth of fabrikade was not out of a spark or a coincidence. It was a progression of what we love about graphic apparels and the online shopping experience at some of our favourite webstores.” Jonathan was personally intrigued close to 3 years ago with the resounding success and approach of three people who owned a graphic design tee webstore based in the States.

“They (the 3 guys) were driven by passion, love of graphic tees, friendships and very much for the fun of it. It is the same reasons fabrikade is running on. Their level of success set me thinking about how such indie webstores can make good and made us believe we can create something to the same degree right here on our sunny island.”

BUT WHAT ABOUT THE FACT THAT ASIANS ARE STILL LESS LIKE TO BUY ONLINE?
Although the online shopping culture in Singapore is still very young, there is a growing trend among Singaporean youths and the trendy/fashionable people purchasing fashion merchandises online. These can be gleaned from discussions in forums and the increasing number of blogs that sell fashion merchandises imported from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Bangkok and Korea. We saw that there are plenty of opportunities for quality graphic apparels and merchandises with a well-designed web store to flourish. We felt strongly too, for fabrikade to address the needs of an online platform for local talents to sell their design goodness here and overseas.

SO GIVE THEM THE REAL THING- ALL THE WORKS
After some research, we found many of the local webstores do not provide a decent online shopping experience, so we set out fabrikade to encompass good site design, proper payment mechanisms, contribution and participation from fans and fellow designers.

We got a bit confused when going through the fabrikade site as to what labels are in-house and which belong to others. Our understanding is that you invite designers to sell their collection on your site. Is that right? Can you help explain how the whole thing works?

The confusion is not a bad thing. :) Perhaps we did good enough to differentiate ourselves from other webstores in Singapore. We see fabrikade as a woven fabric, a big family with members from different places. It’s not just a site to upload products, selling them, thanking the customers and hope they come back again. It’s a community of artists, weaving together a big piece of art.


BOTH LOCAL AND OVERSEAS ARTISTS ARE WELCOMED
Indeed, we are always looking out for well-designed apparels and merchandises both locally and overseas. For overseas indie labels, it is pretty direct. With the help of the internet, I checked up their respective websites/stores and talked to the owners about fabrikade’s mission. They are supportive of the notion and agreed to let us showcase their products. They too, are keen to export their designs and ideas to Singapore.

FABRIKADE REMOVES THE LOGISTICS NIGHTMARE FOR THE ARTIST
As for local indie labels, I scout for them at flea markets and via word-of-mouth. The scene is small but there are definitely many talented individuals and teams to be unearthed! When I find something that is truly unique and well-crafted, I will make a point to establish contact and move on from there. It is important that we bring across our concept and invite them to be part of our community. The designers do not have to worry about the logistics and administration because we will handle them! From photoshoots to features to sales to well, everything else, almost. All they need to do is to park their creative ideas with us and we will do the rest nicely, very nicely.

What kind of marketing have you been doing since you started? What percentage of your efforts are spent online v. offline and what has worked better for you?

Financial commitment, a reasonable return of investment, a defined target audience, market limitations, business overhead limitations are points that we have taken account where marketing is concerned. So, we have worked mainly on building our brand and presence via:
a) word-of-mouth,
b) buzz marketing,
c) viral marketing and,
d) making use of social networking portals.


THE WHOLE WEB 2.0 MARKETING ARSENAL IS USED
Being a web store, our target group is the savvy internet users. Having observed that people are now spending a great amount of time on the world wide web, we have adopted various online communication channels to reach out to this audience. Keeping them constantly in touch of our happenings and progresses via newsletters, blog entries and social network profile updates are ways to interact and retaining their attention.

Making use of the social media has proven to be a slow yet a steady growth of success for us. It has helped us greatly in terms of reducing costs to achieve the same targets, gaining a better understanding of our customers and increasing brand exposure.

NOT NEGLECTING THE OFFLINE WORLD
Despite our aggressive online efforts, we believe that offline marketing is important as well. We have been approached to place an advertisement in a tertiary institution publication (a shopping handbook). We eagerly agreed as this is a good channel to promote our ideas to the savvy tertiary students, who are technology users as well as fashion adopters. This will be rolled out soon and we do anticipate more brand awareness and sales from this move.

Do you consider sites like cafepress.com your competitor (both in sales and in getting designers)? Or do they cater to a totally different type of crowd?

We don’t consider CafePress to be our competitor at all as their vision is vastly different from ours. Anyone can open their own shop, create and sell their stuffs, practically any stuffs that are printable at CafePress. As much as we’re open to designers and labels collaborating with us, we advocate strict quality control and focused on bringing in well-designed graphic apparels and merchandise inline with our branding.

Their audience seems to be varied while interested in all sorts of products while fabrikade’s target audience tends to be the trendy, unique, slight sophistication, informed and fun… anyone with a discerning taste for good/premium apparels and merchandises.

Tell us about your going international in a few weeks, your plans, your hopes. It all sounds very exciting, but at the same time we have to ask, why not international from the very beginning since you are online and t-shirts don’t require fitting rooms to be purchased.

In the beginning, we were in this purely for fun, driven by passion but at the same time, we all had other work commitments during the day. As such, we wanted to anticipate and experience building our foundation first, learning a reasonable amount, especially in the art of order fulfillment locally before we started filling global orders. I would liken it to learning the basic first and then afterwards operating at a level of professionalism customers would expect from us. We also aimed to strike a balance between promoting the culture for Singaporeans to appreciate local design ideas as well as showcasing our local talents to an overseas audience.

MORE THAN TEES
Other than t-shirts, we are pooling other forms of merchandise by local designers. There is a need to establish a strong hold on our own shores, so we can move on to reach out to international customers more confidently.

A good news to share. As we speak, we have successfully configured our cart system to process direct international orders. This is another milestone for fabrikade and we are extremely delighted to realise our mission of exporting and promoting local talents’ works to overseas. We hope that this convenience will greatly help to increase our sales and also gain more exposure for made-in-Singapore design works. In fact, even before we officially made the announcement, we already served customers from the States and Australia, who found us in search engine results. This is a nice pat on our shoulders and a good indication that we are on the right track.

WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD?
fabrikade will continue working on brewing the culture of design appreciation and awareness in Singapore. We are ever weaving and adding new colours and feel to this big piece of fabric, presenting our very own works to the global market. Supporting fabrikade is a small move but a big boost to the local design industry. We hope our customers do not view us as “just another online store”, but as a platform for local designers to showcase their ideas and products.