the accidental entrepreneur. colum 2 : to adapt or to compromise

It had taken me around two years to establish kapok as an interesting concept store in a relatively remote residential area of hong kong. Then, suddenly, I had received a letter asking me to vacate my store as the small walk-up building we were occupying was going to be demolished.

After a few days of doubt, I decided to go on a hunt for a new location. After all, I got hooked to retail and I felt that my mission, to introduce emerging talented designers to Asia, was just getting started.

I spent a few weekends walking around the city, looking for the perfect neighbourhood for the second incarnation of kapok. It was quite tough but I finally found my dream location: the star street precinct in wanchai. It was really quiet, surrounded by nice trees, which would allow our customers to take their time and relax to discover our products and their stories. At the same time, it was quite easy to access by subway and close to quite a few offices, which would make it easier to connect with a bigger audience.

There was only one, rather major, problem. The new location was much smaller than my first store. At the time, I was really interested in selling furniture and design objects, but it was impossible in the new space. I had also discovered that these were quite difficult categories to sell in hong kong. Then began a period of soul-searching — should I really try harder and focus on design products or move kapok into a different direction ?

I started to analyse hong kong people daily life and I realised that people rarely invited each other to their house, as they did in france. Most of the social life happened outside, in café or restaurant. This is why most were not really willing to invest heavily in home decoration. On the contrary, they preferred to create a protecting cocoon for their life outside home, a group of beautiful objects they would always have with them to make them feel good: a bag, wallet, glasses or watches. I also began to realise that my interest was more into good design and beautiful objects but not really strictly furniture and home decoration.

Finding a much smaller location for my new store had forced me to re-think what was kapok and adapt my concept. This proved really successful in the long term, as many people turned to kapok when they were looking for some well-crafted and interesting accessories.

A few years later, the star street store was doing quite well and I had opened a second location, very near to my first one, on sun street. We had started having a following and some press coverage in Hong Kong and overseas. This is when various shopping malls started contacting me to open a kapok store in their malls. At the beginning, it was very easy for me and I kept on saying no. after all I had started kapok to fight against the monotony of hong kong shopping malls and their litany of luxury stores, fast fashion and chain restaurants. I felt kapok did not belong there and I had told this to any journalist that had wanted to hear my story.

One of the mall operators in hong kong was trying to create a new experience, and escape the mainstream models. They kept on contacting me and I kept on refusing their offers, this until they made a very attractive offer to kapok, ‘an offer I could not refuse’ as they say in the godfather. As a pure business decision, this seemed to be a no-brainer but I felt I was betraying my principles by opening in a mall. I finally decided to launch myself but I did not want to associate kapok too much to this new store.

I focused the new store around a nautical theme, as it’s a universe I’m very drawn to. I called it ‘sailor’ and with a very tiny font I had added a tagline ‘by kapok’. It was as if I was ashamed to be a sell-out and open in a shopping mall. After a few weeks of operation, it was quite clear that the new concept was a flop. We had trouble attracting customers and the nautical theme was a bit too narrow to add interesting new products.

A few months later, business was not going better and I had to decide what to do with this new mall store. I figured out that I had been working very hard to establish kapok as a brand, synonym with good quality emerging products and I was not using it at all in the new store. Also, I began to see that my negative feelings against malls were not completely rational. After all, I was sometimes myself frequenting shopping malls. With several months of insane rainfall or equally insane high temperatures in hong kong, they felt more hospitable than the streets of the city.

More importantly, kapok was never an elitist project for me. I was very picky about my product selection and the way we present and introduce our brands. But I always felt that anyone curious enough to learn more about our unknown products was welcome as a customer of kapok.

It then dawned on me. I was not opposed to the concept of shopping malls, but more to the current state of shopping malls in hong kong. This is when I decided to relaunch my mall store, and not to hide the ‘kapok’ name but to put it front and centre. The new concept was called ‘kapok TOOLS’. I decided to explore a more casual and approachable version of the kapok aesthetics. Casual did not mean that I changed my criteria : as the kapok name was used, all products should pass our quality tests, should tell a story. And our visual merchandising and brand training should match what we do in our flagship.

A few weeks after the launch of the new concept, we started to find new customers and I found out that ,many of our fans were living on Kowloon side and were looking forward our opening in their neighbourhood. By opening in a shopping mall, we did not need to ‘dumb down’ what kapok was about. We could propose a new version but we had to stay true to our principles. I learnt my lesson : we could adapt without compromise !

This is through a series of adaptations that kapok became what it is now. And I am sure the stores will continue to evolve over the years. However, I never felt these adaptations were real compromises. My vision for kapok changed, but I never did anything that I feel ashamed or regretful of. I believe kapok fans felt the same way and continued to follow me and the store in its ever-changing story.

(to be continued… originally published in QG business Taiwan)