Founder’s Story: Christy Ng, Founder & CEO of ChristyNg.com

From a flea market shoe seller to serving an international customer base. It all started when Christina Ng who was working for a Swiss Pharmaceutical company decided to put her childhood dream to life and make some side income. After she started to design and market her shoes on Facebook, the news went viral and the Christy Ng Shoes’s fan page gained thousands of fans within the first month.

Here is the Founder’s Story session with Christy Ng, enjoy!

Q&A

Tells us a little about yourself.

I’m actually from a small town called Kluang in Johor. My family moved to the city (Petaling Jaya) when I was three or four years old so I can have better education. I did not have any background in shoe design nor business when I started. In fact, I did a course called biotechnology which is totally unrelated to whatever I’m doing now.

You started your entrepreneurial journey early on, tell us more about it.

When I was in primary school, my mom will look through the newspapers and every time she saw an art contest and there’s a prize money or some hampers to be won, she would send me there and she would tell me: “You have to win this contest because I want the prize.” So yeah, that was my initial encounter with entrepreneurship because I was her source of income. She would force me to draw and draw and draw like a hundred times until I get it right and then send me to Atria (a shopping mall) for the art contests. She would also tell me :” You must come back with the first prize or you don’t come home.” Yeah so my mother made me a go-getter from a very young age. When I was nine, we started selling straw flowers made by her at the Kelana Jaya LRT station. She would put me there after class and I had to approach strangers to sell straw flowers. She would always tell me everyday that my father had no money so I would have to make my own. So since young my mother had made me very “thick skin” (shameless) to be hungry for success.

How was your entrepreneur journey like so far?

I would say that it’s never easy. There are a lot of good days and bad days as well. The first two, three years for me were the toughest because I could not adjust from having a fixed salary to a kind of a job which I do not know when my next paycheck would come. Subsequently after I learned how to deal with uncertainty, I started to feel more comfortable with uncertainty. I slowly find myself adapting better to running a business.

How do you pull yourself up during the bad times?

Actually the only reason why you’re going through a bad time is you have no money. If you have a lot of money, there’s technically no bad time. I have very good friends who actually share with me where to apply for grants, where to look for free money, who’s the boss etc. What I’m saying is that peer to peer sharing and mentorship is really crucial especially in the bad times. It really helps if you have good mentors and I was very lucky that I’ve got a lot of good mentors. They helped me improve my product, advertisement, branding, distribution channel and others. I’ve got mentors for every subject matter. How I survive was that I just went looking for money everywhere at every single grant and every single competition.

In 2013, my primary school friend who knows my mother introduced the Alliance Bank BizSmart Challenge to me and she told me that if I win, I will get RM250,000. So I joined the competition and eventually I got the RM250,000 and that reduced my stress for a year. We were featured in every major publication in the country so that gave us a lot of PR mileage and that was all for free.

I’ve been through situations where I don’t even have enough money to pay my staff salary and I had to withdraw my personal savings to dump back into the company. We had to sell everything to cover one after another financial hole. I’ve been through all that and luckily I still have not been into a situation where I need to sell my house yet but I would say it’s very normal in business. There’s nothing to be ashamed of and if you’re not ready to sell or refinance your house for the business, you are not an entrepreneur because entrepreneurs are risk takers. Of course, the risk should be calculated and you have to be prepared to tank losses and to ride the storm.

Actually you can get grants if you just applied for it. Many times at the low in my life, I will find one grant. In 2015, I got the CIP 500 grant from Cradle so that was RM500,000 and that money was used to advertise my business so that money came in handy. I applied for two to three times and I was rejected so then I went to Singapore and I met with the CEO of Cradle. I approached him shamelessly and I said “Why do you keep on rejecting me?” and he replied “Okay nevermind when you go back to Malaysia you just reapply. I’ll look into it.” So I went back to KL, I reapplied and we got the grant. So sometimes you just need to keep on shamelessly doing it.

What do you think are the qualities to be a successful entrepreneur?

Thick skin. The thicker the skin the better. You must be able to look at yourself in the mirror and know what you are all about. Be thick skin and at the same time know where you stand, these two things are very important. Never ever think you’re smart because there’s always someone out there who are smarter than you so always be humble. If I was arrogant and I went to the government officers with that attitude, I would not get any money. You must know when to be a beggar. Putting your ego out the door really helps because I feel that a lot of entrepreneurs are full of pride. People cannot tell them that they’re wrong and if that happens, they get very upset. So be thick skin and be humble.

Have you ever doubted yourself in your journey?

To be very honest with you, I only doubt myself when the cash flow is bad. Trust me, if you are sitting on tons of reserve funds which can last you for the next five years or ten years and your cash flow is positive, I don’t think there will be self-doubt. Only money and human, its either staff problem or money problem, no other problem. When you have money everybody wants to work for you and when you have no money everyone will desert you. This is a fact of life.

So how I pull myself through is that I always ask myself: Ok what is my problem? Why do I have no money? Is it sales problem? Is it execution problem? Is it a marketing problem? Everyone will have their down time but there’s no use feeling down. No one is going to give you money unless your father is rich. So you need to figure out what’s the source of the problem and then try to work your way around it. When it comes to cashflow issues, I will then ask myself so how do I raise funds without diluting myself? Back then when I started, nobody wanted to look at us or lend us money. So I did a presale or pre-order to sell my product before it actually goes to market at a lower price to raise funds and cash flow. I did clearance on my inventory and changed it to cash. Apart from the government grants, I also ask myself how do I advertise for very low costs and get the highest return. You need to have strategies like Plan A, Plan B, Plan C in your head to overcome that cash flow void in the business.

What has been your most satisfying moment in your business?

I think my most satisfying moment is when I walk into a shopping mall or public area and I see people wearing my products. I think that is a really big win for me and my team. I was in Johor and I was walking to the toilet and I saw a bunch of girls wearing our products. I felt so happy because even in a toilet in Johor, there were people using our product. This is one of our biggest wins.

Being productive with time is very important, especially for entrepreneurs, how do you plan your schedule daily?

I like to spend my time doing positive things. I like to spend my time with my friends, improving myself by learning a new skill or exchanging a new piece of information. I always mix with people who lift me higher. I think that is very important. If you ask me what I focus on in my business, it would be how do I raise the revenue or how do I grow my numbers. I spend my time mostly on marketing and PR which is actually my strength because I am no good with everything else. Don’t force yourself into something that you are not good at, find someone else to do it and focus on what you are really good at. Aside from that, I think every entrepreneur needs to set aside time to network. Even if you are a very introverted or shy person you still need to network you because when you go to events like this (Tough Get Going), you meet new people and they give you new perspectives.

If today you have just one piece of advice to people just starting out on a business, what would that be?

If you are starting out alone, the people around you are your support system. I have a lot of group chats with a lot of fellow entrepreneurs such as E-commerce group chat, entrepreneurs group chat and etc. These are important because you need to have the support system around you. If say you are trying to start a business but every day you are not mixing with entrepreneurs, you cannot shape your mindset. There is nothing wrong being happy with a job but you need to start mixing with people who have the same wavelength, if not you cannot grow. When you’re starting out you cannot feel comfortable. So when we have coworking spaces like Iconic, you get to meet other entrepreneurs who are starting different businesses. You can pool resources and share information. Back then I only had my mother to support and there were no coworking spaces but now there is. So if there were coworking spaces back then I would go for a coworking space because the peer to peer mentoring and the community you get is exactly what every startup needs.

I think another key thing is to be resilient. If your idea is not very good, it is just a matter of time before you perfect it because it is always pivoting and improving along the way. My idea of a shoe company now is totally different from what I wrote in my business plan six years ago. So I think the idea is not the most important thing but you must be persistent enough to see the idea through.

What was your goal when you first started out your company and how has it changed or has it changed over the years?

I would say that the goal since day one is to make good quality products at affordable prices and that has not changed. We are committed towards our customers to produce good quality products. When we have that vision in mind, we are building a sustainable business. That goal has not changed but of course the method of generating revenue has changed so much from day one until now and every year it changes so drastically. I think do not be too fixated on a plan. I have a lot of friends who did very well but when they start getting investors in and the investors tell them to follow the business plan they submitted two years ago, that is where I start seeing people fail or get into trouble because they are no longer in control of their business. So I think the key here is for you to remain in control to manage your own destiny. What I am saying is be nimble, be agile, and be ready to change anytime. You cannot be so fixated or you will die in the business.

What is one thing you wish you had done differently in your journey?

I think I regret not going to the banks earlier when we actually could. We went to the banks in 2018. Before that it was all private and there was no borrowings at all, just grant money. I felt if we went to the banks earlier with a clearer strategy, we would have made much more money by now. We did not want to pay interest but actually the interest was very low. It is a cost of doing business and it helps us to scale a lot faster.

Noticed that your business transitioned from a shoe brand which everyone knows into a brand that sells bags. Would like to know what is the drive behind and what is next?

I think that is a very good question. The answer is just really it is a related product. If you go to shopping malls, you will see every shoe store selling bags and it is a natural progression. That is also because of the demand of our customer base. Every so often we get customers coming to our store and asking why we do not sell bags. They already expect us to sell bags so it makes sense for us to move in that direction. Of course everything that we do needs to be of good quality, sustainable and it has to be profitable as well.

I understand the fact that you distribute your products through both the physical store and also the online store. What are the ratios of your sales coming from each channel?

I would say it is quite equally distributed for both online and offline for us. Online definitely being the key driver of the business and the future of commerce is definitely omni channel. You have to be a multi-channel business. That means you can not only have physical stores, you need to have a website and you should be able to sell to a consumer via your website. I think mobile is the future of retail so your business has to be mobile enabled, mobile friendly and your campaigns have to be mobile-centric. To me that is the future. I see a rapid decline in department stores so I do not think department stores will work anymore as consumers are opting for brands who give them multi channel user experience.

Do you think Facebook or social media nowadays is still a good marketing platform?

You need to be very agile and know what works and what doesn’t on social media because it changes so rapidly every day. If you want organic growth on social media, it is still very possible but it all boils down to your content. Content is king now in social media. If you have very good content, it will have a really huge organic reach without you having to pay. There was this video of our warehouse sales where we did a drone recording of the queue for the sale and our queue was one kilometre long. We posted it on social media and we had about 100,000 organic reach without paying a single cent for any ads. Now selling shoes not as simple. I can’t just post a shoe and say “Buy my shoe”, it has to be more than that. The consumer has to feel that your product is relevant and feel engaged with your stories or your value proposition that you’re trying to share and it has to go right to the consumer’s heart. There was once a thief stole something from my shop and we put the CCTV recording on social media and we said that we want to fight crime. That kind of video had a lot of content too because it was something interesting.

What I also learned is that it is worthwhile investing in taking really good photographs for your product. Video is also very important as it is the future of social media. Brands or influencers that post more videos always have higher engagement than just pretty girls taking 2D pictures on Instagram. However, with video you need very good content delivery to get that kind of engagement.

If you have a chance to meet yourself from 10 years ago, what advice would you give to yourself? How do you motivate yourself when the going is tough?

I think the advice that I would give myself 10 years ago is to start this business earlier because successful entrepreneurs today are all very young. I know 18, 19 year old girls who are doing revenues higher than us so we know that this is possible. When you are younger, you have more energy, and you can afford to take bigger risks. You know if you fail, you can always start again. So yeah, my advice would be to start earlier.

Being an entrepreneur, you have to be self-motivated. If you need people to motivate you, you are dead. You need to be self-motivated no matter how bad things are or how shit things become. You settle the problems yourself. You cannot be like, “I need motivation. I need to go for motivation talk today.” If you are that type, do not be an entrepreneur, go work for someone because entrepreneurs are self-motivated people and you take risks. You need to be resilient. Like I said earlier, seeing people use our products when I walk into the toilet or wherever gives me a lot of satisfaction and that is also my source of motivation.

As a brand, how do you stand out in the market to bring upon the impact like what you did?

Actually I did not have any specific strategy on how to stand out when I started. It is actually more about how long can you last until people notice you. People always ask about how to stand out because it is so noisy nowadays. There is always someone having more money to advertise, better product than you, better team and better everything than you. I would say it is a marathon and not a race. So being able to last and sustain over the long run will ensure that you really stand out because people will notice. Another thing to stand out is by telling a good story. It is one of the lower cost ways of marketing yourself. Providing more value will ensure that you last as well. For example, if your product sells for one dollar but the customer is getting a value of ten dollars just by paying one dollar then you are on the right track. At the end of the day, the customer is king and they decide how far you go.

To learn more about Christy Ng, visit their website. To learn more about Tough Get Going and our latest startup events, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.