Mandy Chan, born and bred in Singapore harnessed the competitive environment in Singapore to fast track her entry into the world of entrepreneurship at the age of 19.
Mandy who dreamt of being her own boss, took a big risk at age 18 to take a gap year away from school to start her own business.
During that time, she produced and sold 4200 all purpose bags and launched a Kickstarter campaign with over 400% funding.
Explaining her business strategy, she told The Independent her BOW’s model is hinged on the B2B and B2C components.
“To target consumers, we utilize crowdfunding Sites such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo as well as a mobile-friendly e-commerce store. We usually collaborate with related services and products to bundle the items up,” she said in an interview.
She said the company will be introducing something new and that is the #Bebold Movement where the company will be teaming up with ambassadors locally and internationally to build up an “unconventional” community among its consumer base.
“To target businesses, our main approaches are collaboration with direct complements of our products such as the largest gym franchise in the world: Anytime Fitness to roll out customized Sweat Bag designs with their logo and ours. We are also currently in talks with retails and distributors to push out our new products through their existing channels,” she said.
Explaining her marketing strategies, she said they include personal branding, social media marketing for the community and collaboration with related products and influencers.
Looking forward, Mandy told The Independent the company planned to head in the direction of cultivating an active lifestyle through our gear.
“We believe that the innovation of sports bags can be improved much further and we want to head that change.”
With this statement, we asked her how disruptive is her business model?
Work smarter and think deeper!
“BOW is a disruptive product innovation start-up. While many businesses are focused on the retail and distributorship model in the offline world, we plan to focus most of our efforts in the online realm. Riding on the trend of rising mobile internet penetration around the world, we want to provide a revolutionary online shopping experience for our customers.”
And she will not bow to competition, since in her view, she has to learn from the successes and failures of the competition while honing the competitive advantage that her brand have that is “our story and community. Push harder, work smarter and think deeper!”
In the future, Mandy believes she would start a collection for breast cancer awareness by working with individuals who are breast-cancer survivors yet, they are living their lives in a bold fashion.
This will be part of her company’s awareness campaign that would fall in the corporate social responsibility segment.
Last but not least, she gave some kind advise to young, budding entrepreneurs:
“Be bold and just take the leap of faith! You never know how your life can change within 1 year. Remember that FEAR in the future is just False Evidence Appearing Real, that focusing on your end goal and breaking it down into baby steps to get clarity on what to do to get there will essentially remove the fear. Be Bold, be brave and get clarity.”
Connect with Mandy onLinkedin: LINKEDIN
Email: Mandy@bowforbold.com
Twitter: @bowforbold