Photo credit: @blackcoralxo (Instagram)
1 Fortune really does favour the bold
It’s obvious from the get-go that the well-dressed and vibrant Cici Zhang has a strong passion for fashion—after all, it’s what she studied at university and she has been in the industry since her first job—but after working as a designer for a mass company for close to three years, it became apparent that there were some gaping holes which she found hard to reconcile with.
She tells us wistfully that while the lingerie, swimwear, and sportswear products she designed for a French apparel company were beautiful, at the end of the day, cost was always the final deciding factor on whether a piece would be approved, so it was difficult for designers to really unleash their creativity. “Sometimes we’d have to take off everything that made a garment special to meet the cost parameters. The process was quite demotivating, and not as creative as I’d have liked. In the end, it was really about cost-cutting and pushing your factory to make the nicest products you can for the cheapest price.”
Is that not the case with any business model, you ask? “Yes, but in a huge mass-market fashion company, the business model is to churn out things that are nice-looking at the most cost-effective price, that seem like a good deal to the customer. Because I was working in Hong Kong for a French brand headquartered in Paris, there was also a bit of a disconnect where they don’t tell the designers why things don’t end up in the final collection. So you don’t have a lot of say, you don’t have a lot of control, and sometimes you don’t even know why.”
Fed up with the circumstances and getting increasingly bored, Zhang began making plans to finally take action on her dreams of having a business to call her own. Put bluntly, she directly went against her employment contract and launched Black Coral with her best friend under the table, while still working full-time. For the first year and a half, they didn’t run any ads or do any publicity, because Zhang couldn’t be seen being associated with another fashion brand—they merely got the word out there through friends and friends of friends, and people who stumbled across the website or their social media platforms.
Even though production was kept very lean, and they only held a few pieces of each style in the most popular sizes in Hong Kong, her apartment was still overflowing with products—she had to shove clothes into every spare bit of space—under the couch, in the bottom of the wardrobe, under her bed, because they couldn’t afford warehouse storage.
Often, she also wouldn’t eat at lunchtimes, running to the post office instead to send out orders before rushing back to the office. As Black Coral picked up momentum, it became apparent that something would have to give. “I realised that I had to either stop doing my own thing on the side, because I couldn’t give it my full attention and I couldn’t give my job my full attention, or I could quit my job and focus on the business full-time to give it a real shot at success,” Zhang says. Of course, she took the bold leap of faith, and it has since paid off.
It’s not just Cici who embodies the enduring spirit of a rising generation of confident, independent young women. The other half of Black Coral, Christine Wang, joined the business while working in finance, and to this day juggles two cross-continent jobs: a full-time bank employee by day, and Black Coral’s other co-founder by night and on weekends. “It’s intense but rewarding, especially when a collection is released and you get a positive reaction from your customers!”