How this founder moved her store from bricks to clicks 20 years ago

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Lui Tong is COO at Strawberry Cosmetics Ltd., which is also known as Strawberrynet. It is a leading online beauty store carrying over 800 brands and 33,000 products that ship to nearly 200 countries around the world.

In this interview, she shares her exciting journey from the early dot-com days in China where she helped launch the popular Chinese social network, RenRen.com, started her own luxury lingerie business, and finally started her ecommerce business in 1998.

Who is Lui Tong?

I’m from Hong Kong and have been in the online business for nearly 20 years now. You might remember the company called RenRen.com, the earliest Chinese community site before Facebook. That’s how and when I started in online media, which helped me to start a business.

I started a brick-and-mortar retail business, representing top international lingerie brands, which I distributed and retailed in Hong Kong. Pretty soon the business evolved into an online business, and I was one of the earliest startups for trading fashion items on an online basis.

How did you get into tech?

I actually never thought about going into tech. I was actually trained as a chemist and a chemical engineer.

As a young person living in Hong Kong, I observed that things moved really fast. I started to ask myself, is this the direction I wanted to take? Is there something else I wanted to do? Then, I had the opportunity to meet the founders of RenRen.com when they first started, Michael Robinson and Anthony Cheng, two ex-McKinsey consultants.

We hit it off over coffee and before I knew it, I joined their venture the next day. That’s how I got started with technology.

How did you come up with the idea for Strawberrynet?

It all started from launching my lingerie ecommerce business when I took one of the ideas I had when I was in college. Marketing in Hong Kong is very nascent and so I thought, “Why not try it?”

I was actually quite naive at that time. I just thought maybe that was what I wanted to do. But I didn’t realize I had no experience in retail. And managing your own company is very different vs managing other people’s companies.

I decided to just go for it. I never really thought about the product’s nature and had never done any marketing in terms of consumable goods or fashion items. I actually got training from my supplier on how to sell lingerie, but I didn’t know how to measure people.

Shortly after launching Strawberrynet back in 1998, the business was transformed to become online only. Today, what we have is an ecommerce company focusing on beauty products from skincare, makeup, cosmetics, hair care, to fragrance.

What are some of the challenges you continue to experience?

These days, it’s so easy to set up an ecommerce company, promote it, then get established. But everyone who invests money in something wants to have a product that meets their expectations, is reliable, and genuine.

What is your outlook for ecommerce?

What advice would you give to an aspiring entrepreneur?