Interview with Low Cheong Kee, founder of Home-Fix

When Singapore was a young nation, and education not universal, our elders did all they could to put food on the table. They rested their hopes in the younger generation, believing that they will take advantage of opportunities the nation’s pioneers don’t have. Through their toil, future generations were able to have higher education and opportunities to be doctors, engineers and researchers.

Entrepreneurship wasn’t a buzzword the government promoted in the past; what mattered was survival. In a way, Singapore has become a victim of its own success, with the younger generation having more options, shunning the businesses their parents have built for more glamorous jobs in management, finance and consultancy.

But Low Cheong Kee, founder of Home-Fix The D.I.Y Store, is different. CK saw the hours and sweat his parents had put into the traditional hardware store, and recognized the value in the business, albeit one in a supposed sunset industry.

It had, after all, fed his family.

Change and growth evolutionary, not revolutionary

CK didn’t start out wanting to build a chain of stores selling DIY and home improvement products; his full-time involvement in his parents’ shop at Geylang Serai began out of duty-fulfillment as the eldest son.

Hardware stores were operator-centric at that time. Customers would walk into the store and ask the owner for the items they needed. The owner, being the only one knowing where the items were kept, would fetch the items and package it for the customers. The storeowner had to get everything for the customer, even the small items with slim profit margins.

Price tagging was non-existent. Storeowners would state prices based on their assessment of the wealth of the customer with better-dressed customers usually paying more. A customer could get a different price on different days because the operator might forget how much he charged previously.

Those were the days of a highly inefficient system with opaque pricing that wasn’t customer-centric, and as CK joked, when an owner in a bad mood would create a foreboding atmosphere in the store for customers.

Improvements to his family’s store were made incrementally. CK started packaging the products, labeling the packs with fixed prices and making them more visible to the customers. In true DIY style, it was a hands-on process with CK buying an off-the-shelf drawer system to house the products, drawing on the labels and writing the descriptions of the products.

Along the way, CK continued learning, finding better techniques of managing inventory, and figuring out the retail industry’s nomenclature and visual merchandising. It was a patient process with CK taking almost two years to slowly transform the hardware shop through daily improvements.

His parents had similarly evolved his grandfather’s store that sold charcoal and firewood into a paint and hardware store. His parents recognized that as more people were moving into HDB flats and using gas stoves, the need for firewood and charcoal would diminish. They too had to persuade their elders that change was necessary and their foresight helped sustain and grow the business.

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