Former Catcha exec starts new fashion site, lets you shop directly from overseas marketplaces

John Wong, ex-CTO of Catcha.com and co-founder of FaveChic

It’s normal for someone looking to set up a business to look towards ecommerce. It’s a market that will be worth US$525 billion this year. Companies that succeed in ecommerce will rake in cash, like Rakuten and Alibaba are doing in this region. Is there still room for more players in this segment? John Wong believes so. He is running a regional fashion marketplace startup called FaveChic. The twist? The new startup brings in products from multiple marketplace sites in a number of countries, and helps shoppers avoid the hassle of counting in international shipping costs and currency conversions.

Singapore-based FaveChic curates fashion products from overseas marketplaces in Japan (like Rakuten), South Korea (like 11st), and China (like Taobao), and translates these offerings into local languages – so far it’s just English and Indonesian. FaveChic customers in Singapore, Indonesia, and Malaysia can browse and buy the products in their local currencies as if they’re buying the items from within their country, while in fact they’re shopping directly from overseas merchants. Customers can even get refunds.

“We facilitate the cross border payment and logistics so customers do not worry about overseas payment and shipping,” explains Wong. He has a decade-long entrepreneurial journey that began with starting Catcha, a regional internet portal, in 1999. He brought his company to the stock market, went through the bursting of the dot com bubble, and ventured into fashion retail as well as ecommerce. FaveChic is his latest baby.

Surviving the dot com bubble

“The four of us – Patrick Grove, Ken Tsurumaru, Nic Lim and I – graduated about the same time and we co-founded Catcha in 1999,” says Wong. It was a web portal like Yahoo, with a localized approach in each of the Southeast Asian countries where it operated. The team offered news and content like travel, food, and live stock quotes. Catcha also had classifieds, forums, and a dating site.

“During those days, the internet portal business was the hottest dot com business and we were competing with the global players like Yahoo, MSN, and Lycos setting up in the region as well as local players such as AsiaOne [owned by Singapore Press Holdings],” Wong explains. “We were then en route to listing on the Singapore Stock Exchange when the dot com bubble burst in 2000. Our internet portal business took a beating as we had to downsize our team and resources when we did not raise funds as expected in an IPO.” The IPO didn’t happen.

In the end, the co-founders decided to venture into event organizing and the publishing business with magazine titles such as Juice and Stuff. And in 2002, as Catcha’s technology development came to a standstill due to a shift in business focus, Wong decided to leave Catcha and went into a brick and mortar business in retail, which eventually diversified into ecommerce.

A tech guy in the fashion business

Some products sold on FaveChic

Being an entrepreneur, Wong was looking to do something on his own and thought that the retail business was easy to start with a gentle learning curve. “It’s as simple as identifying a product to sell and where to sell it,” he says. According to his research, women shop more than men, and fashion accessories are products sold with high margins. He eventually started selling ladies fashion accessories in 2003 called AboveFashion, and at its peak had 15 sales outlets made up of shops and consigment counters in major department stores.

Although the business recorded good growth, he realized that they were always at the mercy of landlords and department stores. “Rentals in major shopping malls are escalating and management of the malls requires renovation every two years. With this I find it difficult to manage the retail business being a sole proprietor,” he says.

In 2004, the team explored and ventured into ecommerce, where their business – especially on eBay and Amazon – saw demand coming from overseas. In 2008, Wong decided to relocate his business to China, where he could source the products and ship them out to countries like the US, Australia, the UK, and Germany. During this time, Wong also diversified its product offerings to jewelry, and accessories for gadgets and cars.

However, he found another problem when relying on marketplace platforms like eBay and Amazon. “We found our growth was not scalable as we the merchants are deterred by the marketplace owners imposing higher listing and transaction fees, and that they do not promote large scale merchants for the fact that they want to give other sellers, especially new sellers, an equal opportunity to compete for business,” Wong explains.

This is why Wong decided to build his own online fashion marketplace and brand focusing on emerging markets in the region. It took him one year to work on FaveChic right from the idea stage to building the prototype, and finally launching the product in April this year.

Shipping affordable goods from overseas

Targeting three countries at once

Banking on social