The King of Shanghai

by Ian Hamilton

  “I’ve never heard of him,” May said quickly.

  “That’s because he’s never designed under his own name.”

  “I see.”

  “He’s spent the past ten years designing clothes for other people’s labels, mainly retailers in Europe and North America. It’s a business their father started with their uncle about thirty years ago. The company was originally based in Hong Kong, but when it became too expensive to operate there they set up shop here.

  “The brothers were very sharp businessmen. They leased a factory in Pudong, but it’s only about two thousand square metres. It’s what’s called a sample factory. They have about a hundred workers involved in designing clothes and making samples for the salesmen and agents. If they get an order, they outsource production to a real garment factory somewhere else in China or Asia.”

  “So they don’t actually make anything themselves?” Ava asked.

  “Just the samples. The production is jobbed out.”

  “So no big overheads.”

  “No, but that’s getting us off the point. I have no interest in that business,” Amanda said. “I just want you to understand Clark and Gillian’s background. The two brothers were named David and Thomas. David was their father. Thomas had no children, so Clark and Gillian were encouraged to join the business. She’s a friend of a girl I went to Brandeis with, and she has an MBA from an Australian university. Clark went to a prestigious institute of fashion design in the U.K.”

  “So you’re saying that the two children went into the business,” Ava said.

  “Yes, they did, and they’ve made quite a success of it.”

  “And now they want out?” May asked. “They’re prepared to walk away from the family company?”

  “This is where it gets complicated. The two brothers were equal partners, and in their original agreement they had the right to buy each other’s shares if one of them left the business for any reason, including death. David Po died two years ago. Thomas bought his shares at a price that was set out in their agreement, but the agreement hadn’t been updated in ages and he paid a fraction of their real worth. Now, both Clark and Gillian are quite clear that this did not change the operating arrangements, and they were happy enough to continue working with their uncle. They thought — naively, maybe — that he would eventually retire and pass along the business to them,” Amanda said, and then paused. “Instead, he sold it a year ago to one of their biggest customers.”

  “Lovely,” May said.

  Amanda nodded. “As you can imagine, this did not go down well with the siblings. But they weren’t independently wealthy and didn’t have the money to set up their own business, so they stayed on as employees.”

  “And now they want to leave and they want us to finance — what, exactly?” May said.

  “The Po fashion line. They want to launch their own label.”

  May shook her head. “Amanda, one of the founding principles of Three Sisters is that we won’t invest in start-ups until we have built a solid and self-sustaining base in existing businesses.”

  “I know, and I told my Brandeis friend who approached me exactly that. But she was very insistent that I meet Clark and Gillian, and eventually I gave in. After spending many days with them, and hours on the phone doing due diligence with customers, I formed the opinion that Gillian is highly organized, efficient, and a tremendous manager. Clark . . . well, Clark is a genius.”

  “Genius, I’ve learned, is used far too often to describe someone who has talent. There is a wide gap between genius and talent,” Ava said.

  “That isn’t my word,” Amanda said. “It’s what I’ve heard over and over again from the sample factory’s customers. I called them as part of the due diligence — I pretended I was a buyer for a Hong Kong retail chain — and they were surprisingly open with me. Most of them told me that Clark is the best designer they have ever worked with, and that it’s a shame — a crime, even — that he’s never had a chance to design his own line.”

  “Why didn’t they give him the chance?” May asked.

  “Those customers don’t want originality. They want to copy the best new clothes from well-known designers, dumb them down, and stick their own label on them. They don’t have time for anything else. They’re on a private-label treadmill, one buying season just rolling into the next.”

  “So we’re the chosen ones?”

  “May, I wouldn’t have asked you and Ava to meet with them if I didn’t think there was an opportunity for us to do something very special from a business standpoint. We’re going to leave here in a few minutes and go to the factory. If you don’t want to take the jump after their presentation, then we’ll move on.”

  “How old are they?” May asked.

  “I think Gillian is in her mid-thirties. Clark is younger.”

  “And how much money do they want?”

  “There’s a considerable amount of flexibility, but I don’t think we could start the business with anything less than ten million dollars.”

  “U.S.?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you said start?”

  “I won’t soft-sell this. If we want to do it properly, the amount we’d eventually have to invest could be ten times that. The operative word, though, is eventually. I think we can ease our way into it. The first and most important thing is for you two to meet them and understand what they want to do. I haven’t made any other commitments.”

  “And what do we get for our ten million?” May asked.

  “Forty-nine percent of the business.”

  “You know we don’t like to be in that kind of position.”

  “I know, May, but I’ve told them we would need to have sign-off authority on every budget and that a cheque larger than ten thousand dollars couldn’t be issued without our approval. With rigorous financial controls in place, we can leave them with fifty-one percent and still maintain control. The point is — and you’ve said this to me many times already — if we have control of the money, we have control of the business.”

  “And they’re okay with that?”

  “I wasn’t that blunt with them. The fifty-one percent is almost symbolic.”

  “And you mentioned that we would absolutely insist that they couldn’t sell any of their shares without our approval?”

  “I did, and they were okay with that as well.”

  “So, structurally, the deal does make some sense.”

  “It does.”

  “And if nothing else, it will be a change from discussing trucks and warehouses and logistical challenges with Suki Chan,” May said. She turned to Ava. “Are you up for this?”

  “I’m game for anything,” Ava said.

  ( 6 )

  Amanda had booked a car to take them to the factory in Pudong. They chatted while they drove, Amanda bringing Ava up to date on the noodle shop and convenience store business that Michael owned with Simon To.

  “I’m glad Sonny is driving for him,” Ava said.

  “No more glad than Michael. He says he gets treated more seriously with Sonny around. Sonny has an edge that can’t be ignored.”

  The talk then turned, almost hesitantly, to Borneo. The furniture business was running smoothly again, and they had found new customers in Europe and the United States. May had sent Peter and Grace Chik — a young man and woman who weren’t related — from Wuhan to run it, and the plan was to keep them in Borneo on a permanent basis.

  “I hope Chi-Tze never has to go back there,” Amanda said as the car slowed in front of a red-brick building surrounded by a wire fence. A guard peered at them through a gate made from steel tubing. Amanda waved and the gate swung open.

  They parked in front of the double wooden doors of a one-storey building with small, dust-encrusted windows. Ava glanced around. There was no sign on the door, or anywhere, for that matter.<
br />
  “This hardly looks inspiring,” May said.

  “As I told you, this is a sample factory. It’s functional and that’s about it,” Amanda said. “But everything the Pos need for their presentation is here. So, we thought, why not use it?”

  They left the car and started towards the door. It opened before they reached it and a young woman stepped into the yard. “Welcome,” she said.

  “This is Gillian,” Amanda said.

  Ava stopped in her tracks, her mouth partially open. She was looking up at one of the tallest women she’d ever seen. Gillian Po had to be six foot two, her height magnified by her slim, almost gaunt frame. She was wearing jeans and a plain blue cotton tank top that exposed her sharp, angular collarbones. Her hair was cut short and shaved along the sides, and she was heavily made up.

  “This is Ava and May,” Amanda said, motioning to her partners.

  “Welcome. Please come in,” Gillian said.

  “Where’s Clark?”

  “He’s waiting for us in the boardroom.”

  They shook hands at the doorway, Ava and May both making a point of looking up at Gillian. When they walked past her, they were immediately in the factory. There was a row of sewing machines and two rows of tables where women were cutting fabric and stitching it by hand. On one side was a blackboard with a dress pattern on it and several large corkboards with drawings pinned to them.

  “Our offices are this way,” Gillian said, making a left turn down a hall.

  Curious eyes tracked their progress past glass-walled offices. At the far end of the corridor a man was sitting in a room at a round table that looked just big enough to accommodate them.

  Clark Po stood as they approached. He was dressed in a plain white silk shirt and white painter’s pants. He was as skinny as Gillian but three or four inches shorter, and Ava doubted that he weighed more than 140 pounds. But it was his face that really caught her attention. It was long and pointed, and his big brown eyes were rimmed with heavy black liner. His hair was gelled, swept to one side, and tossed over his shoulder. It was tied with a red ribbon.

  Ava entered the boardroom first. “You must be Clark,” she said. “I’m Ava. Pleased to meet you.”

  “The same,” he said. Ava noticed that his voice was very deep.

  May and Amanda followed her into the room, greeting Clark with nods and smiles.

  “I apologize for the size of our meeting place,” Gillian said. “Things are quite barebones here. It will be more comfortable if we all just sit.”

  Gillian sat down in front of a stack of binders. “I will give each of you one of these binders when we finish our presentation,” she said, tapping them. “I went through the numbers with Amanda last night, and then I got up early this morning and refined them. But the first thing I want to do is thank you for being kind enough to come here today.”

  “We are curious, not kind,” May said.

  “Can I assume that Amanda gave you a rough description of what we want to do?”

  “She did.”

  “Madam Wong —”

  “My name is May, or May Ling, whichever you prefer,” she interrupted.

  “Of course, May Ling, and can I also assume that Amanda explained the history of our business?”

  “She did, and she said you’re now working for a European owner. What she didn’t say was how well that owner is treating you.”

  “Well enough,” Gillian said with a shrug. “But working for someone else wasn’t what we envisioned when we got into this business.”

  Ava glanced at Clark. He sat completely still, his hands folded in front of him, his eyes locked on his sister.

  “Not everyone is meant to have their own business. Why are you?”

  “May Ling, my brother is an incredibly talented designer.”

  “The world is full of them, no? What makes Clark particularly special?”

  Clark moved quite suddenly, as if the mention of his name had given him a jolt. He stretched a hand across the table towards May. She looked at it uncomfortably.

  “Give me your hand,” he said.

  May hesitated and then placed her hand on the table. He took it and held it gently. “My father despaired for me,” he said, staring at May. “When I was a boy, it was obvious that I was different, and after he realized he couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t, he spent years trying to protect me. He thought that if he sent me to the best schools, got me the best education he could buy, it would prepare me for the world, that I could come into this business and run it. What he never understood was that I liked being different, and that I had no interest in his schools or mathematics or science or any of what he called the ‘building blocks’ a man needed to be successful. I flunked out of every school, and for a while we were estranged. It was Gillian who knew what had to be done, and she did it.”

  “I went to our father,” Gillian said. “I told him that Clark should be brought into the business, but not to run it. I told him I was more than capable of doing that, if he was agreeable. I said Clark loved clothes — women’s clothes — and he wanted to design them. We needed to ensure that he was properly trained to do it.”

  “He let me work here in the sample factory,” Clark continued, still holding May’s hand. “Most of our designers — though you couldn’t really call them that — are women. They may not know how to design but they know how to copy, how to cut and sew, and I spent three years learning the basics of the trade from them. Our customer base was mainly American and low-end, so there wasn’t much demand for originality. Mainly they wanted cheap. We tried to give them cheap and good.”

  “Clark didn’t work just here. He went to the factories where we jobbed out our production and made sure that what was coming off the line was what we had intended,” Gillian said.

  “There isn’t any point in a design if it can’t be manufactured in an efficient way,” he said.

  Ava had to smile as she followed their conversation. They were like professional Ping-Pong players as they lobbed back and forth to one another.

  “The point I’m trying to make is that Clark did his apprenticeship, learning the business from the ground up. After three years he could sew and cut with the best of our women and he was doing his own designing. As our customer base slowly moved upscale and expanded into Europe, he had a chance to work with other designers and a wider range of fabrics. If I didn’t know it before, I saw it then — that he was tremendously creative and could more than hold his own with professional designers. That was when I went to our father and said it was time to send Clark to a fashion design college.”

  “He didn’t want to do it,” Clark said, a tinge of bitterness in his voice.

  “He said it would come to more than fifty thousand U.S. dollars a year, with all the costs figured in. But I didn’t believe him. I think he was afraid that once Clark left the family business, he’d never come back.”

  “But you went,” May said.

  “Yes, he did,” Gillian replied. “We forced the issue and our mother took our side, so he gave in. Clark went to Central Saint Martins in London. It’s part of the University of the Arts.”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve never heard of it. Is it supposed to be good?” May asked.

  “It’s one of the very best — if not the best — fashion design schools in the world. Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, Stella McCartney — they’re all graduates,” Gillian said.

  “I took the fashion design womenswear program. It was a wonderful three years . . . and then I came back to the family business and total boredom.”

  “Pardon me, but you had some very good customers. They weren’t all middle-of-the-road,” Amanda said.

  “No, but they all copy, and that’s all they wanted me to do. Take some Stella McCartney or Jil Sander design and adapt it. That’s what they call it — ‘adapting.’ I call it stealing. No
t to their faces, of course.”

  “Then even that part of the business was sold out from under us,” Gillian said, “and we found ourselves employees in what used to be our family business — our heritage. I told Clark we had to find our way out of this.”

  “All right, I understand your disappointment and your dream, but you need to tell us why we should support it,” May said.

  “To begin with, the profit margins can be fantastic,” Gillian said quickly. “We can make eighty percent, maybe even more. Then, if the label attracts a following, there are so many licensing opportunities we can attach to the name.”

  “You have a label in mind?” Ava asked.

  “PÖ.”

  “Just Po?”

  Clark smiled. “No, actually capital P, capital O, with an umlaut over the O.”

  “What’s an umlaut?” said May.

  “Two dots.”

  “That isn’t Chinese.”

  “No, it’s German.”

  “Why do you want to do that?”

  “I like the way it looks, and it represents the melding of East and West that I’m aiming for in my clothes,” Clark said.

  “Going back to the numbers, I’ve prepared an analysis of the profit margins that can accrue to designer labels,” Gillian said.

  “No, just a minute. I’m not interested in looking at those right now,” May said.

  Ava glanced at Amanda and saw her lower lip tremble. Clark closed his eyes.

  “What I want to see is what Clark is capable of creating. You do have designs for us to look at?”

  “We certainly do,” Gillian said.

  “Well, let’s do that, shall we? If we like what we see, then we’ll move on to the numbers.”

  Clark leapt to his feet, put his hand to his mouth, and blew a kiss across the table towards May. “You have no idea how happy I am that you said that.”

  They left the boardroom, walked back down the hall, and turned left into the factory.

  “I apologize in advance for being so amateurish,” Clark said. “We’ve set up a small runway and I’ve brought in some models. Most of them are friends. I wanted you to see my clothes on real women.”