JOY SEAH
The opportunity to design the New Majestic Hotel—which recently shuttered to make way for new developments— was what sparked the formation of architectural and design firm Ministry of Design in 2004. Joy Seah entered to take care of the non-design aspects of the business, freeing her husband Colin to focus on design. “I do what the architects and designers don’t want to do— business development, HR, finance and office management,” she says of her multifaceted role that taps on her previous experience at global consulting firm Accenture and corporate business exposure. She has helped to grow the business into a globally recognised, award-winning design firm, with offices in Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and Beijing, and projects in more than eight countries. Says Joy, “The journal (pictured on the opposite page) captures my thoughts as I handle calls, e-mails, Wechat and Whatsapp messages from various clients. I am quite digitally driven and I like having all my work and thoughts captured across my Macbook, smartphone and ipad. When I juggle multiple calls from clients, it’s often quicker to simply jot things down with pen and paper. Sometimes that’s faster than typing!” The renderings and photos (pictured alongside the journal on the opposite page) are of the firm’s newly launched and in-progress projects, which includes Vue Hotel, an 80-room boutique hotel in Beijing that aims to reinterpret Chinese culture in modern and quirky ways. The excellent design the firm produces is a direct result of the talent within it. When the formula is right with great people, she says, it is “a wonderfully liberating and satisfying experience”. One way Ministry of Design achieves this is by consciously taking on fewer projects, to allow the creative team to focus on one project at a time “so we can focus on innovation, and achieve real work-life balance. It may mean lower profits, but it feels great to have a happy team”.
or Sabrina Tan, a battle with eczema was the catalyst for a breakthrough beauty innovation. “Sometimes my scalp would be so sensitive and red I couldn’t colour close to the roots. What was worse was when I saw my son and daughter struggling with eczema, too.” While she was working in marketing in the tech sector, Sabrina began mulling over how to find a suitable product tailored for her instead of the generic ones available. She was also dissatisfied with time-wasting multistep skincare regimes. She learned that over 80 per cent of the skin’s condition is affected by lifestyle and environmental stressors. So in 2008, skincare brand Skin Inc was born. “I wanted to empower people with knowledge of their own skin, and understanding of what to do for their skin,” she says. That prompted the concept of My Daily Dose—a cocktail blend of three serums for each person’s unique skincare needs. Customers answer a three-minute questionnaire called the Skin Identity Check on the Skin Inc website. Using a proprietary algorithm, the technology is able to decode individual skin identities and concoct the most effective cocktail of serums. The most challenging aspect of starting the brand was that when she came up with the concept nine years ago, nobody could grasp it. The skincare scientists in Japan she spoke to could not understand her proposal and told her it was not possible to have three different serums in one product, because the ingredients would not be stable. However, Sabrina persisted and came up with the idea of encapsulating the active ingredients in the serum, so they would remain stable. She proposed this idea to the scientists and My Daily Dose was born.
Not everyone can say they have made women’s dreams come true, but Janice Wong can. The pastry chef ’s Chocolate H20, an air-light concoction of water, chocolate and egg white, was “designed for women, because women love chocolate and love to indulge”. The low-calorie, gluten-free mousse comprises 50 per cent dark chocolate and 50 per cent water. It is accompanied by yuzu sorbet, drizzled with yuzu calamansi sauce and sprinkled with a chocolate crumble of cocoa powder, butter and salt. Gummy gems of burnt caramel parfait dot the plate. “I wanted to tease with the sight of the dish,” says Janice. “The sight is part of the fulfilment, then the taste.” A big challenge in creating this dessert was the stability of the mousse. “It’s important that it doesn’t collapse before it reaches the diner. We got around it by using egg white powder as a stabiliser.” The Chocolate H20, which took two months from conception to end product, also entered the finals of the Valrhona C3 Pastry Competition in Spain in 2012 to represent Asia. Janice and her team are currently focused on edible art, doing 40 exhibits a year, such as the first edible marshmallow ceiling art they created in 2011 for a gallery in Singapore and their sugar and chocolate seascape, Underwater Labyrinth, at the Singapore Art Museum in 2016. Besides making her mark with such innovative creations, Janice also feels a sense of fulfilment for being able to inspire other women due to the presence of her eponymous stores in Asia, such as the Janice Wong MGM pastry shop at the new MGM Cotai Resort in Macau set to open later this year. “Women, especially in Japan, come up to us to say this is amazing,” she says. “Over there, women do not use their names as their brand, even if they are the lead pastry chef. I think seeing what we have done gives a lot of women courage.”