TEAM EFFORT
This month’s cover feature personalities tell us about their creative takes on collaboration, community and change
When it comes to a successful photo shoot, a small village’s worth of people skilled in the fine art of creating striking images are called upon to spring into action, calibrating everything from the exact angle of winged eyeliner to the intensity of a precisely placed light. For this month’s cover story, we had the pleasure of welcoming Michelle Yong, Winnie Chan and Yu Yah-leng into this Singapore Tatler village, and they made two days of back-to-back shooting a really fun experience for everyone. After all, the three of them are no strangers to the importance of collaboration and community. For management consultant-turned-business innovator Michelle, who is on the cover, helming the Aurum group—a subsidiary of construction conglomerate Woh Hup—has meant coming up with new concepts to extend the vitality of the core family business. Even as Aurum grows, Michelle says she continues to hold firm to the core values that has guided the 92-year-old Woh Hup, including thinking of growth in terms of three stakeholders: “Ourselves, our team, and our community.” Winnie’s customised stationery and leather goods brand Bynd Artisan has cast a modern new light on the traditional art of bookbinding, which is still undertaken by veteran craftsmen in their stores. “Collaboration allows us insights into a designer’s mindset and eyes while using our business and manufacturing skill sets to balance the partnership,” she says, adding that these projects allow the brand to groom “the next generation in creative thinking and designing”. As for Yah-leng, the co-founder and creative director of design and branding agency Foreign Policy Design Group, the name of her business says it all. “Great ideas and design solutions come from a diversity of perspectives. It’s a philosophy we hold dear at our practice,” she tells us. That is why the studio has a policy of having a diverse team, and that ethos feeds into its collective aspiration to be outward-looking. “We are always looking to match and better standards on a global scale rather than just the local scale.”