maternal instinct / muh-tur-nl/ / in-stingkt/

Sharon Wong came, saw and conquered China with her elegant one-stop shop for harried mothers.

SHARON WONG FOUNDER & CEO, MOTHERSWORK

A mother always wants the best for her child. And when Sharon Wong was expecting her first, she ended up amassing nine strollers and three car seats among other baby essentials. “Those days, there was no Internet. I spent truckloads of money buying different products only to find out later that they were duds,” shares the 56-year-old founder and CEO of Motherswork. “You could say I’ve paid my tuition fees,” says Wong with a laugh.

Twenty-two years on, what started as an exercise to solve a personal need is now a business that helps other mothers sieve out the wheat from the chaff. With a 140-strong team and 14 stores across Singapore and China, Motherswork carries over 10,000 products, ranging from ergonomic strollers to delicate cleansers formulated to minimise allergic reactions on a newborn’s skin, from 300 brands. “Success to me is when first-time mums walk into Motherswork and leave feeling a little less overwhelmed,” says Wong.

As a mother of three, she knows exactly what her target audience needs. However, convincing brands to accept Motherswork as a stockist demanded years of cajoling. “In the early years, brands didn’t care about us because Singapore was too small.”

Undeterred, the former tax and treasury director of an MNC worked on defining a premium store experience. When Bugaboo – the Rolls-Royce of baby strollers – was considering entering the Singapore market, Motherswork naturally became their retailer of choice. After all, with prices ranging from $799 to $2,039, these strollers did not come cheap and any retail partner worth its salt had to be able to justify such price tag to parents.

With Bugaboo on board, other premium brands followed suit. In 2012, Wong decided to break into the China market and the realities of operating there set in very quickly. Making sense of regulations became a daily struggle. “They change the rules all the time and it affects things on an administrative and operational level,” Wong explains. “We spent so much time caught up in these details, but after a while, we just ran fast, evolved, and adapted.”

Then came the age of digital disruption, which saw online retailers muscling in on the market with discounted goods. “I wasn’t willing to sacrifice that experience of interacting with mums in the store,” says Wong, whose personalised approach to customers means mums are recommended different products based on the stage of the journey they are in. Still, she knew that although she’d initiallly resisted the idea of going online, e-commerce was swiftly gaining momentum, so Wong embraced an omni-channel approach – but not before fighting for the survival of the brick-andmortar stores.

To that end, she spent years negotiating with every brand to control the prices of goods and stem the flow of parallel imports. Today, Motherswork’s stores continue to hold firm alongside an e-store extension and other online platforms.

For someone who describes herself as “a warrior and a dreamer”, she has indeed come a long way from her hometown in Ipoh. And even as Covid-19 takes the wind out of the world, Wong remains unfazed. “Volatility creates opportunity. Some of the malls in China that we couldn’t get into before because they didn’t have space are opening up.”