Entrepreneur hits big with embroidery

“Making money for just myself, or making money for myself, my relatives and people in my hometown? That’s the obvious difference between the kind of entrepreneurship I did before and the kind I do now.”

That was 38- year- old Shi Jia’s response when she compared what she did before — running a lucrative engineering company for over a decade — with her current and “much more meaningful” job of helping 1,900 women in her home village prosper by making traditional embroidery that is sold worldwide.

The entrepreneur, who is also a deputy to the 14th National People’s Congress, comes from Shilan town, Hunan province. Her life changed in 2017 when she decided to quit her company, which was netting an annual revenue of around 25 million yuan ($ 3.6 million) at the time.

Shi’s parents persuaded her to give up her company and come home to help other villagers prosper.

So she started her second company making Miao embroidery, a traditional handicraft of the Miao ethnic group in western Hunan.

She hired four practitioners of Miao embroidery as instructors, and encouraged left- behind women and female migrant workers to join the company.

All received paid training for three months, after which they were able to choose to work at the company or complete orders at home. Presented with the prospect of a stable job, many migrant workers chose to work at Shi’s company.

As business expanded, the company set up five more factories in three counties in western Hunan. Shi also set up product design teams and opened both brick- and- mortar and online stores in a number of cities around the country to promote their work.

Nowadays, embroiderers can earn a stable income ranging from a few thousand to 10,000 yuan a month, and are able to live a life “carrying their babies on their backs, embroidering flowers and supporting themselves and their families”.

By 2021, the company employed 1,400 people, was helping 1,272 poor families and facilitated 300 migrant worker parents, who had been forced to leave their children to find work, to be employed locally.

In terms of the product design, Shi’s team has integrated elements of cultural heritage with fashion and has created 300 lines, including clothing, bags and handicrafts.

In 2018, Shi held an exhibition of Miao embroidery in Paris. A month later, designers from Hermes created 12 Miao embroidery pieces with Shi’s company, which were displayed at the Bordeaux Fashion Show.