LOVE BONITO with RACHEL LIM

(Love Bonito, n.d.)

The Textile and Fashion Federation organized a talk with the co-founder of the brand “Love Bonito” at the National Design Centre in the month of February 2017. It was indeed a fun afternoon where Rachel spoke to us about how she began her career and the history behind “Love Bonito”. Her journey has been full of ups and downs. She believes in hard work and team effort. She admits to have been very lucky in terms of finding a manufacturer in China for the brand. The brand has several pop ups at 313 Somerset in Singapore but is mostly online based. They now have a huge customer base.

They also provide internship opportunities to students studying fashion and business. Love Bonito is all about loving yourself and your curves. The company operates out of a 5,500 sq ft space in an industrial building in Kallang Pudding Road, spread out over two floors that include offices, a packaging room and a studio to shoot new looks.

(Zachariah, 2015)

The talk was highly engaging and having work in a startup before, Rachel’s hardships and experiences were very relatable to me. The brand has now taken off spectacularly. When they launched their first collection, the website crashed due to high traffic, even though they had prepared the server to handle a few thousand customers, shared Rachel. The company has about 35 staff, 150,000 "Likes" on its Facebook page and 114.4K Instagram followers.

Rachel Tim and Viola Tan work as partners in building this brand together.

They both work on designing and creating ideas together and are very different from each other, which makes their bond stronger. Viola who handles Love, Bonito's business development, finances and logistics, says: "Rachel and I complement each other. We're constantly talking about the present and future of the business, so we both know the game plan.My visit to the talk opened my eyes to the hardships faced by a business and the difficult times an entrepreneur has to face.

Fig 5 (Chen, 2015)

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