#156 New Base, Home Furnishing Expo, Shop Visits, Expanding Friends Abroad (01/06/2025)

Welcome back to this week's journal. It's been three years since I started this habit, quietly writing a little something every weekend. In the blink of an eye, the city has changed a lot, and Hong Kong has changed a lot too, but I am still me, I am still an ordinary person, and I want to do what I am good at.

This week has been quite busy, sometimes so busy that I really wanted to quit. Some of my colleagues probably know this. The workload and various forms of hardship this week are truly grueling. I feel that if I hadn't started, and if I could choose again, I might not have done it. A Hong Kong entrepreneur I greatly respect once said that the most enjoyable, or rather, the most rewarding and cost-effective, time for starting a business is when you have a relatively large, one-person company. That's the best time. Later, if you want to expand, you'll experience a painful period. This is absolutely true. My small business is still a small business, but with several stores and continued product production, it's slowly becoming increasingly difficult.

This week we just launched our new Base frame, internally called "Four Colors Team." Besides adding new colors, there have been updates in various details—I won't go into details here as they're already covered on https://repillow.co/bedding, so there's no need to repeat myself. But in addition to these updates, we've added a feature many people have wanted—waterproofing. The waterproof layer will be attached between the mattress and the bed sheet, and the base frame will hold it in place. So whether you have cats, dogs, or children, you have another reason to switch to new sheets. I will continue to improve it until new sheets become a natural choice for more people.

Besides, we also participated in the Home Expo at the Convention and Exhibition Centre this week. I was there too, but I'm really not good at speaking. My colleagues are good at it, but I'm shy and awkward. I'm not very good at "selling to customers." I also have a lot of work to do and we don't have enough manpower, so it's better for me to stay at the shop. So, I switched places with my North Point colleague. Some days, I went back to the shop to look after the shop while my North Point colleague went to the Home Expo. The North Point shop is relatively quieter, with tables and chairs, so I can do my work there.

Actually, there are advantages to working in a shop, because you get to meet people and hear what customers are thinking. When you're engrossed in your daily work, you'll have blind spots—you might focus too much on a few flawed aspects and neglect others. For example, suppose you're making T-shirts, and you're constantly researching how to make the shirt more breathable—which isn't wrong, but it turns out the customer just wanted more color options.

One advantage of working as a shop assistant is that I think you learn how to judge people. This is something you develop gradually through experience. Nowadays, many young people my age or even younger have indeed had fewer opportunities to interact with people since childhood, and I admit I'm not very good at judging people. After starting work, as you meet more people, you begin to learn how to judge them. Personal skills are necessary, but knowing how to judge people is even better.

Recently, at least several friends have mentioned that their companies' businesses aren't doing too well, so they've decided to try expanding into overseas markets. I think this has become quite common in the last two years. But frankly speaking, whether going to foreign markets will actually be better is uncertain. It's genuinely quite difficult. As a well-known Hong Kong businessperson said, the Hong Kong government's current attitude is to let companies "fight freely" in a shrinking market. Some people used to fantasize that with the food and retail market in such a bad state, the government would provide support or some kind of assistance to help the industry weather the storm. Now it's a period of elimination; in short, no one will help you, you have to find your own way out.