KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 19 — If you appreciate good design, you’ve probably heard of Naiise, a Singapore-born company founded by Dennis Tay in 2013 that focuses on under-the-radar artisanal brands with creative, original designs.
To date, they have six brick-and-mortar shops in Singapore, all located in shopping malls. This year, Naiise launched its online store in Malaysia as a pre-cursor of bigger things to come in December.
Shoppers can look forward to a 4,000 square feet space at the Zhongshan Building that will house their retail cum warehouse, workshops and a small bakery.
So how is Naiisse changing design? “Essentially we are a platform where we showcase what designers do and help them to sell what they do,” says Tay.
Since most of them are independent designers and artisans, Naiise helps them by taking away their headaches like overhead costs, marketing and promotion, delivery and other issues. This allows these one-man-show creatives to focus their precious time and energy into their craft.
Naiise also offers pre-orders for designers who may only have a prototype. This will give the opportunity to designers to bridge the gap between themselves and the customer, allowing them to not feel afraid that their products won’t sell once it’s produced.
“It’s also helping the customers to understand that there are these great products outside but some of them might not be ready.
“If you don’t support them, they will never ever be ready and we will never have all these interesting products that we can shop and buy,” explained Tay.
Surprisingly, the biggest international market of Naiise is actually in the US, with the UK being the second largest.
Opened on October 26, Naiise UK had a three-week long pop-up in Shoreditch, which is a very art- and design-oriented area in London.
There are also plans to open up a brick-and-mortar store there as well. Although London is a capital of design, Tay and his team realised that there is very little representation of South-east Asian designs hence the decision to open there.
So far, there are about 80 people in the Naiise team across the three markets. “The mandate in a long run is that each country must represent a larger quantum of designers from that local country itself.
“In the long run, Naiise in London must represent at least 60 per cent of London designers within that space. Likewise in Malaysia, Singapore and whatever country we go to,” said Tay.
If you browse through Naiise Malaysia’s website, you will notice many designs that are close to home such as Singapore’s Nom Nom Plush’s Curry Puff cushions, Malaysia’s Tiny Pinc’s Siew Yoke stud earrings, Singapore’s Red Republic’s Good Morning mug (reminiscent of the popular Good Morning towels) and Malaysia’s B’Nottee’s Pasar Malam washi tape.
Naiise Malaysia also commissioned Malaysian designers to come up with exclusive-to-Malaysia products for the website including products from Whimsy Whimsical, The Great Indoors and so on.
Plans for Naiise Malaysia include a replication of what Naiise Singapore has done. This means you can look forward to pop-ups and workshops. Tay notices that the design scene in Malaysia is similar to what it was in Singapore when Naiise first started.
“The design community is a bit fragmented, there isn’t one consolidating guy pulling all these designers, artisans and creatives together to showcase them on one platform.”
In Naiise Singapore itself, there are 1,067 brands on the platform. So far in Malaysia there are already 200 to 300 brands since they launched in June this year.
Naiise tries to standardise the prices across all three countries but the pricing is also subject to taxes, shipping costs and so on.
Since Naiise launched here in Malaysia, they received about 10 to 20 enquiries from designers to be on the platform. There are also times when Naiise would approach a designer. “As we started to grow, more and more brands started to approach us. It’s less of a stress in terms of finding the products but we also still go out and look for interesting things to represent Naiise.”
The three criteria Naiise looks for in their curation is that the product must be an original design, how it betters people’s life (or inspires people), and how often one uses it.
In the beginning, Naiise had a rocky start in Singapore. Some of the Singaporean designers Tay approached back then were afraid to commit. “I know an illustrator in Singapore. The first time I met him he was scared and he didn’t even want to talk to me. I told him what we wanted to do at Naiise.
“When the order comes in, the illustrator will print and we will go collect from him,” said Tay. Within two months, Tay tells us that the illustrator managed to sell 60 pieces of his work on the Naiise platform.
“By the third month, he printed out copies of his work and left it with Naiise, saying that whatever that is sold, inform him at the end of the month and then the illustrator will bill Naiise and then replenish the stock.”
Naiise Singapore’s first foray into offline was a pop-up at the rooftop of a carpark complex where designers and design lovers gathered to showcase their products.
“What we started to realise is the importance of community, being in a place where everybody is speaking the same kind of vibe, the same kind of language. That’s why we chose Zhongshan Building as our launching point in Malaysia as well because this is an art block, a designer block and there are a lot of like-minded people here.”
Tay feels that having a physical brick-and-mortar store is important in Malaysia because he observes that physical spaces help interaction of the products with customers.
As the customer learns about the design and effort that go into the product, they will be willing to pay more for a lesser-known brand with good design, rather than buying something that is already established in the market.
“With online you don’t really hear the full story of the product or the full functions of the product,” said Tay. He explained that Naiise became an omni-channel brand where it has both online and offline presence to give their customers options.
He adds, “We help customers understand why they pay a certain price for a mug versus buying from a mass-produced brand made in China.”
In case you are wondering how the name Naiise came about, Tay says it is a colloquial term used in Singapore to describe something nice. “Naiise is a way we spell ‘nice’ in Singapore. I’m not sure if you do it in Malaysia. It was the hardest thing to do which is to choose the brand name.
“We needed something simple and generic but can be scaled. If we called ourselves Chairs then we will be stuck with chairs. I also wanted it to reflect on how we treat people, how we treat our staff, and how we treat our customers.
One day I was just talking to my friend and he said...‘Why not just call it Naiise?’”
Naiise Malaysia
