Manhattan Portage (MP) bags — one of the world’s most popular fashion accessories — are 100 percent made in Taiwan, according to MP CEO Lin Su-hwei (林淑惠), who herself is from Taiwan.
Lin has been selected by the Crain’s New York Business journal as one of its top entrepreneurs of the year, a title given to honor business leaders’ spirit of never stopping “innovating and growing, even when facing an unpredictable economy or a challenge as tough as Hurricane Sandy.”
Her success is turning the Manhattan messenger bags into a global hit. Asked how, Lin said she believes it is her insistence on staying in style and using high-quality materials.
“Manhattan Portage is iconic — they were the first real brand to make a messenger bag into something that was contemporary, sleek and functional,” said Emily Blumenthal, founder of the Independent Handbag Designer Awards.
One key to the company’s expansion came from Lin’s decision as CEO to move beyond the messenger bag while staying true to the brand’s roots, Crain’s said.
Last year, a client took a 30-year-old MP backpack to the company for repair, Lin said. This shows that their bags “are so durable that are hardly worn out after 30 years of use,” she said.
To maintain such high quality, Lin, who moved to New York from Taiwan in 1991, went back to her homeland where she located reliable factories.
After the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, she started to weigh the feasibility of relocating MP factories from the US to Asia, Lin said.
At the start, she worked with manufacturers in the Philippines, Vietnam and China, but because they upheld different standards, she frequently had to travel between the US and Asia to check on the quality of every shipment, she said.
Eventually, she continued, “I got sickened.”
As a result, she decided in 2009 to close the factories in the Philippines and China and relocate production to Changhua County.
Taiwan makes top-quality products, according to Lin.
“Sometimes our factories demand a higher quality than even I ask for,” Lin said.
The US dollar was trading at NT$29.7 at 10am today on the Taipei Foreign Exchange, as the New Taiwan dollar gained NT$1.364 from the previous close last week. The NT dollar continued to rise today, after surging 3.07 percent on Friday. After opening at NT$30.91, the NT dollar gained more than NT$1 in just 15 minutes, briefly passing the NT$30 mark. Before the US Department of the Treasury's semi-annual currency report came out, expectations that the NT dollar would keep rising were already building. The NT dollar on Friday closed at NT$31.064, up by NT$0.953 — a 3.07 percent single-day gain. Today,
‘SHORT TERM’: The local currency would likely remain strong in the near term, driven by anticipated US trade pressure, capital inflows and expectations of a US Fed rate cut The US dollar is expected to fall below NT$30 in the near term, as traders anticipate increased pressure from Washington for Taiwan to allow the New Taiwan dollar to appreciate, Cathay United Bank (國泰世華銀行) chief economist Lin Chi-chao (林啟超) said. Following a sharp drop in the greenback against the NT dollar on Friday, Lin told the Central News Agency that the local currency is likely to remain strong in the short term, driven in part by market psychology surrounding anticipated US policy pressure. On Friday, the US dollar fell NT$0.953, or 3.07 percent, closing at NT$31.064 — its lowest level since Jan.
Hong Kong authorities ramped up sales of the local dollar as the greenback’s slide threatened the foreign-exchange peg. The Hong Kong Monetary Authority (HKMA) sold a record HK$60.5 billion (US$7.8 billion) of the city’s currency, according to an alert sent on its Bloomberg page yesterday in Asia, after it tested the upper end of its trading band. That added to the HK$56.1 billion of sales versus the greenback since Friday. The rapid intervention signals efforts from the city’s authorities to limit the local currency’s moves within its HK$7.75 to HK$7.85 per US dollar trading band. Heavy sales of the local dollar by
The Financial Supervisory Commission (FSC) yesterday met with some of the nation’s largest insurance companies as a skyrocketing New Taiwan dollar piles pressure on their hundreds of billions of dollars in US bond investments. The commission has asked some life insurance firms, among the biggest Asian holders of US debt, to discuss how the rapidly strengthening NT dollar has impacted their operations, people familiar with the matter said. The meeting took place as the NT dollar jumped as much as 5 percent yesterday, its biggest intraday gain in more than three decades. The local currency surged as exporters rushed to
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