When she first traveled to China nearly a decade ago, Tsai Yen-ping (蔡燕萍) saw women dressed in drab blue jackets. They either wore no cosmetics or they slathered thick, cheap makeup over their fine skin.
The Taiwanese entrepreneur quickly realized she could get rich making these ladies beautiful and she set up a factory in Shanghai.
PHOTO: AP
Ten years later, her Natural Beauty (
She credits much of her success to good timing. She got into the Chinese market just as the poor nation began shedding communism and chasing fast industrial growth. The climate was ripe for her time-proven theory: Women yearning for a good life would spare no effort or money to add to their personal charm and appeal.
"All women want to look pretty, and poorer women want it even more," the soft-spoken Tsai said as she sipped floral tea in an elegant Chinese-style silk jacket. "Without good education or rich parents, appearance is what they count on to move up the social ladder."
Tsai is among thousands of Taiwanese who have invested in China in the past decade,.
When she first went to China, the country reminded her of impoverished Taiwan in the early 1970s when she started her beauty empire from scratch. And the women she saw were a lot like she was then, eager to get out of poverty and obscurity.
After her father's business went broke, the 54-year-old Tsai said her family sank into poverty, keeping her from advancing beyond high school. She later married an office worker and rented a chair in a beauty parlor, where she did facial massage.
In 1976, she acquired a loan of NT$240,000 (US$6,800) and operated a parlor that grew years later into a multi-million-dollar franchised business with a factory producing various cosmetics. Now, she says her privately owned business empire is worth NT$2 billion (US$58 million).
Her strategy: Get as many women into the business and help the more career-minded ones to operate their own stores. The same practice was used in China.
To find dedicated clerks and beauty consultants, the group offers a six-month, tuition-free intensive course on makeup and skin care.
The trainees can get loans from friends or from Natural Beauty to start their own beauty parlors. The group foregoes royalties, allowing the parlors to reap up to 60 percent gross profit, Tsai said.
Women of all ages, and sometimes their husbands, joined the business.
"We don't just hire young women with fair skin," Tsai said. "There are also people laid off from state-run firms or professionals who wanted to make more bucks."
Women from remote places such as the western provinces of Xinjiang and Gansu go to the training schools in larger cities and return home to start their business, she said.
Wang An, a former translator, turned her home in downtown Beijing into a Natural Beauty shop in 1995. Today, Wang, 40, oversees the capital's 300 or so franchised stores, training and the construction of a 28-story company building.
China's high taxes on cosmetics and the group's big spending on advertising have cut into profits, Tsai said.
Tsai said she lives a simple life, though she confesses to indulging in clothes. "I may be a rich woman, but in spiritual, not monetary terms," she said.
Profits could rise as the group plans to go public and would be required to collect royalties from franchised stores, she said. And Tsai says she plans to double the number of beauty parlors in China by the end of 2002.
"We expect to have at least 2,000 in China next year," she said.
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