“It didn’t work, lesson learnt,” said Thomas Koh, 35, who chose not to brand his stall as a Koh Brother outlet and instead introduced a “funky and new” look to modernise his family’s business.
The best businesses move with the times, and even traditional F&B stalwarts sometimes attempt to modernise themselves. Like Tiong Bahru Market’s hawker institutionlate grandfatherThomas, a graphic designer by training, has been helping his parents at their stall for almost 10 years. Last June, he teamed up with three friends to set up an outlet at Maxwell Food Centre serving his family’s famous pig innards soup.
: “I wanted to keep the two brands separate so that we can try modern techniques at Maxwell and break away from the traditional ways of cooking to take our pig organ soup to the next level.”But he is humble enough to acknowledge that it was “a mistake” not to use his family stall’s famous name to operate in Maxwell Food Centre. “I tried something funky and new because I wanted to appeal to the younger crowd. It didn’t work, lesson learnt,” he reflected.
Despite importing “premium ingredients” like pig’s hearts, livers, intestines and stomachs from Europe, Thomas faced the challenge of convincing potential customers that his offal was clean enough. As his stall was independently branded, people had no idea that the organs were painstakingly washed by Thomas’s father at Tiong Bahru.
While his mod branding attracted his own share of younger customers, Thomas observed that these youngsters tend not to revisit a stall as much compared to older folks. “The rotation is longer because they have more choices. My own parents don’t eat Japanese food ’cos they don’t enjoy it, and they are not used to Italian food either. The older generation tend to eat at the same stall three to four times a week,” he said.
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