Born With It

Not everybody can turn her passion into a profession, much less one that has flourished for two decades. Founder of Motherswork, Sharon Wong, shares her journey with CHARMIAN LEONG

- Charmian Leong

SHARON WONG likes to tell people she’s an “accidental” or “unintentional” entrepreneur. She’s not entirely wrong. Her retail chain Motherswork started as a hobby that eventually developed a life of its own. But if all it takes are fortuitous circumstances to become an entrepreneur, we would see a whole lot more of them today. So while we’ll concede her path to business ownership wasn’t exactly planned, there is nothing unintended about how she stayed at the top of the mother and baby retail game once she decided to become a player.

Like many successful business owners, Wong saw a problem and decided to fix it. “When I was pregnant with my first child, I was working full-time at an MNC. I had to meet bankers but didn’t want to go in my frumpy, floral maternity dresses,” she shares. “That’s when I decided to sell maternity clothes for professional women.” So she opened a small shop at Forum The Shopping Mall, and that was the beginning of Motherswork.

While the name hasn’t changed, the scope of Motherswork certainly has. Obsessed with hunting down the perfect products for her babies and realising the only way to get the brands she wanted was to order them in bulk from overseas suppliers, she amassed a sizeable collection of spare goods. “I wanted the coolest stroller, the safest car seat... But this was over 20 years ago and we didn’t have such stuff in Singapore,” she says. “Can you imagine the number of brands and products I had researched by the time I had my third child? I was probably on my 10th stroller and hated the first nine. So I started selling products for babies and children too. It was a hobby — I simply wanted to hang out with other mothers and share all this knowledge. This was before social media so you couldn’t just go online and Google everything. We were the research.”