Starting her own body aesthetic company, Bizzy Body, at the age of 25. Expanding the business to 30 outlets within five years. Establishing Malaysia’s first beauty co-working space, Beauty & Co, in The Gardens, Mid Valley Megamall, for aesthetic professionals to serve clients while sharing cutting-edge resources and a prime location.
Yap Yann Fang accomplished all these with a palpable gusto for the beauty industry – the seed of which was planted when she was a child helping out at her mother’s hair salon.
As she swept up the floor or helped to wash customers’ hair, Yap practically inhaled what working in beauty means – lifting customers’ spirits. “Customers came to my mum for a hair wash or a hair blow, and they would leave feeling good. I don’t remember seeing a customer leave her salon feeling bad.”
But these days, she observes, the beauty sector often leaves a bitter taste in customers’ mouths.
Yap dived into the industry since graduating college two decades ago, cutting her teeth in slimming and beauty salon chain Mayfair Bodyline. Over the years, the market grew increasingly lucrative. According to Statista, the revenue of the beauty and personal care market in Malaysia totals US$2.74 billion in 2022 and is expected to grow annually by 3.53% from 2022 to 2026.
Competition grew in tandem. Yap says that this led to rampant unscrupulous practices in the market, such as selling products containing banned substances, using dubious technology on customers, or using fear tactics to pressure customers into spending more.
Disillusioned, Yap was close to quitting the career she loved. What made her bounce back to take on the spiralling standards of the industry? The CEO and founder of Beauty & Co sits down with Asia Connects to chat about how the beauty co-working space can be a game changer.
Asia Connects: You have spent your childhood and career in the beauty business. How has the aesthetic market changed over the past two decades, especially now in the age of social media?
Yap: Around 30 years ago, only the affluent could afford beauty procedures and products. When I started my career 20 years ago, beauty became affordable. Beauty salons mushroomed up. And these days, people are sharing their visits to beauty centres on social media platforms like Instagram. This opened up demand for beauty treatments and services. Gone are the days when people hide about going under the knife.
Moreover, innovation is rapid in the aesthetic field. Now, you don’t need to undergo invasive procedures like facelifting to reverse ageing. There are less invasive options, such as HIFU (high intensity focused ultrasound), so people are more open to try it.
AC: What put you on the path to start Beauty & Co?
Yap: When I was 25 years old, I started my own slimming salon business, Bizzy Body. It was my first time being an entrepreneur, and at such a young age, I grappled with a lot of self-doubt and trials and errors. It was very fortunate that we managed to expand quickly. By the age of 30, I was managing about 30 outlets.
But eventually, the business outgrew me. I had no motivation to go to work anymore. I think it was because I didn’t have a clear vision, culture and values. Without these, you end up hiring people who don’t share the same values, making you feel more and more out of place. In 2012, I sold the company to [international wellness player] VLCC Group.
It came to a point when I wondered if I should quit the beauty industry altogether. I was demotivated because the industry was a mess – there was so much price competition and not much integrity. We saw many beauty businesses selling products with banned substances, using aesthetic machines of inferior quality, and performing illegal procedures.
Fortunately, I had the opportunity to attend a culture camp by Zappos in the US. That gave me a lot of affirmation and confidence. I realised that I was still very much in love with the beauty industry, and I should take on the competition with more integrity, not less.
So, in 2018, I started Beauty & Co – the ‘& Co’ part of the name reflects my aim to build a community and ecosystem that can become a role model of professionalism for the industry.
AC: How did you develop the concept of Beauty & Co as a co-working space and platform for beauty experts?
Yap: I was clear about what I wanted when I started Beauty & Co – integrity and impact. We uphold integrity by carefully screening the beauticians, small salon owners, masseuses, spa therapists and skin doctors that use our co-working space and platform to serve clients – they have to be genuinely skilful and not the ‘hard-selling’ type. And I wanted to make an impact because I was already 38 years old by then. I thought: I’d likely work hard for another 20 years, so I should take this time to build a legacy that brings positive change to the industry.
Many new business models were cropping up at the time, including the shared resources model like Airbnb and Grab. So, the question was, how can we modernise the beauty business? I started mapping out how we can share resources in the beauty sector. For our industry, the location, ambience and environment are essential – that can be shared. The latest equipment and technology also require a hefty investment, but we can share that too. Besides hardware, we can also share training, marketing and branding services.
So beauticians who are actually skilled at their services but not so savvy in building a brand and managing the business can join our platform. They can focus on serving their clients and improving their skills while Beauty & Co takes care of the rest.
AC: How does the co-working arrangement work, and what is the response from the industry so far?
Yap: Although Beauty & Co started in 2018, we took two years to build a foundation and only launched the co-working model in 2020. We now have 70 full-timers and 30 freelancers sharing our co-working space.
The full-timers are under Beauty & Co’s employment. They receive basic salaries and commissions. When they become more skilful and build a more extensive database, they can convert to freelancer status, which usually also means a step up in their earnings.
For freelancers, they usually run their own beauty business and provide their services at our space. Some have salons but come to Beauty & Co to use our technology. Freelancers do not need to pay rent for our space or equipment; we operate on a profit-sharing basis. The cut we take ranges from 5% to 40%, depending on how much they use Beauty & Co’s space, equipment and client database.
Of course, the beauty industry took a hit during the pandemic in 2020. But it pushed up demand for our co-working space because many beauticians needed to cut down on rental and staffing.
Moving forward, I believe the co-working concept for the beauty industry still has a long future ahead. People want more flexibility in their work hours nowadays. Beauticians, especially, start their careers at the young age of 17 or 18. But ten years down the road, they may get married and have children, and the focus is on the family. Then, when their children go to school, they may decide to work hard again. That’s the strength of a co-working space – it allows people to have that flexibility and work at their own pace.
AC: How is this model working out for Beauty & Co so far?
Yap: This is our fourth year of operations, but of course, we did suffer two years of the pandemic. All in all, we are expecting to close around RM20 million in revenue this year. Our target is to go public and undertake an IPO (initial public offering) in five years, and for now, it looks highly possible that we will achieve this.
So we are not doing too badly, but no business is perfect, and we still need to improve. We want to improve at a faster speed. That is why our company hierarchy is very flat, so we can make decisions faster.
AC: You are also advocating ‘selling with love’. Can you tell us more?
Yap: About 20 to 30 years ago, beauty professionals were not as aggressive in sales. But today, as the industry becomes more lucrative, it also attracts more ‘salesy’ people to join the industry. So hard-selling to customers became the norm. This soured the industry’s reputation and created much fear among customers to even walk into beauty centres.
At Beauty & Co, we try to weed out hard-selling behaviours among our professionals. But some of them were worried that if they do not sell aggressively, the customer may be won over by another hard-selling beauty salon. So I started thinking about how I could train my community to sell the right way – sell with solutions and professionalism, and sell from a place of love instead of from a place of instilling fear within customers.
I was fortunate to have gotten to know Jason Campbell (author of the book Selling with Love), who was able to coach me to do just that. I also invited him to run a workshop in Malaysia. Initially, it was meant for the Beauty & Co community, but I thought – why not extend the impact? We decided to open the workshop for free to those outside our community. After all, there’s no point if Beauty & Co is the only one selling with love. The industry needs to level up, so customers no longer dread entering beauty centres.
Our line of business is to make people feel good. And sometimes, all customers want is for us to do our job.
