We’re
staying on ‘massage’
Monday, 3 Oct 2016
Goh Cheh Yak, MD of healthcare and massage chair company Gintell, says one must prioritise building up the brand over merely making profits, especially if one is in the game for the long term. JOY LEE talks to him.
IT WOULD seem some entrepreneurs, like Datuk Goh Cheh
Yak, are born out of necessity. The reason he stayed on in business, he says,
is because no one else would hire him.
But of course, Goh, managing director of Gintell, did
not finish school with a business plan in hand.
He started out as a salesperson, selling sewing
machines door to door for electrical company Singer.
The job came with no salary or allowances, and Goh had
to work hard to earn his commissions. After a year, when his brothers and some
friends started a company that sold household products, Goh decided to join
them.
This time, he had to go round to supermarkets,
departmental stores, pasar malam and pasar pagi to introduce and
demonstrate the use of their household products. But this set-up did not last
very long.
Within a few years, his brothers had moved on to
something else, and Goh found himself at a crossroads in 1996. What should he
do? Find a job elsewhere or continue with the business?
Well, as it transpired, circumstances made the
decision for him.
“At the time, no one wanted to hire me. So I had no
choice, I had to do my own business,” he points out.
Goh, then 28, started a shop called Intelljaya in
Sungei Wang Plaza, Kuala Lumpur. He had no capital, only leftover stock from
his brothers’ earlier venture worth RM200,000 to RM300,000. This, he took and
sold, using the proceeds to build his new business.
His shop sold all sorts of household products, from
water filters and water heaters to safety boxes, television filters and
computer filters, so much so that “we call it a sundry shop lah”.
Running his own show was a challenge.
Goh recalls that he had too many products, and so had
to discontinue slow-moving items to lower his stockholding. Additionally, the
Asian Financial Crisis in 1997 affected Intelljaya quite significantly, as most
of its products were imported.
“We restructured our products and focused more on
healthcare products. We concentrated on our massage and fitness products,” he
says.
Back then, small massage products went for about
RM1,000 or a few hundred ringgit for one. Goh packaged his goods and sold them
in bundles “like RM888 for five products” to push sales, and customers, he
notes, thought these to be good buys.
When the economy improved, so did demand for
healthcare products. With a growing market at hand, the company moved to
capitalise on it by bringing in bigger items, like massage chairs, from Taiwan
and China.
In 2003, Goh rebranded his business to Gintell. Along
with this change in name, Gintell also renovated its existing showrooms to
reflect a new image.
He launched eight new concept stores and started
selling massage chairs under the brand.
After a while, Goh found that the designs of the
imported chairs did not quite match the demand of the Malaysian market. That
was when Goh decided to try designing his own massage chairs.
In 2006, Gintell appointed its own designers, while
the actual manufacturing and customising processes for its brand of massage
chairs were outsourced. Goh is proud to say that Gintell’s products are truly
its own.
And over the past two decades, he has invested heavily
in building the company and the Gintell brand. Investment in branding is
especially important for the long term, Goh emphasises.
“That’s why we have put aside a lot of budget to
promote our brand. In these 20 years, we didn’t really make much profit,” he
reveals.
“All the profit goes back to promoting our brand. So
we don’t win the profit but we win the Gintell brand. It’s for the long term.
We have to invest in our brand,” he explains, noting that cumulative
investments in advertising and promotions over the 20 years added up to
RM50mil-RM60mil.
But Goh says he came to realise that putting Gintell’s
name out on advertisements alone was not enough. That just meant that consumers
could see the brand, not experience it.
So Gintell started setting up branded coin-operated
massage chairs at Rest & Go stations it set up in Selayang Mall and Summit
USJ in 2009. Consumers could get a good three-minute massage for just RM1. The
response was favourable, and within two years, Gintell had 2,000 such chairs
installed all around the country in shopping malls, airports and rest areas.
The company even managed to penetrate regional markets
with its Rest & Go concept. It currently has a total of 1,500 chairs in
Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand and Brunei.
Goh has grown Gintell into a sizeable company. Gintell
currently makes an annual revenue of about RM100mil. The company has been
growing at an impressive rate of more than 20% per annum over the last three
years.
And last year, Gintell received due recognition when
it bagged the “Malaysian Business of the Year” award at The Star Outstanding
Business Awards (SOBA) 2015. The company also took home two Gold awards and one
Silver award under the “Best in Marketing”, “Best Brand” and “Best Innovation”
categories respectively.
Gintell’s victory came as a pleasant surprise for Goh
as the company only made the “Most Promising” category in 2014.
“Now we have the pressure to keep being better. It is
a good motivation for us,” Goh says.
No doubt, this year will be a challenging one for
Gintell, as it will be for most retailers. But Goh is not about to sit back and
let circumstances dictate the growth of his company. If his being in business
didn’t feel much like a matter of choice, then the urge to keep his business
running and growing is, likewise, not a matter of option either.
“Businessmen are always not satisfied. So we need to
continue to do better. We need to have a long-term view. No choice. We have to
keep going,” he laughs.
Goh’s hobby these days is to seek out ways to grow the
“baby” faster.
Gintell has some 50 planned roadshows nationwide this
year to reach out to consumers and Goh notes that turnout and sales closed at
these roadshows have exceeded expectations. Next, he is eyeing expansion in the
Asean market, and by 2030, he hopes Gintell will grow across Asia. A listing
exercise is also not too far off the horizon.
Necessity has certainly driven Goh far, and it seems,
necessity will continue to drive him even further.
“In the beginning, we call it a dream. But now that we
are here, it is good, but we need to just keep improving. We will always try
our best to improve and achieve our dreams,” says Goh.
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