What started out as a womenswear brand has evolved into a design-centric label, fusing fashion and lifestyle via desirable pieces that push oft-perceived boundaries of what a Singaporean brand can be. Run by husband-and-wife duo Daniel Chew and Rebecca Ting, Beyond The Vines celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. For this milestone, the brand partnered with UK heritage fabric house Liberty on a series of bags and accessories.
A week before the official drop of the BTV_Liberty Fabric collection, Beyond The Vines held an intimate preview party at Goodwood @ Evans, a garden centre that set the tone of the collection’s floral prints. On launch day, we spoke to Ting over Zoom, a date that had to be blocked out about a month in advance. Undoubtedly, running a business and a family means her schedule is perpetually stacked. But from what we could tell through the screen from our Parisian hotel room, Ting’s demeanour and candour hasn’t changed one bit since the first time we interviewed her five years ago.
ESQUIRE SINGAPORE: You guys just launched the Liberty collection today, right?
REBECCA TING: Yes! And it did so well. I think we’re mostly sold out online; if anything, there are just a couple of them left in stores. So very proud of the team.
ESQ: That’s crazy.
RT: I know, right? I mean, I knew it would do well, but I didn’t expect it to do this well, because I wasn’t sure how people would react to florals and prints.
ESQ: How does it feel to hit 10 years, and five years after a revamp that pretty much skyrocketed Beyond The Vines?
RT: I feel nothing much has changed, to be honest. Seriously. We still are driven by the very same reason we started BTV. I guess we’ve learnt a couple of things along the way. Ten years is a long time, but it’s also not that long. And like you said, I think us jumping into rebranding during COVID makes it feel like we’re still quite young. Personally I feel ancient, but I think the brand is fresh and has a long and open road ahead of it.
ESQ: I can imagine the rebranding probably feels like a new lease of life.
RT: In a way, yes. It feels like we’re doing it for the second time, and yet, a bit like a grafted plant, you know? The stem and trunk are old, but there are new branches and leaves now.
ESQ: Oh, that’s a great way of putting it. Well, we first met and spoke five years ago when you rebranded and opened your Ngee Ann City store. We were talking about Beyond The Vines expanding into menswear, and you said Daniel’s “voice was quite strong” while designing it. Has that changed?
RT: No, it’s still there. He puts me out as the face of BTV because he thinks his face won’t sell. (laughs) Daniel and I work very closely and very well together. We complement each other, but a large part of the creative force—the creative vision at large, maybe from a company’s perspective—comes from his voice actually. He is a lot of that assurance, clarity, and the boldness to take certain steps forward—like what he thinks we should definitely do even when everything else points otherwise. He has definitely supported and charged that vision significantly for the brand.
ESQ: As someone who didn’t start out doing menswear, how has your approach changed since five years ago?
RT: I think we have evolved a little. Five years ago, we just wanted menswear to support womenswear. We felt there needed to be an expansion into the category and it made sense. But in recent years, we started to see a shift. More and more men began adopting the brand and accepting that we aren’t just a womenswear label—which took ourselves a while to shed. When we started with the Dumpling bag, a lot of the men could not imagine themselves using it. Now, we have come to a place as a brand where our products have androgynous appeal. Our designs are more neutral and men have found that these work for them too. It just takes a bit of styling. So I think the distribution between male and female has shifted.
ESQ: I do notice this epicene quality in the designs. I’m sure even for your womenswear pieces—like when you dropped a line of women’s suiting—men could buy into them as well.
RT: Absolutely. The women are buying menswear; the men are buying womenswear. A couple of weeks back, we launched some long-sleeved shirts and they got snapped up by men. Maybe it’s because we do menswear only once a quarter... they were buying up the larger sizes for the longer body. We don’t push the items as unisex, but people have come to realise that they work for them.
ESQ: So you don’t release menswear as often as womenswear?
RT: No. Womenswear tends to be more often. Maybe for every two women’s ready-to-wear collections, we do one men’s.
ESQ: Let’s get into the 10th anniversary collaboration with Liberty. How did that come about?
RT: We had that conversation going probably two years ago. But I think we weren’t ready to commit to a print because our aesthetics are very much block colours. To introduce prints, we felt it needed to be something more intentional. We like to do things intentionally—or at least with a certain meaning when we do them. At that point, even though Liberty knocked at our doors and came to the studio a couple of times, we weren’t sure how it was going to work.
It was Liberty’s suggestion actually. They informed us that they were going to turn 150 in about a year’s time, and we said, “Oh, we’re turning 10!” We’re a baby compared to their 150, oh my God. We said maybe we should take that opportunity to do something together. So that was how the whole thing started. That process—from when we decided to do it—took us about a year and a half for the BTV design team to go through the Liberty archives, the production, and then sampling production, test print, colour proofing, all of that. When we finally hit production, it also took a bit of time because we decided to lay over a PVC layer. We didn’t want to just do the print alone as we felt it could come across as one-dimensional. We wanted to make it a little more contemporary thus the PVC layer. And that increased the production time. Obviously, when we decided to do a print, there was nobody else we would have done it with than with Liberty. They’re legends in that space.
ESQ: You’ve done a few collabs throughout the years. How do they often happen and have you turned down any?
RT: We have turned down many. But I agree we’ve been pretty passive about collaborations. Most times, we are approached by brands, and we’re thankful we have the opportunity to pick and choose. How we select our collaborators has always been that they need to carry the same ethos as us. I strongly believe good design can be accessible to all. Like Pokémon… it’s very strong in protecting the brand culture, brand equity and all that, yet its appeal is global. The same goes for Singapore Airlines and Casetify. I’ve mentioned this many times before: When we design a chair, we don’t categorise it as specific to a gender or ethnicity or nationality; it’s everything to do with ergonomics. The same thought process is applied when we do collaborations. For example, Liberty is legendary in the print space, yet at the same time, its reach and breadth are wide to the masses. We feel that way as a brand. We try to hold as long and as tightly as possible to our brand worth, but we also want to reach to as many people as possible. There were brands that have approached us with mass appeal, but without as high of an emphasis on brand protection and equity, so we decided not to collaborate with them.
ESQ: For a brand as young as BTV, isn’t it crazy that all these companies are approaching for collaborations? How do you wrap your head around that?
RT: The part that’s crazy to me is that these opportunities are happening even though Singapore is not known for design; we don’t give it much attention. But the landscape is very different from when we started 10 years ago. There were only a few of us and those people that started with us are no longer around. The retail landscape is not easy to navigate in Singapore.
ESQ: Has your day-to-day involvement change at all over the decade?
RT: No, I’m still equally involved. If anything, we have built a larger team that’s extremely capable, very committed, and highly creative. It hits me every time we do an event; I don’t know why. When we organise an event, you will see all our teams get involved. Whether they are product, marketing, visual merchandising, the business teams, the customer service teams that show up to greet guests they recognise—everybody shows up. When we talk to old friends and people who attend our events, every single time they’ll tell me the same thing: that we have an amazing team. When we opened the Bangkok store last August, we had an insane party. There were thousands of people outside the store, we had celebrities—it was huge. But the team behind it is so, so small.
ESQ: There is a great deal of youthful energy in your team. I see it at BTV events. The team is relatively young, but the thing that gels them together is a consistent vibe. Everyone is super-friendly, super-chill, and obviously very creative. It’s like an Apple-esque culture where everyone’s vibe is the same, you know? It does feel like a big family from what I can tell. What’s the hiring process like?
RT: For at least 90 per cent of the crew, the last line of hiring is Daniel, which is crazy. I wish we hired faster. The team is very… strapped. Everybody needs help. But we’re very slow to do that because if we are hiring someone, we want to make sure that they, firstly, have a career with us. And secondly, they will stay for a long time and have the highest possible job fulfilment. Obviously they need to, in terms of synergy, get along. Daniel really gatekeeps that—to him, culture is number one. He doesn’t even look at people’s resumés. What takes up a lot of my headspace is the community from a brand perspective.
At the Liberty event, I repeat what that journey looks like in my head like a hundred times as a guest. When they walk in, what do they do? Who is that first touch point? What do they see? What do they smell? Who do they talk to? Is there something in the experience at the event that they feel that is different from something they’ve been? What do they do when they leave? All that is huge for me—even down to the product. Daniel does the exact same thing, but he does that for the crew. He thinks about them all the time.
ESQ: That’s great. I don’t think a lot of companies can say that. I brought my friend to the Liberty event and he was amazed to see the kind of people that were invited. BTV has successfully built its own community in Singapore. Has that always been the goal for BTV to be more than just about design and kind of bring all these creatives together?
RT: We have come to a place where those verticals start to merge. Back in the day, the people in architecture don’t speak to those in fashion because they’re very different. Architecture is very serious; fashion is very crazy. And then the people who are in design are also very individualistic. Those verticals are very clear, although they are creatives as a whole. But I think those lines are no longer there. For us, we feel compelled as a brand to seamlessly merge those lines. There’s always a mix of genres that we feel need to be on our guest list—there needs to be artists, musicians, dancers, writers, chefs… because then it, sort of, democratises it. It’s important as a brand because we also see ourselves that way. Although we are in the fashion category, we don’t approach the brand from a fashion perspective only. There are always influences from other areas and therefore it’s more dynamic. It just makes the brand more exciting, and the ability to then relate to what our vision is—good design accessible to all—who those “all” are.
ESQ: It’s rare to see someone who heads the design of the brand, enjoy wearing their own clothes. You clearly are the best representative of BTV. You wear the brand, test the products out and then secretly tease new products on your own Instagram. Was this always a marketing move or did it come naturally?
RT: It was definitely just me doing my own thing. I used to get into trouble because I would post stuff that was not approved or was on embargo. Can you imagine? I get into trouble. At some point, I realised that I had more people whom I did not know following me than people whom I know, and they began commenting and asking questions. But it hasn’t changed much for me; I still do it because I’m excited about it.
ESQ: Do you get DMs about these unreleased products much?
RT: I do. Sometimes the teams use me to gauge how well a product is being received, which is very, very mean. Hey, you posted this that you’re not supposed to but anyway, how did it do? Are people interested? But genuinely, I like it and I like to use the products. It’s always been that way from the start. I still pay full price—this sucks, by the way.
ESQ: Is there no founder discount?
RT: I use the same staff discount as everybody else. It started when we first launched the brand. Daniel made me buy the pieces that I wanted to because he said, “You need to buy like a customer, if not you’re never going to feel the value of the dollar to the product.” And the team tracks me to see whether I’m one of the top 10 customers. It’s terrible; there’s no PDPA (Personal Data Protection Act) for me. (laughs)
“I think a brand like ours coming up from an island like ours, and the ability to penetrate markets the likes of Thailand, Japan and Shanghai, is hard to come by. There’s maybe one in every generation.”
ESQ: I feel like it’s safe to say that BTV is probably one of Singapore’s most successful fashion and lifestyle design exports. And because of that success, I have seen a brand or two trying to emulate the look. How do you feel about brands that are inspired by the BTV aesthetic?
RT: Once in a while, I won’t lie, I do get bothered by it. But when I look at how they try to replicate it from a surface point-of-view, they’re missing the point. When we approach how we built the brand, it’s from a philosophical point-of-view. They may be able to win some market share on a commercial level, but for us, the mission is larger than that. I hope the community and the consumers know that we stand behind every single design we do. We take a lot of time to do it, and if there’s an issue with it, we rectify it. And we’re quite honest about it.
At the end of the day, nobody wants to pirate a movie that nobody wants to watch. There’s a reason why the windscreen is bigger than the rearview mirror.
ESQ: What keeps you going?
RT: I feel we’re not done. There’s much more to do. Maybe I speak for the creative team as well because I lead a team that gets younger and younger. When I see the younger ones come in, they’re so talented, so fresh. A large part of me feels like running the brand gives a platform for a lot of them to expose their creativity and yet, at the same time, within certain parameters of where the brand allows. I think that’s a huge part of what keeps me going: the crew. On the other hand, I think a Singaporean brand penetrating markets like Thailand, Japan, and Shanghai is hard to come by. There may be one in every generation.
ESQ: In our first interview, you talked about how the revamp came about after discussions over dinner with Daniel on the next five years of the brand. Now that you’ve hit the next five-year mark, are there plans to switch things up a bit?
RT: For the first five years, we were really figuring it out. But after the rebrand, I feel that we found our voice and heartbeat. You know? That soul. If anything, we need to take that and go further with it. In terms of shaking things up, I think expanding some categories would be quite exciting—that’s expected to come in the next couple of months and to be rolled out in the next year or so. We’re increasing our footprint by opening in different markets. Japan is a big market for us; Shanghai as well. Bangkok has been doing very well.
ESQ: You and Daniel have two kids. How much do they know about the business?
RT: A little too much, to be honest. (laughs) They’re very involved and intentionally so. It’s important for us to show them what we do because I was very much involved in my parents’ business growing up. I was at their workshop and studio every day after school, messing around with my dad’s stuff and watching my mom work. There are a lot of things that can be taught, but a lot [that need to be experienced]. Design is such a huge part of day-to-day life. The idea of how design solves problems, and how it makes the world better; you cannot learn that in a school; you need to be in a space and be immersed in it. I don’t hope for my kids to do what we do, but if anything, maybe at least they know where their rice comes from. (laughs) We work very hard.
ESQ: How very Asian mother of you. (laughs)
RT: We recently went for a factory visit—we do that every quarter. We were supposed to drag the older boy along to hang with us at the factory. We like to do that. We don’t see the separation of work and family actually.
ESQ: Final question. This comes from a few friends who want to know: What is there beyond the vines?
RT: What? (laughs) How do I answer this? That’s a very poetic question. But, of course, there is always life beyond the vines.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Photography: Shawn Paul Tan
Photography Assistant: Chay Wei Kang
Special thanks: The Beyond The Vines Crew
