The Choo Yilin Interlude: Pressing Pause
Pressing Pause
It was ten years ago when we first began formally crafting the story of Choo Yilin, determined to share important stories of heritage, love, and becoming. Each of these ten years has been marked by many chapters, with the majority of them being written in the last three years.
Today, we are writing to share with you that we have reached the end of another chapter of Choo Yilin, and are excited to begin another.
Beginning 4th November 2019, Choo Yilin will close our Mandarin Gallery flagship boutique and e-Commerce platform. From then till the end of the year, we will be lovingly archiving a decade of milestones, memories, and stories.
From January 2020, Choo Yilin will be stopping operations and taking a hiatus to reflect on our craft, our storytelling, and laying the foundation for the next chapter of our journey of love, heritage, and becoming.
Why?
We are grateful that Choo Yilin in its current structure has carried us through ten years of creative and financial success, dynamic growth, and an amazing journey with a supportive community.
But like all journeys, to continue growing and going further, we need to take time to reflect on how we got here, and how to get to where we want to go next.
Over the last few months, we’ve sought advice from industry thought leaders, management consultants, and institutional investors. Whilst many were incredibly encouraging and supportive of our decision, some did question why we would take a pause at a time when there didn’t seem to be a financial need to do so.
Our response was that this considered decision is to honour the trust that clients have placed in us, and to safeguard the preceding chapters that we had worked so hard to write. We argued that it was not about the short-term financial rewards; that it was about making sure that our growth and evolution reflected everything that we hold dear: our culture, our brand values, our mission.
Our hiatus is necessary to preserve and strengthen the most intangible yet crucial aspects of our brand aspirations as we lay out our plans for the next phase of growth.
In essence, we are prioritising rebuilding, restructuring, and restrategizing in order to continue working on the brand mission and to better deliver on our brand promises to you.
What does this mean for you?
At Choo Yilin, our clients have always been like family. You have been a huge source of joy, and your stories are our inspiration.
Our operations may pause, but we hope you will continue to follow our story through our social media and online platforms. Our articles on jade education, jewellery care, heritage, love, and becoming will still be here. We want you to join us on our journey into the future.
If you require after-sales care, advice, or support for your Choo Yilin pieces, we would be happy to assist you at hello@chooyilin.com. We would also love to hear from you – questions, stories, comments, anything that you want to know about jade or the Choo Yilin story. We look forward to keeping the conversations with you alive.
We’ve also put together a FAQ which we hope will help to answer any questions you may have.
What’s Next for Choo Yilin
We have begun to map out the next few chapters, and are incredibly excited to share them with you soon. There are chapters that involve Singapore and South-East Asia, our heart and home, but there are also stories from beyond the region.
A Request
Finally, we have a request of you, our beloved community: please write in and share your favourite memories and stories of Choo Yilin. This is important to us; Choo Yilin was created as a celebration of all our stories, and we would love to see them through your eyes.
Please know that we are infinitely grateful for you coming along with us for the first ten years of Choo Yilin’s journey; we promise that we’ll be back, and we cannot wait to continue this journey with you in the next decade and many more to come.
