Leadership Journey of Mrs Anastasia Liew
In 1973, Mrs Liew met her husband, Johnson Liew, a fellow Indonesian Chinese based in Singapore who is 15 years older than her. Two years after marriage, Mrs Liew started making butter and chiffon cakes and kueh lapis (refer to diagram 2.1) at her four-room flat in Marine Parade. She sold them to friends and through word-of-mouth, the food she made became so popular that a department store in Lucky Plaza set up a counter specially to sell her cakes. However, as the store did not have a license to sell food, she was forced to stop her home-baking business as it was illegal. Yet, customers kept coming back so she opened up a store in an HDB shophouse close to her house called Bengawan Solo, which was named after a popular Indonesian Song about the country’s Solo River.
The shop’s popularity grew rapidly and the demand for her cakes and kuehs became overwhelming, which lead to the opening of a second outlet at the Centrepoint shopping mall on Orchard Road in 1983. By 1987, the company had 5 outlets and required a central kitchen, which was opened at Harvey Road. In a decade, the business expanded with 25 outlets and Bengawan Solo shifted its kitchen operations to a larger factory in Woodlands. As the number of outlets increase each year, it needed more manufacturing capacity. The company therefore explored the possibility of opening factories in neighbouring countries.