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“Just try lor” was her candid advice to aspiring entrepreneurs. “I just feel like there’s nothing you can do wrong about it because every wrong thing will come out with a lesson learnt… You never try you never know,” she said.

Even with all these obstacles, when asked if she had ever considered returning to a corporate job, Yeo responded with a resounding “no”.

“The revenue was just barely covering (our salaries),” quipped Yeo.

Even more worrying was the drop in sales, as the partial lockdown put a stop to events resulting in a lack of demand for batik clothes.

Communication was also a challenge after Yeo took her interactions with her tailors online. The tailors were not fluent in English while Yeo’s Bahasa Indonesia was rudimentary.

Yeo had to completely change the production line-up so that she could stock casual clothing instead of dresses and other formal wear. She improvised by using cloths that would have been used for the dresses so that they did not have to sample new materials.

But the pandemic was not without its silver lining. YeoMama Batik’s activewear line, which was a flop when it debuted in September 2019, sold like hotcakes during the partial lockdown.

Like other businesses, YeoMama Batik ran into its fair share of hiccups when the pandemic struck. Yeo was unable to fly to Indonesia to talk with the tailors. She also had to focus on digitalising her business as her boutique remained closed.

Family also influences Yeo’s business decisions. For the foreseeable future, Yeo, who married last year, plans to start a family. To prepare for the potential disruption at work, she has expanded the staff strength to 5 full-time workers so that they can manage the store even when she is away.

Nevertheless, family is an integral part of the YeoMama Batik brand, with the brand’s story featuring a quirky video with candid shots of Yeo’s entire family —her parents, two brothers and a grandmother, dressed in batik clothes (YeoMama Batik of course).

“I feel like a business should feel like a business. Sometimes it feels like it’s being handled too much like a home.”

She also had to contend with tailors falling sick, or being affected by floods. To deal with that, Yeo is always on the lookout for tailors to diversify her business.

Working with family is “fun” but also “very annoying”, Yeo said with a big laugh.

By 2019, YeoMama Batik had outgrown its space. The boutique then found a new home in Oxley Bizhub. YeoMama Batik now pulls in a stable five-figure revenue on a monthly basis, compared to a borderline five-figure revenue when it first began.

“His generation of doing business is a lot of ‘I sell you buy’. Our generation of doing business is you need to focus on customer loyalty, the customer service part of things and there’s social media, there’s engagement,” Yeo said.

She mused, “I guess it’s a traditional upbringing where they have certain standards of how a daughter or a wife should be. They need to know how to clean the house, cook, but at the same time my dad as a businessman hopes I can run my own business. So it’s like you want to juggle all of these and you want me to meet the expectation of a traditional wife so how do I balance? Sometimes you just snap.”

This was before the batik life “chose her”, Yeo said.