In several years, Nahji Chu has managed to turn what began as a small kitchen based catering business into a multimillion brand spanning locations across both Melbourne and Sydney as well as gaining a foothold in the UK.
She is now eyeing off high-fashion strips in Hong Kong, Tokyo, London and New York or, as Chu puts it, wherever people are “swanning about with Gucci, Prada and Dior bags”. “Of course,” she adds, “we also see the outlets being in the heart of the business districts of the same cities feeding the workers as well as the tourists and leisure set.”
Sometimes referred to as the “queen of the rice paper rolls”, Chu has invested her business with a healthy dose of her own personality and creative flair. Her restaurants are modeled to resemble simple tuckshops selling what she describes as “modern day hawker takeaway with high-end food at a low price tag.”
The menus are done-up to look like those found in school-canteens, while Chu has employed cheeky language to promote her home delivery service. The “you ling, we bling” slogan ruffled a few feathers at first, but was always intended as a light-hearted play on the verbal slurs she suffered as a young Asian girl growing up in Australia.
In fact, the misschu chain draws heavily on Chu’s background. She came to Australia with her family as a refugee after fleeing the Pathet Laos Regime in Laos in the mid 1970s and living in Thai refugee camps.
“Statistically refugee migrants are business owners,” she tells Dynamic Business. “So, just from a statistics point of view I was likely, due to my childhood spent fleeing the rise of Communism in Laos, to become an entrepreneur.”
“It literally took a few decades to figure out the format for misschu. My aunt is a successful restaurateur in Melbourne. But from watching how hard she worked I knew the one or two restaurant model was not for me. Too much work for too little return and so it was with misschu, which started out as a catering business, that I developed my scalable business model.”
The desire to enter the world of business emerged from disappointment in other fields. Chu is more blunt. “Failure,” she says. “I failed as an artist, a fashion designer, a filmmaker and as a performer. I am a late bloomer and what I have built reflects all of my previous interests and bundles them up into one umbrella package – which is misschu; a political and design orientated fast food brand.”
The catering business began from Chu’s own kitchen located in Sydney’s inner-west suburb of Balmain in 2007 with the first “tuckshop” opening in Sydney’s Darlinghurst in 2009 followed by a second at the Opera house in 2010. This was followed by an outlet located on Melbourne’s Exhibition Street in January 2011, Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach in November of that year followed by her first CBD store in Sydney in 2012.
The first international store was opened in London in November 2013, with Chu now eyeing off other international locations as well as expanding back home into Queensland, South Australia and Western Australia.
“Ultimately we want misschu to be a global brand. We are talking to potential partners in different countries all the time. The focus recently has been about ensuring the internal systems and our commercial kitchen is capable of handling increased growth in Sydney – which is where I am based. Growth in Melbourne and Sydney is still key to the business,” she says.
Putting aside her obvious energy and drive, Chu credits her rapid growth over the last several years to a convergence of factors and fortuitous timing. The impact of the global financial crisis on dining and the growing demand for fast, healthy and affordable food were significant.
“The GFC killed off a lot of fine dining in Sydney. At the same time we’ve seen a massive increase of apartment living in inner Sydney and Melbourne. People have less money and less time – misschu fills a market desire for fast, nutritious, affordable food being consumed by an increasing number of people who spend too much time at their desk,” she says. “Also, the last seven years has seen the rise of the gluten free trend and it just so happens that many Vietnamese dishes are gluten free.”
Always the innovator, Chu also attributes her success on the ability to adapt to her client base. For example, the idea of the “tuckshop” format evolved because students from the nearby SCEGGS independent school for girls started coming to the Darlinghurst Bourke Street store in droves. More recently, Chu has set her sights on opening a drive through at a store in Sydney’s upmarket Double Bay because the location allows for it. “Again, it’s just me being resourceful and making the best of situations and positioning,” she says. “It’s a survival technique.”
Chu has learnt a lot over the last several years, saying her biggest challenge was trying to meet demand. One of the
issues she has encountered is the difficulty of striking the right balance between debt and equity financing.
“I think that feeding people on the scale that I do as well as creating a misschu experience is probably one of the most difficult tasks to achieve. It’s a daily juggling act of balancing cash flow, food and hygiene, staff training and management, taxation liabilities which, especially with the introduction of payroll tax, makes it virtually impossible to make my business case viable,” she says. “I have struggled with the timings of debt versus equity financing. So I strongly suggest that entrepreneurs plan for the problem of rapid growth, because once capacity is outstretched by demand you suddenly have to make a big investment that sometimes existing profits cannot cover.”
Grit and determination still play a huge factor in driving the misschu brand forwards with Chu saying maintaining a “singular purpose” is critical. For her, she has been able to use her tuck shops as a kind of template through which a “variety of heterogeneous influences can be filtered.”
Her advice to aspiring entrepreneurs is to develop a business that can be scalable and which has a clear pathway to profit. Costs including rent, labour, tax and insurance should all be factored into the business plan.
“Business is no longer about just selling a product,” she says. “It’s about being viable long into the future and that means one question: Does the consumer really need your product and will that same person keep buying the same product in 5 years time? The answer must be ‘Yes’ otherwise re-think the model.”
