MY STORY IS …

I was trained to be a translator/interpreter but left the world of languages to join the world of sustainability because I felt a need to contribute directly towards a better future through my day-to-day. The seed of this desire was planted seven years ago. On 24 April 2013, Rana Plaza in Bangladesh collapsed and I heard about the atrocities of the fashion industry for the first time.

Three things about the incident affected me:

1. I was appalled that as someone who appreciated fashion as much as I do, I didn't know a thing about its supply chain and really only knew the end product.

2. I am female myself and believe in supporting and empowering women, and the fact that the majority of garment workers were female working in substandard conditions was unacceptable to me.

3. Many of the labels found in the rubble were from brands that I had shopped with before, and so I felt complicit in the disaster.

I decided immediately to educate myself on this topic of human rights in the fashion industry and learned soon after that human rights and environmental rights are inextricably linked. This is why sustainable fashion to me will always include both people and the planet.

As Fashion Revolution’s Country Coordinator for Singapore, I work with an amazing group of volunteers who dedicate their time to calling for greater transparency, sustainability and ethics in the fashion industry. We engage consumers, designers, brands, and policymakers - because clothing is something that touches the lives of everyone so every one of us can play our part.

I also recently founded Shop Bettr, a sustainable fashion search engine that brings together all beautiful products made by better businesses so that consumers can find sustainable alternatives to their shopping needs. This was born because I was that frustrated consumer who wanted to buy better, but realised how troublesome it was to find what I needed.

My crazy is I speak five languages because it’s a bit of an occupational hazard as a linguist to want to learn languages when you realise how beautiful they sound. But also - I can talk about sustainability for hours because it’s just such a huge topic and there’s so much to learn.

September is our Month of Confidence so we sat down with Chu and asked her —
What does confidence mean to you?

Confidence, to me, is really knowing your purpose and being self-aware.

This is a definition that’s quite close to my heart because I’m an introvert. Confidence is often associated with extroverts because they’re more outspoken and, as an introvert, I’ve struggled with that. I wonder, “I don’t think I’ll ever become an extroverted person, will I ever be seen as confident, or will I ever be what I see as confident?” 

I’ve been reading a lot of books ever since starting this entrepreneur journey, and one of the books that has helped me with this is “Starting a Revolution”, a business book about female entrepreneurs. One bit that stuck out was that purpose coupled with self-awareness is more important than ego.

I think that’s been very helpful because I’ve been in the sustainability space for a while and it was always a struggle to understand what success means in this space. Success in sustainability is very rarely what society deems as a success, i.e. you don’t really see the high-flyers with high salaries, which is what society considers traditional success.

Logically speaking, I understand that that is not what success means to me, but ego sometimes kicks in - if everyone around me only sees that as a success, then it does get to me. But reading that phrase in the book reminded me that I needed to stay focused on what really matters to me -- what is my purpose -- and that’s advancing sustainability in fashion. It’s why I founded Shop Better, why I’m leading the Fashion Revolution in Singapore and why I’ve been an activist in the space for 7 years now. And regardless of what happens, whether I get high pay, low pay or no pay, it’s my purpose in life, and I will do what I can to advance this cause. And coupling that with self-awareness, knowing what I can do and when I should ask for help, is important if I want to be effective at what I do.

To be honest, this is something I’m still learning to deal with right now as I tend to shoulder the responsibility of too many tasks myself instead of asking for help. But I do see the importance of knowing what tasks I should hand over to people who can do them much better than I can, and what I need to do myself for sure.

So I think learning about the “purpose + self-awareness > ego” equation has helped me redefine confidence in a way that resonates with me.

photography Zahwah Bagharib