PPB January 2021

Kathy Cheng Picking Up The Mantle For Kathy Cheng, home sounds like the humming of factory machines. For three generations, her family business has been manufacturing textiles in North America. Today, Cheng is continuing her family’s legacy, wielding her voice as an advocate for supplier diversity and establishing her business as a niche player in the promotional products industry. by Kristina Valdez K athy Cheng looks at textiles and sees history, family and love. After all, it was through textiles that her parents first met. “I swear, growing up, I said I’m never going to be in it and here I am,” says Cheng. “But as you grow up and as youmature, there’s a lot of reflection, and you realize we are who we are because of where we come from.” As president of Ontario-based supplier Redwood Classics Apparel, Cheng has watched her family’s business change over the years, adapting as the marketplace continues to evolve. Although history and legacy follow her, Cheng was able to find something new in her family’s business—her voice. “I didn’t realize I had a voice,” she says. “And I didn’t discover my voice until about six years ago. I realized that I’ve always had a point of view, but I was afraid to use my voice.” In 1988, Cheng’s father, along with his brother and sister, started the family business in Canada. “We were a small sewing contractor,” says Cheng. “Your typical immigrant family; we came from very humble beginnings.” Cheng says her dad started the factory because he was entrepreneurial and wanted to domore for his family. “My dad’s side of the family has always been in textiles. That’s why we say at Redwood Classics Apparel ‘three generations of textiles’ because my parents actually met at my grand-uncle’s textile factory in Hong Kong. So, textiles are in my blood,” she says. The business began with five employees and 10 machines. But by the 1990s, the factory, soon- to-be Redwood Classics Apparel, directly employed close to 500 people and had 200,000-plus square feet of space across three locations, all local to each other. The business became a vertical manufacturer, making products for major retail brand names as private label manufacturers. “We are kind of like the tire-maker for Goodyear andMichelin, but we do it for apparel,” says Cheng. It was also during the 1990s that Hong Kong, a former British colony, was returned to China. Because of this, a huge influx of people fromHong Kong, fearful of communism, immigrated to Canada. “I, myself, was born in Hong Kong; I am a Hong Kong emmigrant” says Cheng. “Hong Kong, at one point, was a textile hub. There is a lot of that knowledge, expertise and skillset that came to Canada. As we were scaling and growing, we were able to onboard several immigrants with the skillset to help us. As we settled into North America, we were able to help new immigrants start their new [lives]. Looking back, that is so impactful. That is something I am so ridiculously proud of when I look back on the history of our company.” In December 2001, China joined the World Trade Organization, and businesses begin going offshore for textile suppliers. By 2008, amidst the recession, the factory had scaled back to 150 employees. When Cheng’s aunt and uncle retired, it was just her dad running the business, and one day, he asked Cheng to join him in a business meeting. “In this meeting, I learned the business landscape just could not support the infrastructure that we scaled to,” says Cheng. “The family decision was, do we retire like most textile families have or do we continue this fight?” After that meeting, Cheng’s father asked her to be his business partner. “When he asked me to be his business partner, Oleksandr Lysenko / Shutterstock.com 70 | JANUARY 2021 | CONNECT