The visions, mission statement and goals of PT Endorsindo Makmur Selaras are framed and hang proudly on a wall in a meeting room at the company’s headquarters on Jl. Tebet Utara Dalam, South Jakarta.

“We love to dream,” says Theresia Alit Widyasari, the company’s marketing and promotions director, who founded the clothing design and outlet company with her brothers six years ago.

“We check our goals later to see whether they have been achieved. If not, we try to figure out why.”
According to their mission statement, this year’s goal was to open two additional stores in Jakarta.

Next year, they plan to open a huge flagship store under their brand Bloop. In 2011, their goal is to open two additional stores outside Jakarta. For 2012 — join an international tradeshow.

The company now has two distribution outlet (“distro”) stores named Bloop and Endorse along Jl. Tebet Utara Dalam, another called Urbie in Jatiwaringin, East Jakarta, a burger shop (Dejones Burger) and a restaurant specializing in duck (Bebek Ginyo).

All of these businesses are thriving.

But who would have thought such achievements could have begun in a humble 36-square-meter rented house?

Widya, as she is known, still remembers how Jl. Tebet Utara Dalam looked when they opened their first Bloop store.

“In 2003, there were only six stores along this road; the rest were houses. But now, it’s the other way around, perhaps only six houses remain, the rest are stores,” she says with a smile.

Widya has been an entrepreneur since childhood. Her first business was selling snacks to passersby. She arranged her wares neatly on a chair placed by her front door. Unfortunately, her small business had to close down as her “customers” just took her wares without paying.

She had more success selling stickers when she was in junior high school: She bought the stickers for Rp 60,000 and sold them for Rp 180,000. In high school, she helped found The Moffats Indonesia Fan Club and earned pretty profits from selling merchandise of the Canada-based boyband.

Her brothers, Martinus Sunu Susatyo and Bertolomeus Saksono Djati, also tried their hands at businesses, but they ended up cheated by their partners.

For example, Martinus, who worked on a ship, tried shrimp breeding. The business seemed promising as the harvest date drew near. But a day before their scheduled harvest, someone else took the shrimps away.

Another business they tried was making martabak telor (deep fried egg, beef and vegetable pancake). They found a very talented cook and gave him all the funds he needed, paying for his room, buying him a TV and giving him the startup capital.

But, they claim, the cook played tricks on them. They say he replaced the meat with cheaper liver, or claimed local thugs took the day’s earnings — which struck them as odd because the martabak always sold out anyway. In the end, they had to close down the business because the cook disappeared.

They found him a few days later — selling martabak for someone else.

“We’ve had problems with businesses in the past, but we took them lightly and carried on with life,” Widya says.

Their entrepreneurial spirits rose again when they heard about the distro trend in Bandung. But, having already lost a lot of money in businesses, they did not dare approach their father for funds.

Rather, they approached a friend who happened to have a rich father. Upon hearing their plan, she turned them down, saying, “Distro? That business will die in five years time.”

Eventually, they took their father A. Kardjono, a private company employee, to Bandung to see the distro business there. He was impressed with the creativity and suggested to the three that they open a similar business. His answer to them telling him they had no money was that they should try to get a bank loan.  

“When we are given a challenge like that,” Widya says, “we will take it.”

And so, having secured a loan, the siblings opened their first Bloop outlet in the humble house, at first purchasing products directly from Bandung. Having spent the bank loan on renovating the house, they relied on their father’s salary to buy the goods — which wasn’t always reliable. Once, having chosen their products, the three went to the nearest ATM to withdraw money, only to find the account was still empty. All their father could say, when called, was that perhaps his salary had not yet been transferred and they should wait.

“In the end, the store called us at 9 p.m. to ask whether we might arrange to transfer the payment the next day and he would send the products afterward. We agreed to his idea and came home,” she recalls, laughing at what must have been a frantic day.

In 2003, there was no tollroad connecting Jakarta and Bandung, meaning a trip to Bandung to collect goods for sale could take three to four hours — a return trip they made three times a week.

“During the journey from Bandung to Jakarta, I would peel off the price tags and replace them with our price tags. We did that for the first three, four months,” Widya says.

“Then we left it to the person there to pick things out for us. In the beginning, we spent around
Rp 4 million per store, but we gradually reached Rp 20 million per store.”

Five months after opening the business, the siblings tried to produce their own creations with Widya as the designer. With no fashion or design background, their first attempts were rather, well, funny.

“When we first made clothes under our own brand, we didn’t know anything about fabric. So the T-shirts we made would shrink after being washed,” Widya says. “We had already given one of the T-shirts to Donny Alamsyah from Ada Band. Luckily, he didn’t know [about the shrinking] because he had yet to wear the T-shirt again after it was washed.

“We’ve been trying to contact everyone who bought a shrinking T-shirt,” she adds. “They can return the shirts and get a new one for free.”

Although she doesn’t have a design background, Widya does know about the fashion industry. After studying psychology at the University of Indonesia, she later went to London to study fashion marketing at Cavendish College.

During her studies, she got the chance to work for three months in the clothing store River Island, where she was asked to observe which outfits customers did not even look at, which were the best sellers and what sizes were the most requested.

Widya also took business coaching at Action Coach, a coaching clinic at Wisma Antara, Central Jakarta. She applied the knowledge from her studies and business training to her company, and discusses relevant issues with her staff at a weekly meeting.

At the meeting, they mainly discuss marketing strategies, taking into account how many people visit the store in a month, how many buy, how much they spend and how many people come back.

“If we face a problem, we have to find a solution,” she says. “We also keep an eye on the transactions. If the number of customers is high but sales are low, we ask the marketing division if they have any problems. Perhaps they need to help customers or perhaps we need to put a product catalogue in the store.”

The young entrepreneur is open to the employees’ suggestions and encourages them to be creative and productive. She always tells employees that if they have plans to increase sales, they should come to her or her brothers and ask for a raise.

“We always encourage employees to make clothes. We tell them not to be satisfied with their salary.

If they want to earn more money, they should work harder. We are glad if our employees succeed,” she adds.

In its early years, the store employed all kinds of people, from high school graduates to relatives and friends. As they learned more over the years, the siblings decided that, as they want to educate employees, they needed to be more selective in recruitment.

“Because our employees interact directly with customers, they need to have good communication skills, so we now have group interviews,” she says. “In a one-on-one interview, candidates can hide their true character.”

After building up the distro business, the three expanded to food and beverages. At first, it was an attempt to give their mother, who loves visiting their store, something to do.

“At first, the café had no concept. We sold juice and fritters, but the café did not profit. But then there was a burger trend, so we switched to burgers, and it worked,” Widya says.

When a house near their first store became available for rent, they relocated Bloop to the new premises and kept Dejones Burger in their first store. Then the house across from Dejones was put on sale; they bought it and opened Endorse, their second distro. They recently opened Urbie, their third distro in East Jakarta.

Widya says that the stores follow mainstream styles but in the future they want each store to have its own style. For example, Endorse has a simple mature look, Bloop is more youthful and Urbie adopts an urban style.

“It was my brother Martin who invented the name. Bloop is like an air bubble. Where there is air, there is hope and life,” Widya says. “Endorse was made to support Bloop and Urbie came up because we recently took a liking to urban stuff.”

When asked about their revenue, Widya declined to answer, preferring instead to estimate the number of customers coming to the store.

“In its early years, Bloop had around 50 to 100 customers per day, while on the weekend it could reach 200 to 300. Nowadays, we get 1,000 to 1,500 customers per day, and on the weekend it reaches 2,700.”

As a business pioneer in the area, Widya admits that she was shocked when a famous distro store opened a branch there. The competitor, she says, approached their same suppliers.  

“We told the suppliers that we wanted to distribute their products exclusively. If they wanted to put products in the competitor’s store, we would not stock them. Then, 15 major brands chose to move to the competitor. That was a huge shock. But we saw that as a challenge to make customers loyal to us.”

Widya wins customer’s hearts by applying a surprise factor. For example, she says, she calls regular customers on their birthdays and invites them to come to the store to get a gift.

“We have their data through Facebook and our own data. Usually when someone is celebrating their birthday, they will bring along their friends, relatives and parents. As a result, they not only get the gifts from us, but also do some shopping.”

They offer other incentives too, she adds. “If my marketing people see someone wearing our products in a public place, such as in a mall, they approach the person and give them discount vouchers.”

Another example is of a customer who commented on a dress she liked in Bloop. When Widya checked her Facebook account, her status said that she was studying for a test and was stressed.

“I told her to study hard and if she had good marks, we would give her a reward. When she finally got good marks, we fulfilled our promise. We gave her a free dress and gave discounts for the friends that she brought along that day,” she says.

Another attempt to ensure loyalty among customers is the issuance of membership cards this December, she says.

Widya has no set routine or pattern in her daily work as she usually does random things every day. She might do window-shopping in the morning, purchase fabric in the afternoon and discuss designs with her in-house designers later in the evening.

“I do everything that comes first,” she says, laughing.

Her favorite pastime is traveling; the city she has visited the most is Bangkok in Thailand. Although she would love to explore Indonesia, she says that since it is more expensive to travel here than to visit foreign countries, she has put the plan on hold.

— Photos by Ricky Yudhistira

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