From the Point of View of… Sonia Sin
Sonia Sin’s first steps into entrepreneurship were when she founded Service at Work, here in the Netherlands: “I’d be traveling every other month: to Egypt, India, South Africa, Asia – and of course buying all these things that I liked!… read more >
From the Point of View of… Sonia SinSonia Sin’s first steps into entrepreneurship were when she founded Service at Work, here in the Netherlands: “I’d be traveling every other month: to Egypt, India, South Africa, Asia – and of course buying all these things that I liked! I’d bring them home, but then I wouldn’t have any time to get my pants shortened, my shoes repaired or my clothes dry-cleaned. So I said to myself, ‘why can’t I figure this out and provide a service for all these busy women like myself?’ I talked with my dry-cleaner, my guy who did my boots – a really old man who looked like a Gepetto from Walt Disney and who used to do the boots for the Queen’s guards – and a Turkish tailor… and they all agreed to go into this with me. Everybody around me was telling me my business was not possible. ‘Sonia, you can’t get into these companies, it’s impossible that people would want this type of service’… everything was impossible. But when people tell me something can’t be done I become more determined than ever to show them that it can. So that’s how I started Service At Work. Within no time, my clients included several embassies, the National Ombudsman, KPN, Exact Software – all the big companies around here.” She gives a wide grin, and says; “People would ask me; ‘What do you do as a business?’ and I realized ‘Oh my God, I’m doing Chinese laundry! It’s genetic!’” “Before all this, I helped Mexx enter the Egyptian and Indian market in the 1990s, setting up their whole production and acting as licensing manager. Mexx was actually the second western brand to enter Egypt and India – after Benetton,” Sonia tells. “What made this such a challenge was that these countries wanted to… read more >