It is the first weekend in May and, in the plaza outside the Ta­pei City Hall, the Cheng ­Xiang Li Zan Business Fair is in full swing. Over the course of its two-day run it will attract over 90,000 visitors.

This is the fourth time this event has been held since the inaugural one in 2010. Its stated purpose is to “provide an opportunity for small and medium-sized enterprises, novel or creative types of businesses, and unique local products to raise their visibility,” and it is widely seen as sort of a live-fire exercise for newly created brand names. This year’s event is divided into eight themed zones, with more than 500 firms in total, each having only a space of nine square meters to try to stand out from the crowd.

Most people consider baked goods, furniture, and textiles as “sunset industries” in Taiwan. But with effective repackaging and branding, they can live to see many a new dawn.

In the baking industry zone, to look at one example, there is no doubt that one firm has succeeded in doing just that: Wang Xi Shi. Identifiable by a banner with white characters on a blue background, their booth is decorated with the theme of Taiwanese puppet theater, and their pastry gift boxes have an avant-garde sensibility but with an unmistakable streak of the antique.

The bakery now known as Wang Xi Shi was founded in Tai­nan’s Yong­kang District 64 years ago. So local was its focus that it operated without even a formal name until September of 2012. The third-generation boss, Wang Tong­sheng, a graduate of the Kun Shan University Department of Visual Communication Design, has in a mere half year moved with lightning speed to define a brand image and launch a comprehensive set of coordinated business operations including package design, product marketing, and an official website.

As if treated with a miraculous rejuvenation cure, Wang Xi Shi products have exploded in popularity virtually overnight on the Internet. The firm has become such a “phe-nom” that a Singapore TV station even sent a crew all the way to Taiwan to report about them. An old bakery whose owners labored for decades in obscurity has become super-hip in a New York minute, and sales have increased many times over.

The fruit pastries that Wang Xi Shi sells—known as dan­bing—are a down-home specialty of the Yong­kang District. According to local custom, if a family has a male child, then on the 20th day of the first lunar month of the following year, they are expected to give gifts of dan­bing fruit pastries to friends and family. (That day is even listed on the calendar as “Dan­bing Day”!)

The earliest danbing had no filling, and tasted like lightly toasted wheat pancakes. The first-generation owner of Wang Xi Shi, Wang Tong­sheng’s grandfather Wang Ji­sheng, changed all that when he developed ones with a fruit filling, and these quickly supplanted the originals. The second-generation heir, Wang Deng­shan, came up with his own innovation, plum cakes, which were quite popular in their day. Today, there are only three bakeries in all of Taiwan that still produce dan­bing fruit pastries, and Wang Tong­sheng’s decision to take over the reins of the business has determined not only the fate of a family enterprise, but the survival and renaissance of the whole dan­bing culture.

Wang Tong­sheng, born in 1987, once dreamed of opening a design studio. But recalling that his father, who only graduated from primary school, gave up his own youthful dreams to take charge of the family business, he thought to himself: Sure, I can pursue my dreams freely right now, but shouldn’t I take some responsibility for the long-term future of my family and local culture?

In the end he got to have his cake and eat it, too. He brought what he learned from the study of design into the old shop and launched it on a new entrepreneurial path. He created the brand from scratch, welding the family surname of Wang to their home village’s name “Xi­shi” to get their new moniker.

“It has all turned out better than I ever anticipated,” he says, “because that added sense of ‘responsibility,’ that feeling of being on a mission, made me put even more of myself into the business, and the sense of accomplishment I have is all the more powerful as a result.”

This is the real appeal of “re-inventing” a firm, or what we might call “second-wave entrepreneurship.” It is in some ways more difficult to bring one’s talents into play in a context where the foundations and boundaries of a business have already been established, but when you do come up with innovative breakthroughs in such a context, they come with the bonus dividend of being part of and extending a valued tradition.

Most people consider baked goods, furniture, and textiles as “sunset industries” in Taiwan. But with effective repackaging and branding, they can live to see many a new dawn.

According to 2012 data from the Small and Medium Business Administration of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, of Taiwan’s nearly 1.28 million SMEs, an impressive 47% have been in business for at least 10 years; but that figure slips to 20% at the 20-year mark and a mere 4.7% for 30 years or more. If we consider 30 years as one generation, it is clear that Taiwan’s SMEs are faced with a lack of willingness on the part of the next generation to take over, and a resulting absence of new ideas.

The large number of businesses that rode the crest of rapid national economic development in 1970s Taiwan were mainly founded by “hands-on” business­people who spent most of their time in the factory. In today’s globalizing environment, regardless of whether these bosses chose in the 1990s to relocate their operations to some newly emerging economy or to stick it out in Taiwan, they now face complex, intertwined problems of rising wages, problems in recruiting talented people, and ever-fiercer international competition.

If the first-generation founders of these firms are unable, from lack of education or experience, to operate them sustainably, then it falls to the second generation to undertake a “second wave of entrepreneurship.” Otherwise the companies are likely to end up on the scrap heap of history.

Such a “second wave of entrepreneurship” is by no means necessarily easier than starting a business from scratch. This is because such an attempt comes with built-in residual burdens from the past—aging organizations, obsolete products, backward value systems—yet with an obligation to carry tradition forward in some recognizable way. Thus the successor generation must be both more patient, and also more indomitable in purpose, than if they were starting their own businesses afresh.

Unfortunately, searching for new products or other ways to extend the field of an enterprise’s operations while still living under the control or supervision of the older generation is not nearly as exciting, and offers much less scope for decisive action, than if one were pursuing one’s own dreams. On the contrary, the experience is more like fighting a long, drawn-out revolution.

Lilian Chang, managing director of SOHO Creative Management Consultants, relates that Taiwanese enterprises going through a second wave of entrepreneurship generally follow three paths: Starting with creative branding at the core, they give unnamed old shops catchy monikers, develop a new look for their products, and expand product lines to find new market niches.

YaYa Shu, whose specialty is fashion design, makes a perfect complement to her father James Shu, an expert in fabrics.They are relying on the XuXu Wear clothing brand to take their firm in a new direction.

While Wang Xi Shi is the classic case of creating a brand name for a business that lacked one before, the aluminum cabinet brand Fun­Cube has reaped great rewards from giving an old product a major facelift.

Fun­Cube is a subsidiary of ­Hsinli Aluminum Company, an old-established manufacturing firm. Founded in the 1980s in Tai­nan City by Chen Geng­nong, who started out as a technician, ­Hsinli was the first company in Taiwan to make furniture from lightweight aluminum tubing.

Before major international furniture brands like IKEA and B&Q entered Taiwan, ­Hsinli’s durable aluminum cabinets had the top market share. Virtually every kitchen in southern Taiwan had one. However, with the arrival of more stylish yet still affordable options, demand for ­Hsinli’s purely functional designs withered. Chen Geng­nong had little choice but to diversify in order to keep revenues from falling. He opened a factory in Dong­guan in mainland China to manufacture rollers, leaving his wife in charge back in Tai­nan.

Alas, while both aluminum cabinets and rollers are useful, they are not in the least “cool,” and Chen’s children had little interest in taking over the business. It was not until 2008 that his second daughter, Wendy, then studying in the US, gave him the nod and agreed to become the heir. But she set one major condition: She wanted to create a brand name of her own. “I used to disdain the things Dad made, they were so completely lacking in style,” says Wendy Chen.

By happenstance, it was a major typhoon that struck Taiwan in 2009 that really prompted Chen to move actively forward on the tasks of branding and design. When floodwaters invaded people’s homes, their wooden furniture got waterlogged, whereas aluminum cabinets just had to be wiped down and could be used again at once. Orders for Hsinli products suddenly boomed.

Chen’s first foray was the “Cabini” line. From among the various assemblies and frameworks that her father Chen Geng­nong had invented in the past, she selected those products most suited to mass production. She also made them more hip, and defined the brand as “inexpensive, light, and durable,” looking to appeal mainly to young people.

Unexpectedly, despite all the effort put into product development, the market response was weak, and the line just didn’t sell. Wendy Chen began to ask herself whether something was awry with the brand.

After studying the matter repeatedly, Chen finally took a page out of IKEA’s playbook and discovered that the key to success for low-budget stylish furniture was its flexibility for mixing and matching. So she simplified the product line down to a single type of item: square or rectangular aluminum-frame cubes and boxes that can be cobbled into larger storage units like the organic growth of a beehive. As the firm likes to tell consumers, their product is light, fashionable, and “adapts to endless spatial possibilities.” Setting the price at NT$520 per unit, Chen also adopted a different brand name. Though rendered into English as Fun­Cube, the Chinese name is literally “Hide-and-Seek Squares.” It is based on her memories of hiding in the aluminum cabinets when, as a child, she would play with her dad around the factory. This added a “storytelling” element, and a new brand that could lay claim to be being both up-to-date and historic was born.

Hoping to pioneer new sales avenues, Chen began to attend various trade shows and exhibitions. Observing consumers’ reactions to her products right there on the sales floor, she gained confidence. She was emboldened to begin renting sales space in the upscale Eslite Bookstore, and in March 2013 even set up counters in several Hola locations. The Fun­Cube brand’s monthly revenues, initially around NT$100,000, have climbed rapidly.

“It’s amazing to think that the mobile aluminum-frame cabinet needed only a new branding overlay to bring an old industry back to life,” she says.

Most people consider baked goods, furniture, and textiles as “sunset industries” in Taiwan. But with effective repackaging and branding, they can live to see many a new dawn.

XuXu Wear is another example of a brand that found its way to brand confidence by attending the Cheng ­Xiang Li Zan ­Business Fair.

The parent firm, Black Lion Enterprise Company, is a textile trading company founded in 1990. When Taiwan’s textile manufacturers emigrated en masse to mainland China, Black Lion lost a lot of orders. The founder, James Shu, began to give serious thought to how to reorient and restructure the firm.

After Shu’s daughter YaYa graduated from the Department of Visual Communication Design at Tai­nan University of Technology in 2011, she and her father began to discuss founding their own clothing brand. In contrast to most transfers of corporate power from one generation to the next, which almost invariably involve some agonizing stage of intra-family “overthrow,” in the case of the Shus both father and daughter had an understanding right from the start that each would respect the other’s expertise.

“The only thing I really know about is fabric. I don’t understand fashion or design. So I only get involved in decision-­making when it comes to textiles or finances. I leave everything else entirely up to my daughter,” explains the older Shu. The trading business is largely about interpersonal relationships. He deals with his successor the same way he deals with his clients—mutual trust and mutual assistance. He knows that’s the only way to keep things moving along smoothly.

YaYa Shu has not let her father down. For example, she’s the one who came up with the brand name, which in Chinese is both elegant and appropriate to their situation.

The characters XuXu come from a passage in the Book of Songs, a collection of classical Chinese poetry dating to the period from the 10th to the 7th centuries BCE. In this passage, the characters are used onomatopoetically, describing the sound of a team working in harmony. Thus “XuXu” not only carries the cachet of ancient literature, it is an excellent metaphor for the shared determination of father and daughter to succeed in their “second wave of entrepreneurship.”

After a period of trial and error by Hsinli Aluminum successor Wendy Chen, the company’s FunCube brand has made its presence felt in the hipster furniture market.

Born in 1985, YaYa Shu is part of a generation of Taiwanese who have grown up appreciating the virtues of “living small” and “green consumption.” Therefore she decided to define her brand as “mori” style, with organically grown cotton as the primary ingredient. (To meet XuXu’s standards, the cotton must be grown on land where no agrochemicals have been used for at least three years.) Mori is Japanese for “forest,” and a “mori girl,” the Urban Dictionary tells us, is a young woman “dedicated to living the cheerful, simple, natural life of a girl in the forest.” XuXu Wear markets its clothes as “unfettered fashion,” simple yet durable. Shu emphasizes that XuXu Wear is not just doing business, but also promoting the concept of sustainability for the planet.

Meanwhile, James Shu’s fabric expertise and network of contacts have been critical tools in the brand’s market differentiation. This is because a number of complex issues are involved in organic cotton products—yarn import rules, fabric dyeing, certification mechanisms—and it takes someone who knows the industry from the inside to get the lowest prices and make sure that quality is up to snuff.

When you walk into the brick-and-mortar XuXu Wear store on Zhong­shan North Road in Tai­pei City, you are immediately immersed in an ambience that is at once hip and yet somehow refreshingly artless. In sharp contrast to the general impression that organic cotton material is invariably rough-grained, here the fabric is very fine and soft to the touch. Also, not only can a single item of clothing last for several years, the brand has also chosen to make “versatility” a feature, so that just by adding some simple buttons or a sash, you can wear any piece in a variety of ways.

“I also want to mention that virtually everything about our products is ‘Made in Taiwan,’” adds YaYa Shu. Except for the imported organic cotton (cotton is not grown at all in Taiwan) everything else—design, marketing, manufacturing—is subcontracted locally to Taiwanese. Shu even went so far as to comb the greater Tai­pei area to uncover each and every craftsperson trained in making clothes to order. “I wanted to build an ‘iron triangle’ of top-flight designers, expert fabric producers, and master tailors, in order to present a completely new image to the market, one that evokes a sense of pride and professionalism.”

When XuXu Wear formally opened for business in March 2012, they were only making a dozen or so basic items of clothing per season. By spring of this year, they could produce 80.

Nonetheless, YaYa Shu stresses that she has no interest in manufacturing products in huge numbers just to drive up revenues. She hopes that quality and value will trump volume, and that their brand will represent the concept of sustainability and not just be a fashion fad. So determined is she to put this concept into practice that she even saves leftover offcuts of cloth and turns them into small accessories to give away to customers.

Interestingly, the founding of this new brand has brought father and daughter, always on good terms, even closer together. Even when just eating a family dinner at home, they chatter on ceaselessly, with everything they say linked in some way to the prospects for their family enterprise.

As the global economy evolves, so must Taiwan’s industrial structure. Fresh-faced brands—Wang Xi Shi, Fun­Cube, Xu­Xu Wear—are springing up. Old enterprises are venturing into new pathways as family proprietors try to keep them going strong. Traditional industries are indeed “traditional,” but so what? Does that have to be fatal? The burdens that come with keeping a family’s way of life alive are heavy, but many in the successor generation seem to have “the right stuff.” It looks like the story of entrepreneurship in Taiwan has not only not reached its final chapter, but there are many thrilling episodes to come. Stay tuned!

With a little tweaking, those old-fashioned, functional aluminum cabinets that have been ubiquitous in the kitchens of Taiwan’s rural grandmas have become accepted as furniture that makes a decorative statement in the homes of young urban dwellers.

Black Lion, an established textile trading company, has brought its fabric expertise to bear on penetrating the market for designer clothing made from organic cotton.

As a new generation takes over old family-run firms, they are often turning to branding as the core of a “second wave of entrepreneurship,” taking their game to a new level. The Wang Xi Shi bakery in Tainan is now in the hands of the third generation, in the person of Wang Tongsheng. He has put a new name to this venerable business and made enormous strides in a brief time.