Before 10 a.m., after delivering her five-year-old daughter to school, Wei Chien-yi hops on a motorbike and makes her way from her home in Taipei County to a storefront in a small alley off Tunhua South Road in downtown Taipei City.

On the door hangs a sign reading "China Blue," and inside the shop is chock full of blue-dyed qipao, cotton-padded jackets and long Chinese-style gowns, all priced around NT$1,000. There are also smaller items like hats, name card folders, change purses and cute hanging decorations. On average some ten new items come on line every month, and patterns and colors are constantly changing.

Wei Chien-yi, starting out on the Yahoo online auction website in 2003, opened up a small shop in the Tunhua South Road area a little over a year later to terrific success. "Sixteen hours a day at work, only resting on New Year's Day," such is the picture Wei draws of her frenetic life style. With her black-rimmed glasses, terse manner of speaking and experienced business personality, 35-year-old Wei has nevertheless faced a difficult road in creating her company.

"The biggest obstacle for a female entrepreneur is not being able to stick it out, blindly following other people's opinions," says Wei. Recently she received a very nasty e-mail demanding distribution rights for China Blue, saying that if she didn't grant them, the person would go to China and cut off her sources. "Faced with this kind of situation, most women would get frightened, but I flat-out refused."

Located in a small alley off Taipei's Tunhua South Road, Wei's shop does not have much space but every month some ten new designs come on the market in a kaleidoscope of indigo-dyed cloth.

Up from a failed marriage

Although the success of an enterprise may have no absolute correlation with a person's gender, issues stemming from gender can influence whether the path to starting a business is a smooth one. When Wei was traveling to China's coastal provinces in search of cloth and contract factories she saw a girl on the train ostentatiously made up and being closely watched by pickpockets. This jolted her into the realization of the dangers to a single woman traveling alone in a strange place, and she quickly got herself a short haircut and some baggy clothes so that people would think she was a male and she could avoid any trouble.

To have the China Blue label achieve initial success within little more than two years was something Wei Chien-yi had never expected, just like she had never thought her marriage would be headed for the rocks.

Wei and her then husband had been fellow technology college students and both were regular salaried workers. In 2002 her husband was sent to Shanghai by his company, and she left her job in the publishing industry to follow him.

Unexpectedly when she took her year-old daughter back to Taiwan for a month to get her vaccinations, her husband hooked up with a "woman of pleasure" in China and soon after had a showdown with Wei. On December 25 as a big snowstorm began in Shanghai, her husband turned her out of the house. He cut off her economic resources and, without even any time to pack her bags, she took her child with her back to Taiwan. Wei at first turned to her husband's boss in Taiwan for support, but he put the blame on her for not being able to "control" her husband." With her parents' assistance, she put together enough money for a ticket and flew back to Shanghai finally to put together her things.

Originally, Wei Chien-yi had also thought of starting a new life in China and found work in the Shanghai publishing industry, but the RMB3,000 monthly salary was not even enough for rent, let alone for raising a child. Economic pressure gave her no choice but to return to Taiwan and stay with her parents.

Wei returned to the publishing industry and discovered she could no longer work overtime to nine or ten o'clock in the evenings as she had before without a child. With a monthly salary of NT$30,000-plus there wasn't much left after deducting for nursemaid costs, so she was forced to look for something better.

After a mix-and-match design process, traditional indigo print has both a classic and modern aesthetic feeling, such as this three-quarter-length T-shirt and jeans combination.

NT$30,000 start-up

Wei Chien-yi thought about the time when, before she had left Taiwan, she had sold off some old things on the Internet, so she got out some old brand-name second-hand clothes and put them up for auction, making NT$30,000, and began looking for some new businesses opportunities.

Infatuated with indigo-print cloth since childhood, Wei loved the blue cloth gowns she saw the old people wearing when she was a child visiting her grandmother's Hakka village in Miaoli. After she grew up she had occasion to see in a Kyoto art shop pieces of patterned indigo-dyed cloth costing hundreds of thousands of yen each. Later in a draper's shop in the old streets of Shanghai she found cloth of the same beautiful pattern and color but that was considerably less expensive.

Surfing Taiwan-based websites, she discovered very few stores selling indigo print, and what was on offer was rather highly priced. Wei thought if she could break into the NT$1,000 market for the product, the situation looked very promising. When she returned to Shanghai, she hoped to take back some indigo print to Taiwan for sale, but with little capital she was unable to buy much in the way of finished goods and only could buy some cloth remnants to bring back with her.

With a degree in chemical engineering, Wei had a fundamental knowledge of printing and dyeing techniques, but she had not started out as a designer and had to learn that part from scratch. She cut apart her mother's old designer-label qipao, studied the pattern and tailoring and then went ahead and made a copy. She was not at all happy with the first piece she made but using a borrowed digital camera she laid the garment out flat on the bed and took a picture which she put up on the Internet. Despite such a rough start, she received a warm welcome online, and so it was that she went from being self-taught in design, to contracting Chinese factories and selling her product on the Internet.

With the outbreak of the SARS epidemic in 2003, so-called "non-brick-and-mortar" sales saw a major jump. Add to this the fact that the root of the indigo woad plant, used as a dye, was also touted as an effective remedy against SARS, and remarkably the market for indigo-dyed fabric heated up. Her online auction business jumped from a monthly turnover of NT$8,000 to NT$20,000 and then to NT$50,000.

Small shop costs

Internet auctions, despite their low technology, low capital requirements and ease of operation, still present a plethora of problems. For example, just a few months after opening up her Internet auction, Wei was galled to discover that clothes she had designed were being copied.

"Genuine indigo prints use vegetable dyes. The cloth is dyed and then dried a total of nine times before it is finished. To use a machine to apply the pattern directly gives a very poor sense of quality. There is no comparison between a genuine handmade indigo print and a machine-made one," says Wei. There are even some sellers who copy her designs and writing directly off the material. Her only recourse is redouble her efforts at developing new items.

Wei Chien-yi felt some traditional styles were just too old-fashioned, so she rummaged through old books looking for inspiration. For example, she took a Qing dynasty ruyi pattern used on the collar of women's clothes and sewed it on the cuffs of a pair of blue jeans. She also took traditional motifs like flying phoenixes and turned them into an antelope orchid and a butterfly, captivating a young audience.

Currently China Blue's cloth comes mainly from China and Wei travels to China on average once every three months looking for sources and making contacts with factories. Because she was burned once by a factory where a sample pattern she had designed had gotten out and was copied, Wei now even has an understanding with her contract factories to allow her to sell a pattern exclusively for six months, after which the factory can do anything it wants. In addition, she has learned how to carefully plan for the supply chain, parceling out different manufacturing processes to different suppliers. For example, she buys cloth in Zhejiang, has the sewing done in Guangdong and after the semi-finished products get to Taiwan she puts on the label, making it difficult for forgers to keep up.

Because many online customers expressed a desire to try on the clothing in a store, in October 2004 Wei Chien-yi opened up a "China Blue" shop in an alley in Taipei's eastern district.

"After six months of operations, I made a careful calculation--in-store profit margins were not as good as those for the online auction. It was only after asking consultants at the National Youth Commission that I learned I had completely overlooked the expenses of running the shop," says Wei. After attending the NYC's "Free and Young" program, she made "cost awareness" her main criterion: for example, for things that she made and sold herself, the manufacturing costs had to be kept to one third, operating costs for the shop one third, and the remaining one third would be profit.

Last autumn Wei rented new premises because her landlord had raised the rent and she hired two employees to give her a hand, beginning to turn some of her efforts toward opening up new avenues, such as getting more orders for group purchases and gift designs.

Recently Wei designed a door curtain depicting an ox head for the Japanese-owned Yoshinoya restaurant chain, and before that she had received commissions to design cloth handbags and uniforms for Lin Yutang's former residence, the Shenghsing railroad station at Sanyi in Miaoli County, the Lin Family Garden at Panchiao and the Sanhsia Hakka Gardens. Although the orders have only amounted to one or two hundred pieces, the China Blue label has blossomed everywhere.