The story of the Tales brand in mainland China reads like a fairy tale.

Last year, PRC president Hu Jintao paid a visit to the Bahaoqiao industrial park for creative industries in Shanghai. He was especially impressed by the artistically decorative wall tiles he saw on display, and immediately ordered that they be exhibited and sold as souvenirs at the World Expo 2010 Shanghai.

"We didn't meet the original criteria to be allowed to attend the Expo as a manufacturer of expo-licensed products," explains Artilize CEO Tony Tseng. But Hu's admiration was enough to get them direct entry into the most coveted site for all souvenir and gift manufacturers, the China Pavilion.

Basking in the reflected glare of Hu's spotlight, Artilize's visibility sharply increased. In late 2010 they were invited to design gift and souvenir products for the Guangzhou Asian Games. They also started doing big business with companies like China Tobacco.

The "Tales" brand created by the company Artilize first made headway in the US and European markets, and more recently has ventured into mainland China. The photo, taken in a home decorating store in Singapore, shows pieces from the "Chinese Style" series.

It may look as if Artilize-which combines intellectual property licensing, design, manufacturing, and marketing under one roof-just had the good fortune to be in the right place at the right time. But it would be wrong to say that its success has been due to "luck."

It all starts with Tony Tseng's background. His mother and father were in the antiques trade, and he studied art and music from a young age. For a time he was the vice general manager of Artkey Art Licensing Company, where he learned that the market for licensing of copyrights for artwork was nearly limitless. That's why he decided to spread his wings and start his own company.

As Tseng explains, "The English name of the company, Artilize, describes very well what we aim to do-to 'utilize art,' to bring art into practical use in people's lives." The holdings of the world's galleries and museums are dazzling, and it would be a shame for them to be confined within the walls of these institutions.

In the first few years after opening his firm, he limited himself to responding to specific requests from clients: getting copyright licensing, then designing and manufacturing products. He did anything and everything from lamps to tableware to stationery.

So what happened that caused him to focus on wall tiles as the product for his own brand? Most importantly, his resources were limited. Each type of product has its own distribution channel, and if he had tried to launch too wide a variety of products, the production costs would also have been higher. So he decided to first concentrate on a single product which would itself be open to diversification and which could be easily adapted.

Tseng, who feels a particular affection for ancient artifacts, got his initial inspiration from the painted tiles of the Han Dynasty. It was very common in the Han period to record images of local customs or religious beliefs on tiles, which were then affixed to the outside of temples or other buildings. From this came the Chinese name of the brand, which literally means "the painting of myths on faces of stone," and also the spirit of the company, which is "telling a story of culture or art on each and every ceramic tile."

Tales acquired reproduction rights from museums and artists, and then transferred the works of art onto tiles, giving buyers three different size options. The firm also has products designed in-house, and, drawing on the technology available in the ceramics industry in Taiwan, has developed very distinctive tiles.

The initial inspiration for Tales came from the painted tiles and bricks of the Han Dynasty. The brand's parent firm, Artilize, also acquires rigts to reproduce work by more modern artists.For example, a painting by Qi Baishi has been reproduced on chinaware and teaware.

Tales' products draw from a wide variety of source materials and styles. Take for example the most popular line, "Chinese Style." It includes Buddhist images, calligraphy, ring-shaped door knockers, cloud motifs, temple eave decorations, terracotta warriors, and other Chinese forms. It was works from this series that Hu Jintao found so enchanting. The Dunhuang Series, decorative tiles with bas-relief images drawn from the stone-carved caisson ceilings in the Dunhuang grottoes, brings together deep-black bamboo charcoal and pure-white porcelain to create an effect that is both classicist and modernist at the same time.

The National Palace Museum Series is based mainly on the most famous paintings in the NPM collection, collected by emperors over many centuries. There is also a series featuring works by contemporary painters from Taiwan and mainland China.

Tony Tseng explains that each consumer's home has a different style and underlying attitude. Some are simplicity itself, others classical, others have "luxury" written all over them. It is necessary to have a lot of product lines to satisfy different needs. At the same time the company has developed companion accessories, like stands and frames, which customers can use to create whatever effects they may have in mind.

So far, so good. But the fact is that Taiwan is virtually swimming in makers of creative and cultural products. So how did Artilize, with only limited resources, get penetration into the US and European markets with the Tales brand?

"After creating the brand in 2004," explains Tseng, "we actually targeted the overseas market first." The main route to foreign markets is usually by taking the products you develop to major global product shows. The catch is that it costs several million NT dollars to show at just a single major international exhibition! So Artilize had to start with small, cheaper shows and stalls with the most marginal locations, and make contact one by one with the firms that showed up on the exhibition websites, getting the maximum impact from their scarce resources. From there they made it to ever more important home decorating shows in Hong Kong, then Frankfurt, and finally Paris.

Having established brand recognition through the shows, the next step was to find local agents. In order to keep the character of the brand uniform around the world, Artilize produced a very detailed handbook of rules that its overseas reps had to follow governing the layout and decor of the sales floor, training of sales personnel, and more. They were determined that customers be able to sense the cultural commitment and dedication behind the Tales brand through the very shops and service provider themselves, as well as from the products.

The initial inspiration for Tales came from the painted tiles and bricks of the Han Dynasty. The brand's parent firm, Artilize, also acquires rigts to reproduce work by more modern artists.For example, a painting by Qi Baishi has been reproduced on chinaware and teaware.

A lot of people are certainly curious as to why Artilize started out so far from home. CEO Tseng responds that they were by no means confident that mainland Chinese customers would be very enthusiastic about the mainly Asian aesthetics of their products. Moreover, the sale of upmarket products in the mainland market quickly elicits a flood of cheap local knockoffs. But when the global financial tsunami hit in 2008, demand in the US and European markets sharply declined, while mainland China's domestic market was growing stronger by the day, so Artilize decided to head into the mainland despite these concerns.

Tseng soon discovered, "People in the mainland feel a strong sense of pride about Chinese culture." As mainland Chinese have grown wealthier, the market for home decorating products has taken off, and appears to have virtually unlimited potential. With five years of experience selling to the West under their belts, the folks at Artilize adopted the following strategy: Whereas in the West they were content to sell through a "Tales Corner" in existing home furnishings stores, they decided that, in order to ensure the integrity of the brand name in mainland China, they were going to have to open their own specialized outlets.

But the mainland is enormous, and Artilize, given its scale of operations, couldn't go in for directly managed outlets, but would have to operate through local agents. Unfortunately, every sales channel and every city in the mainland has its own operating customs, each with its own pros and cons, so the company faced the enormous challenge of coming up with a model or models for developing operating channels.

"There's a basketful of people in mainland China who will act as local agents, but it's not easy to find just the right person," says Tseng. Artilize was not in any panic to get into the mainland market, and decided to be satisfied with growing only as fast as their network of local agents. Right now they have seven outlets in places like Beijing, Shanghai, and Hefei, and plan to expand to over ten locations by the end of this year.

It has also been necessary to overcome differences in the way people on one side of the Taiwan Strait think and work compared to the other side. Creative people in Taiwan love to cross disciplinary boundaries to see what they can find, but that's not common in the mainland. The main model there is to train people according to some standard operating procedures, with each department-product displays, sales, whatever-having its own people that concentrate only on doing their one task well. But after years of rubbing shoulders with Taiwanese colleagues, and sometimes coming to loggerheads with them, mainlanders have gotten used to the idea of getting more training and experience outside the box.

In the three years they have been in the mainland market, Artilize has focused not only on the two major markets of retail sales and custom-made production of products for large corporate clients, but more recently has begun to see the profit opportunities in museums. Tseng, who has "an acute sense of sell," has found that museums in mainland China have large and rapidly growing "hardware" resources, but lack the "software" skills needed to make their institution stand out above the rest. This presents a great opportunity to the creative and cultural industry in Taiwan.

Artilize has already reached agreements to work together with several quite famous museums in the mainland on projects that include corporate identity, product planning, manufacturing, establishment of sales outlets, and international marketing, even going so far as to train museum personnel for participation in overseas exhibitions.

Tony Tseng says that the spin-off products developed by museums not only bring in revenues, they are living advertisements. The National Palace Museum in Taipei, the Metropolitan in New York, and the Louvre in France all have done very well in this respect, but mainland museums, though having the inevitable gift shops, just don't do enough to put more substance and creativity into their spin-off products.

Tseng spends a lot of time traveling back and forth between Taiwan and the mainland. What does he think the prospects are for complementarity between the human resources on the two sides?

"There is a deep foundation of handicrafts and materials production all over China, everywhere you go," he says. "But they could do with some help from the Taiwan side, some creative ideas and organizational skills, to make them shine brilliantly once more." For example, in Yunnan you'll find extraordinary craftsmanship in silver and tinwork. Tseng hopes to integrate these metals into embellishments for his ceramics products, each material raising the other to a new level and inspiring greater creativity and more elevated aesthetics.

However, he also advises: "There's no need to overly stress preconceived notions that 'Taiwan does this, the mainland does that.' What's important is the coordination of resources and assets on both sides, with everyone working together to create successful brands."