Video | AustCham Shanghai Member Moment - hcreates
Our CEO Jack Brady recently interviewed Hannah Churchill, founder of hcreates and Hadleigh Churchill, Business Director at hcreates, an award-winning interior design studio in Shanghai, China. Hannah and Hadleigh were able to provide insight into their business, the changes in the industry in the past few years and how they’ve coped with the pandemic in 2020.
Summary of the key questions asked:
Q: Tell us a bit about your design philosophy. What do you bring to the project as a designer?
Hannah: Our approach to design is about helping clients edit their ideas down into something functional and practical. A lot of work has involved New Zealand companies as they’ve wanted to have more of a New Zealand identity, and we’ve been able to provide that through aesthetics, material and design.
Q: What have you learnt over the past 10 years in terms of working with clients?
Hadleigh: Shanghai has always been pushing ahead in terms of China, more recently we’ve seen markets outside of Shanghai and China trying to catch up. A city now that feels that its going through that transition is Shenzhen where it’s starting to have a lot of new concepts going on. One thing that hasn’t improved as rapidly is the contractors and the quality of the build, so you’ve still got to be quite involved in the process.
Q: Have your Shanghai credentials helped you expand into Beijing, Shenzhen as a business?
Hannah: Shanghai I find is very word of mouth and maybe that’s how it is in all the cities but people outside of Shanghai find your work on various different platforms so I guess people look to Shanghai as a very international city. Chengdu, Hangzhou all those smaller places that’s where our queries come from.
Hadleigh: I think we’ve had an interesting journey because we started out doing pubs and bars and people would ask us to replicate those designs into their space. We’ve had a couple of scenes recently where we’re doing a lot of breweries and a lot of bakeries.
Q: How has your experience been over the past few years, running your business in Shanghai? Do you have any advice to people coming after you or things you would do differently?
Hannah: Once you get started and go through the steps, it seems daunting at first, but once you get started, there’s lots of people willing to help and people throw you lots of contacts, for us setting up wasn’t as painful as I thought it’d be. All the processes that you worry about, there’s a lot of English-speaking agencies that have enough experience to help small businesses,
Hadleigh: I think one of the things that are so interesting about doing business here, even people competing directly with you realise there’s little chance you actually competing over the same project or market so even some people we thought would be our biggest adversaries are happy to share advice, contacts, the camaraderie has been quite important in sustaining our business here.
Q: You do a lot of work in the hospitality industry and unfortunately that has been one of the hardest hit this year. How has 2020 been for you?
Hadleigh: We’ve historically had a lot of F&B projects during the April and May period and that’s slowed down a bit this year. We have started to see now with people getting comfortable with the way the economy’s going, people have started to talk to us about their projects so we’re not too far away from things kicking off again.
