Calvin Chan Jian Chern

You can lose in business, but you must not lose as a person.

The path from phone salesman to kopitiam managing director runs through two industries that share almost nothing — component sourcing and retail margins on one side, perishable ingredients and dine-in service on the other. What carried across the gap wasn’t domain knowledge. It was a habit of building something from a standing start, tested first on hardware, then on drinks, then on coffee and toast. By the time Calvin opened his first café, he had already spent two decades learning that a brand is built by whoever controls its quality, not by whoever has the deepest résumé in the category.

The walk-away was hard to justify from the outside, because Black Whale (黑鲸), the bubble-tea chain he co-founded in 2018 with his younger sister Callie Chan Yen Min (陈艳敏) and her husband Sean Koay Song Leng through Golden Whale International, was not obviously broken. It won a World Top Gourmet Award in its tea category and a World Top Rising Star title in October 2019. By any outside measure, Black Whale was working. Calvin didn’t see it that way. “As you are probably aware, I was involved in the boba tea business, namely Black Whale,” he told The Edge Malaysia. “I learnt that if you compromise on quality, your brand will never grow. That lesson has stayed with me, and I’ve made it a point to never repeat those mistakes at Oriental Kopi.”

That sentence is the spine of everything that follows. It is not a founder’s origin myth polished after the fact — it is a standing operating principle he still enforces, more than a year after the company built on it went public.

What makes the lesson unusual is what it wasn’t attached to. Black Whale hadn’t collapsed publicly, hadn’t triggered a recall, hadn’t cost the family its reputation in the trade press. By every visible metric it was a functioning, even celebrated, business. Calvin’s decision to treat it as a cautionary tale anyway — to extract a discipline from a venture that looked, from the outside, like a success — is the harder version of learning from failure. Most founders only audit themselves after the market forces the reckoning. He ran the audit early, on a business that hadn’t yet asked him to.

A café opened into a lockdown #

In December 2020, Calvin opened Oriental Kopi’s first outlet in a rented shop lot in Johor Jaya, Johor Bahru. Malaysia was cycling through Movement Control Order periods that periodically banned dine-in service nationwide. A sit-down kopitiam, opened by a man with a mobile-phone-retail résumé and no food-service credentials, was a bet made at the worst possible moment for that particular bet. There was no investor deck justifying the timing, no market study promising the pandemic would lift rather than crush a new café. There was a lesson from a bubble-tea shop and a decision to test it somewhere new.

The test held. Within months, Oriental Kopi proved its unit economics in that single Johor shop lot before expanding to mall retail — a second outlet at Mid Valley Southkey in May 2021. That same year, Calvin made the personal decision that mattered more than the business one: he stepped back from Black Whale to give Oriental Kopi his full attention. He was not fleeing a failing venture. He was choosing discipline over a comfortable status quo, at a point when Black Whale was still generating revenue and carrying no public taint of scandal or collapse. Reduce involvement in the concept that taught the lesson; commit fully to the one applying it.

Later that same year, he tested Oriental Kopi outside Johor entirely, opening in Bandar Puteri Puchong, Selangor, in November 2021 — a market with no family history, no home-turf advantage, nothing but the model itself to prove the case. It held there too.

None of this reads, on its own, as remarkable retail sequencing — prove a concept locally, then expand regionally, is a textbook move. What makes it Calvin’s story rather than a generic playbook is the order of operations behind it: the personal decision (leave Black Whale) came before the business decision (test Selangor), not after. He didn’t wait for Oriental Kopi’s numbers to justify walking away from the older venture. He walked away first, on conviction that the lesson mattered more than the safety of a second income stream, and let the numbers catch up.

The discipline that doesn’t retire #

What makes Calvin’s version of the quality lesson distinct from the usual founder platitude is that it never became a closed chapter. Even after Oriental Kopi scaled past two dozen outlets and built a central kitchen, he still visits outlets weekly. He still washes dishes himself. The lesson from Black Whale was never framed as “here’s what went wrong once” — it was installed as an operating habit, checked against reality on a recurring schedule rather than recited once in an interview and shelved.

That habit showed up again in 2022, when Calvin committed Oriental Kopi to JAKIM halal certification — a process his own community’s Chinese kopitiam tradition had never required, and one that JAKIM’s rules complicate by requiring an outlet to be operating before an application can even begin. It was a personal commitment layered onto an institutional one: certifying a Nanyang-style coffee shop for a market its founders had no obligation to court. When the certification was announced publicly at Suria KLCC on 14 June 2024, Calvin told Malay-language media that the process demanded understanding “religious and cultural values” — not simply food-safety compliance. He was describing, in his own words, a difficulty that a founder chasing only growth numbers would have had no reason to name.

By 2023, his younger sister Chan Yen Min had completed her own exit from Black Whale and its related Cunfry operations — the family finishing what Calvin had started two years earlier. The old venture wasn’t disowned; it was simply closed, cleanly, so the new one could have the whole family’s attention.

The pattern across both moves — the personal discipline of weekly outlet visits, the institutional discipline of a certification process most of the founding family’s own community never needed — is that Calvin treats “quality” as something that has to be re-earned continuously rather than declared once. A brand that compromises on quality doesn’t announce the compromise; it simply stops growing, quietly, in ways that are hard to trace back to a single decision. His response has been to remove the ambiguity: show up in person, check the dishes, sit through a certification process most Chinese-owned kopitiams skip, and let the operating routine itself be the proof rather than a slogan about it.

The eighteen months that proved the model at scale #

If the personal-doubt version of Calvin Chan’s story exists somewhere — a specific dated moment of “am I delusional?” — no such moment has surfaced in the public record. What he has said, on the record, is closer to exhaustion than doubt. Speaking to the 14th ACCCIM Young Entrepreneurs Convention in August 2025, he described the roughly eighteen months before Oriental Kopi’s IPO, when the company expanded from eight outlets to nineteen: “During that period I was busy almost every day until 3 or 4 in the morning before going home.” That is not a crisis of belief. It is the cost of applying quality discipline at a pace fast enough to satisfy institutional investors — the same discipline that once meant walking away from Black Whale, now compressed into a year and a half of near-nightly grind.

The push worked. In November 2024, Oriental Kopi crossed its first real departure from the operating principle Calvin had built the company on: for the first time, he put brand execution in a partner’s hands, signing a 30:70 joint venture with Singapore’s Paradise Group to open the brand’s first outlet outside Malaysia, at Bugis Junction. A no-franchise, no-partner founder had made exactly one exception, and only to cross a border he couldn’t cross alone.

The exception is worth sitting with. Structuring the Singapore entity as a 30:70 joint venture, with Paradise Group holding majority control from formation, is a materially different arrangement than anything Calvin had built inside Malaysia, where he had kept 100% ownership of every outlet. He accepted the minority position only once, only for the one market he had no route into alone.

On 23 January 2025, Oriental Kopi listed on Bursa Malaysia’s ACE Market. The offering was oversubscribed 59.96 times. Calvin Chan Jian Chern — phone salesman, handset-brand founder, bubble-tea co-founder, kopitiam operator with no formal food-service training — was now managing director of a publicly listed company, with a look-through interest of 844.02 million shares (42.20%) held indirectly through the family vehicle United Gomax Sdn Bhd, itself 57.53% his. None of the credentials that would normally precede that outcome — an F&B degree, a family retail dynasty, an early institutional backer — appear anywhere in his record. What appears instead is a decade spent building toward a single working principle, tested first on hardware, then confirmed the hard way on a bubble-tea chain that was not obviously broken.

The valuation has not stayed still. Speaking to The Edge Malaysia, Calvin summed up what it now feels like to run the company he built on someone else’s mistake, corrected: “At our IPO price of 44 sen, our market cap was RM880 million. In October last year, our market cap hit the RM3 billion mark. I am flattered, but at the same time, I must admit, I do feel a bit of pressure now to deliver results.” It is a strikingly plain admission from a founder whose entire public narrative has been about discipline holding under pressure — proof that the pressure is real, and that he still names it rather than performing confidence he doesn’t feel.

Ask Calvin what building Oriental Kopi actually required, and the closest thing to a personal motto isn’t about strategy or scale. It’s a line that has surfaced in his own words about the difference between succeeding in business and staying who you meant to be while doing it: “You can lose in business, but you must not lose as a person.” For a founder who built his second act by refusing to repeat his first act’s mistake, that is not a slogan. It is the same discipline, restated once more, aimed inward.

Last updated: July 31, 2026