Chiang Sang Sem

I simply hoped that through this business, my siblings could have stable jobs.

The eldest son’s burden #

Everyone in Malaysia’s fashion industry knows Sang Sem by a single nickname: 老大 — Lao Da, Big Boss. The title did not come from boardroom politics or corporate vanity. It started with his siblings. As the eldest of nine children — six brothers and two sisters — he carried the weight of a Chinese eldest-son tradition that demands the first-born provide for the rest. His parents tapped rubber in rural Malacca. There was no safety net, no guarantor willing to sign for a poor boy’s employment papers, no path to education beyond what the family could afford, which was nothing.

That obligation would become the engine of everything that followed. In the Hokkien Chinese tradition of his Fujian ancestors, the eldest son does not merely lead — he provides. He is the guarantor, the employer of last resort, the one who eats last and worries first. When Sang Sem later explained why he started a company at twenty-one with borrowed money, the answer was disarmingly practical: “I simply hoped that through this business, my siblings could have stable jobs. Due to poverty, finding work was very difficult — I needed a guarantor’s signature.” He was not chasing ambition. He was solving a family problem. The irony was precise: the boy who could not find a guarantor for his own employment would become the guarantor for his entire family.

The apprentice who learned with his hands #

At fifteen, Sang Sem left Malacca for Penang, where an uncle ran a small handbag factory. The apprenticeship paid RM15 per month — barely enough for food — but it taught him every step of leather production: cutting PVC and polyurethane, stitching seams, piping edges, gluing linings. He learned the trade not from textbooks but from repetition, standing at the same workstation for months until his hands knew the material by feel.

After two years in Penang, he moved to Kuala Lumpur, then to Singapore, where he took a job as a factory hand earning SGD 60 a month. The work was the same — cutting, stitching, gluing — but the scale was larger and the competition fiercer. Singapore in the early 1970s was a crucible for young manufacturers, and the leather goods trade was dominated by established firms with capital and connections that a Malacca rubber tapper’s son did not possess. Sang Sem compensated with speed and precision. Within three years he had risen to design supervisor at SGD 200 — a thirteen-fold increase on his Penang apprentice wage. He later attributed his work ethic directly to his mother: “I demand speed in everything I do — fast and accurate, just like my mother. I’m not afraid of failure and dare to try.”

By twenty-one, Sang Sem had saved SGD 1,200. He borrowed another SGD 3,800 from relatives and opened a leather workshop in Geylang, Singapore, with seven employees. Three were his younger brothers, whom he paid SGD 1 per day. He slept on a folding bed on the factory floor and drew no salary. The workshop produced fifty to sixty bags daily, all for other companies under contract. Sang Sem delivered orders himself, riding a motorcycle through Singapore’s streets with bags strapped behind him. The business existed for one reason: to give his brothers a wage.

For three years the Geylang workshop hummed along, producing bags that bore other companies’ names. Then, in 1977, Sang Sem visited the leather trade fair in Bologna, Italy. Walking among the stalls of Italian leather houses — companies whose products were no better made than his own but whose names commanded ten times the price — he experienced what he later described as an epiphany. “All the products here have brands — why don’t I build my own?” An Italian friend suggested “Alexander.” Sang Sem found it too long. Instead, wandering Bologna’s streets and encountering the works of the Renaissance sculptor Giambologna, he extracted three syllables — BO-NI-A — and registered them as a trademark. The workshop hand had a brand. The brand had three Italian syllables and a Malaysian soul.

The crash, the child, and the sleepless nights #

In 1990, Sang Sem opened a factory in Malacca — the state he had left as a penniless teenager. The eldest son of rubber tappers returned not as a labourer but as an employer, building a manufacturing operation in the place where his family had once struggled to afford school fees. Four years later, he achieved what his fifteen-year-old self could not have imagined: Bonia listed on the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange in 1994, share price above RM10, profits exceeding RM10 million. He owned properties across Malaysia and Singapore. His brothers had not just stable jobs but careers within a publicly traded company. The promise he had made to himself in Geylang — that his family would never go hungry — appeared fulfilled.

Then came 1997.

The Asian Financial Crisis did not merely hurt Bonia. It nearly destroyed it. Malaysia’s GDP per capita fell nineteen per cent. The ringgit collapsed. Consumer spending across Southeast Asia cratered. Bonia’s share price crashed from over RM10 to approximately 50 sen — a decline exceeding ninety-five per cent. Creditors called. Revenue vanished. The factory in Singapore, where Sang Sem had started everything, had to be shuttered after two rounds of retrenchments.

Sang Sem sold nine personal properties at a loss to satisfy debts. He went to the golf course not to play but to temporarily forget what was happening. According to a Malay-language profile published years later, he could not sleep for days, lying awake brooding over his fate and the business he had spent a lifetime building.

And then, during this same devastating period, one of his children died in a traffic accident.

The intersection of financial ruin and personal loss was the deepest crisis of Sang Sem’s life. The man who had left home at fifteen to provide for his family was now watching that family fracture under forces beyond his control — markets he could not steady, a child he could not save. His brother Albert later captured the psychology that kept the family going through those months: “It’s because we were terrified of being poor that we had to work even harder to make it through.”

Sang Sem did not quit. He could not quit. Quitting would have meant abandoning the brothers and sisters who depended on the company he had built for them. Every employee who would lose a job, every creditor who would go unpaid, every sibling whose livelihood depended on Bonia’s survival — they were the weight that kept him at his desk through the sleepless nights. The same obligation that had driven him out of Malacca at fifteen now held him in place at the worst moment of his life. Family responsibility, the force that created Bonia, was now the force that refused to let it die.

From wreckage to discipline #

The recovery took approximately two years. Sang Sem converted every available asset to cash, reduced headcount dramatically, and serviced debts methodically until the company stabilised. The process was grinding and unglamorous — no rescue investor, no government bailout, just a man selling what he owned and paying what he owed.

But the experience did something permanent to his leadership. Before 1997, Sang Sem had been an aggressive expansionist, opening markets and acquiring properties with the confidence of a founder who had never failed. After 1997, he became something else entirely: a cash-management strategist with an institutional memory of catastrophe. Bonia began maintaining cash reserves exceeding RM100 million — not because the balance sheet required it, but because the man who could not sleep for days during the crisis insisted on it.

The discipline paid immediate dividends. When SARS struck in 2003 and Bonia’s sales dropped nearly fifty per cent, the company had the financial cushion to absorb the blow without panic. When COVID-19 shuttered the majority of its outlets in 2020, the reserves held again. Each subsequent crisis was less existential than the last, not because the external shocks were smaller but because the company’s defences were stronger. The sleepless nights of 1997 had become the institutional doctrine of every year thereafter.

The paradox of Sang Sem’s post-crisis leadership was that caution and boldness coexisted. He maintained enormous cash reserves while simultaneously expanding into new markets, acquiring a forty-nine per cent stake in Braun Büffel — a 137-year-old German leather house — and growing the company’s retail footprint to more than 1,100 outlets across fifteen countries. Revenue eventually reached RM424 million. The difference was that every move was now underwritten by the memory of what it felt like to lose everything. The man who once slept on a factory floor because he could not afford a bed now kept RM122 million in cash because he could not afford to be caught without it.

The patriarch who will not quite let go #

The question that now hangs over Bonia is generational. In April 2023, Sang Sem’s son Daniel — formally Dato’ Sri Chiang Fong Seng, a University of Melbourne commerce graduate who joined as his father’s personal assistant in 2008 — was designated Group CEO. The eldest son, Chiang Fong Yee, had already taken Carlo Rino public as a separate company in 2018. A daughter, May Ling, and another son, Fong Tat, sit on the board. The dynasty is deep.

Yet the patriarch remains. Sang Sem holds the title of Founder and Group Executive Director, retains a board seat, and continues to oversee brand development and strategy. His brother Albert stated the arrangement plainly in a family interview: “He has absolute decision-making power, because he is the company’s founder.” The nickname 老大 still applies. The Big Boss is still the Big Boss.

It is a tension common to founder-owned companies across Asia — the formal handoff that is not quite a handoff, the next generation that leads but does not yet fully command. The children have university degrees and corporate training that their father never had. Daniel studied commerce at the University of Melbourne and proved himself by spearheading the Braun Büffel acquisition while still in his twenties. But credentials are not the same as authority, and authority in the Chiang family flows from a single source.

For Sang Sem, whose entire identity was forged in the furnace of family obligation, stepping away entirely may be the one thing harder than surviving 1997. He built this company so his siblings could eat. He rebuilt it after 1997 so his children could inherit something worth leading. Letting go of it requires trusting that it will endure without the hand that made it — and for a man who has spent fifty years providing for everyone around him, trust may be the last skill left to learn.

Last updated: April 5, 2026