Derick Ooi Tze Wei

I asked myself, why are people willing to spend so much on coffee at Starbucks? And if a can of Coke is priced at RM1.80 in the supermarket, how could it fetch up to RM18 at a hotel? It's all about unrivalled service and creating an exceptional experience in a relaxed environment. People are willing to pay if you can add value or provide a good customer experience.

The observation sounds trivial. It was not. What the teenager was registering — without the vocabulary to name it yet — was the specific confidence that comes from controlling your own appearance. It is the founding conviction of his entire professional life: that a well-executed haircut is not a luxury but a form of dignity, and that delivering one well is craft worth taking seriously. By the time he graduated in 1998, he knew what he wanted to do. His parents did not agree.

Against the family #

The opposition was not ambiguous. Derick Ooi’s parents did not consider hairdressing a suitable career. They provided no encouragement and, more practically, no money. When he joined a Penang hair salon as an apprentice — the conventional entry route into the profession — he did so without family support of any kind. He had to earn his own tuition fees. He had to save his own start-up capital. Every ringgit of the investment in the career his parents opposed came from the apprentice wages he earned working in someone else’s salon.

The Shanghai Business Media profile of April 2021 — translated from Chinese — put it plainly: “His entrepreneurial road was not entirely smooth — apart from his parents’ opposition, he also had no financial support of any kind, and could only rely on working as an apprentice to earn his tuition fees and start-up capital. Eventually, by sheer perseverance, he finally established his first salon, and gradually began to corporatise the business.”

That compressed timeline — apprentice wages to first salon — took four years. Between 2000 and 2004, 黄子玮 (Derick Ooi Tze Wei) worked inside someone else’s business, saving the money that would eventually fund his own. It was not dramatic. It was a long, quiet accumulation of the resource his family had refused him.

Hydro Hair Salon, Bandar Baru Ayer Itam #

In 2004, Derick Ooi opened Hydro Hair Salon in Bandar Baru Ayer Itam — a neighbourhood market in Penang’s interior, not the prime retail corridor, but a community with genuine daily traffic and a founder who had the local knowledge to read it. The salon had three chairs. The capital was entirely his own, earned over four years of apprentice wages. There were no external investors, no family loan, no partner to share the risk.

The opening was, in the simplest sense, a vindication of the bet he had placed in 2000. He had gambled four years of labour on the proposition that the career his parents had opposed was one he could build into something real. By 2004, the first evidence was in: a small salon, three chairs, funded from nothing but his own work.

What happened in the six years between 2004 and 2010 was the grinding work of running a single-chair-range salon well enough to know its limitations. Derick Ooi was a craftsman and an operator, but the architecture of scale — the systems, the financial structure, the commercial strategy required to move from one salon to many — lay outside what a sole craftsman-founder could supply alone. By 2010, he knew what the business needed next.

Leon Lee and the structural bet #

Leon Lee (Lee Toong Leon, 李通霖) brought a different formation. A Northumbria University Computer Science graduate, he would later be known primarily as the founder of Zeon Properties and Managing Director of Stark Development. In 2010, he stepped into Hairstory as business co-founder — the commercial and structural counterpart to Derick Ooi’s craft mastery.

The 2010 partnership was, in retrospect, the decision that made everything else possible. The rebrand from Hydro Hair Salon to Hairstory International marked the formal integration of two capabilities: the craftsman who understood the salon floor and the business mind who could build the architecture above it. Neither alone would have produced what followed.

The Leon Lee principle — the discipline of preparation before action — became visible in 2019 when Hairstory opened its seventeenth outlet at Damansara Utama in Petaling Jaya, the chain’s first location outside Penang state. The opening had been preceded by two years of research. Leon Lee, at the ribbon-cutting, offered the line that defines the partnership’s decision culture: “Only when we had 100% confidence of succeeding in our project then we made the great step forward.”

Thirteen outlets and 150 stylists already in the network, and the founders had waited two years before taking the step.

A philosophy from a Starbucks cup #

The intellectual framework Derick Ooi brought to service positioning was simple and sharp. He had watched premium service businesses — coffee chains, hotel food-and-beverage — operate on a different pricing logic than the industry he was working in. The insight was not original, but the discipline with which he applied it was.

“I asked myself,” he told Asia Connects in July 2022, “why are people willing to spend so much on coffee at Starbucks? And if a can of Coke is priced at RM1.80 in the supermarket, how could it fetch up to RM18 at a hotel? It’s all about unrivalled service and creating an exceptional experience in a relaxed environment. People are willing to pay if you can add value or provide a good customer experience.”

The observation drove a direct operational conclusion: Hairstory would not compete on price. It would compete on experience and consistency — two attributes that required investing in people and in the physical environment of the salon. The Employee Entrepreneurship Programme (EEP), which converted 25 of the chain’s stylists into equity partners in their individual outlets, was the structural expression of this insight. If experience and consistency were the product, the people delivering them had to have a stake in their quality.

The free training door #

In 2014, Hairstory launched a zero-fee hairdressing training programme for school-leavers from households earning under RM5,000 per month. More than 80 young people had passed through the programme by 2019. The programme was funded by Hairstory and supported in collaboration with elected representatives; the training led to professional certification and, for the best graduates, employment within the chain.

The architecture of the programme maps precisely onto the founder’s own starting conditions — reversed. He had entered the profession without money and against family opposition, funding his training from apprentice wages because there was no other way. The 2014 programme created the pathway he would have needed: free, accredited, and connected to a real employment destination. The programme did not announce itself as autobiography. But for anyone who knew the origin story, it was impossible to read it any other way.

The training work deepened an institutional identity that was already visible in the EEP: Hairstory was a chain that built its people up rather than holding them as contracted service-providers. The programme was not altruism bracketed off from the commercial operation. It was the commercial operation — a talent pipeline for a sector chronically short of trained stylists, built by a founder who had once been the talent that such a pipeline could have helped.

The MCO and the payroll commitment #

On 18 March 2020, Malaysia’s Movement Control Order closed every Hairstory outlet. Seventeen locations, 120 employees, zero service revenue. The pandemic presented the question that Derick Ooi had not had to answer before: could a management philosophy built on trust survive the pressure of a revenue collapse?

His answer was immediate. No employee would take a pay cut. The commitment, made before the MCO duration was clear, transferred the financial risk of the lockdown entirely onto the founders. To make it financially viable, Hairstory deployed four parallel survival mechanisms: zero pay reductions, Facebook Live stylist tutorials to maintain client relationships, online treatment product sales, and prepaid one-year voucher packages that drew future revenue forward into the crisis period. The voucher strategy was the mechanism. The pay commitment was the moral prior that required a mechanism.

“I believe the stellar financial results are one of the best among those in the fraternity in the northern region,” he told Asia Connects in 2022. “It shows that you will get the desired result if you are determined to achieve something great. If there is one thing to learn from the pandemic, then I would say it has made us better prepared to cope with any difficulties in life.”

The results, by any measure of the industry, were anomalous. Hairstory’s 2020 and 2021 revenues were, in Derick Ooi’s own characterisation to the press, the best in the chain’s history to that point — tens of millions of ringgit in both years, achieved through three lockdown cycles and partial reopening restrictions. The management philosophy that had looked ruinous in March 2020 had, by December 2021, produced the strongest financial performance in the company’s seventeen-year history.

A crisis within a crisis: the “air bangs” incident #

Not all of the pandemic period’s tests were systemic. On 12 March 2021, a customer complaint about a fringe cut at the Air Itam outlet went viral on Sin Chew social media. The response was institutional in scale but personal in delivery. Derick Ooi drove to the outlet himself. He apologised in person. He offered the customer one year of complimentary service.

The episode was minor in the financial narrative of the MCO years. It is significant in the character profile. When the founder faced a reputational crisis that could have been managed from a distance — a statement, a manager’s call, a discounted future visit — his instinct was to go to the outlet. The personal apology was not a communications strategy. It was the founder’s specific reflex to the kind of situation he had built his management philosophy around: trust is not abstract, and the people in the salon deserve the same directness he expected of them.

PKT — the community’s answer #

The Penang Birthday Honours List on 14 October 2023 included the PKT — Pingat Kelakuan Terpuji, a state honour conferred by the Penang Governor. Derick Ooi’s name was on it.

The medal stands at the intersection of two arcs that the profile has tried to trace separately: the personal arc, from the apprentice whose family opposed his career to the state honouree whose career built an industry institution; and the social arc, from the young man who had no training pathway to the founder who created one for 80 others. The PKT is a civic recognition, not a commercial one. It acknowledges what Hairstory has contributed to Penang as a community institution — the training programme, the employment created, the model of employer conduct during the pandemic, the length of a career spent building a business in the city rather than out of it.

By 2023, Hairstory had 17 outlets and was aiming for 30 by 2027. Twenty-five stylists had been converted to equity partners through the EEP. The ACCCIM Young Entrepreneur Super Model Award had arrived the year before. The trajectory was clear. But the PKT was the specific recognition that measured the founder against the community he had served — not against a peer group of entrepreneurs, but against the city that had watched him build.

What the absence built #

The professional identity that Derick Ooi constructed over more than two decades returns, consistently, to a formative absence: no capital, no family support, no external stakeholders to share the risk. In another founder, this origin story becomes leverage for an inspirational framing — the self-made narrative, the “I did it all alone” claim. In his case, the formative absence produced a different conclusion.

“This is much better than opening up new outlets with external shareholders,” he told Asia Connects in 2022, discussing the Employee Entrepreneurship Programme, “who may not be aligned with our work culture.”

The insight is precise. What the absence of external backing in 2000–2004 taught him was not that he could do everything alone — it was that dependency on people not aligned with the enterprise’s culture was the structural risk. External shareholders who did not share the commitment to service quality and employee development were not partners; they were governance problems waiting to emerge. The EEP, which converted stylists into equity partners rather than sourcing capital from outside, was the architectural solution to the problem the founder had first encountered at the age of twenty as an apprentice who had to fund himself.

The founder built a career. Along the way, he built a management philosophy. Both began, in 1998, in a Penang secondary school where the rules said: 0.6 cm, no exceptions. The rules changed when the holidays arrived. By 2023, the Penang Governor was handing him a medal.

Last updated: June 4, 2026