Aaron Chin at Murky Wines, a natural wine bar he co-founded in Gasket Alley, Petaling Jaya.
Sitting in his natural wine bar Murky Wines at Gasket Alley Petaling Jaya, Aaron Chin took time off from his busy schedule of juggling his vast portfolio of businesses which includes the uber-popular Kyochon Korean fried chicken chain to talk about how it all started.
“I’ve been an entrepreneur who is interested in a few different industries. I don’t tie myself to just a single industry,” Chin tells The Peak.
The chilly bar – kept at under 16ºc for the wines – offers a glimpse of what else is playing in his mind as we picked up a bottle labelled “The Brighter Cider of Life” by Anders Frederik Steen & Anne Bruun Blauert.
Punny.
“It’s wine and poetry,” he responds.
Having been introduced to natural wine by his partner in the speciality coffee business, Chin has been making a pilgrimage to Tokyo, the hub for natural wine in Asia and bringing back bottles just for his own consumption before realising that there might be others in Malaysia who would similarly share their interest.
“So we thought okay, why don’t we just start a small boutique importer,” Chin says.
“Our only rule is that we only bring in wines that we both enjoy.”
Listening to him talk about his other businesses, this appears to be a trend with him rather than a one-off thing. An avid traveller, unique and whimsical bottles of artisanal wine are not the only thing that piqued his interest and found its way back to Malaysia with him, as most of his ideas found their spark while he was exploring the world.
Hailing from Kota Kinabalu, Chin laments the lack of design-driven hotels in the popular tourist destination, more so with the prices that are being charged to guests.
“These hotels with very simple rooms and white walls often can get away with charging people RM300 a night,” he says.
Having stayed at a string of aptly named Design Hotels around the world, which brings together some 300 independent hotels rooted in design, locality, and culture, he decided that it was time for Kota Kinabalu to have one such hotel: The LUMA Hotel.
The interior of The LUMA Hotel.
“I get a lot of my ideas from travels,” he says. “I tend to try out different hotels, some in the urban area, some in the cities.”
In fact, a trip to the Philippines several years ago was the spark that led to the introduction of Kyochon to the Malaysian market.
With all these human-facing businesses under his belt, it may come as a surprise that Aaron’s background is actually in tech. In fact, the software company he set up some two decades ago is the first and only software development company with an MSC status in Sabah.
“Tech is always the thing that I hold dear to my heart,” he says. “We leverage on data to make our decisions.”
In his restaurant business, where location is everything, data plays a major role in highlighting the hotspots in a particular town on the demand for Korean fried chicken. This invaluable insight not only allows the business to focus its attention but also irons out any subjectivity between him and his partners when it comes to decision-making.
“We may have different opinions on whether I like this location, maybe he likes the other locations,” Chin says. “So we use a lot of data to help us.”
His technology background, and his acumen for hospitality and understanding what humans want, weave nicely into his latest business venture, Gaia Eats, a plant-based food company with the idea of creating alternative proteins to make a more humane protein supply chain.
While 95 per cent of the work is done online with AI doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the back end, Chin understands that Malaysian consumers still want a human touch even when engaging in online transactions, leading him to cater to this need.
“There is a lot of chatting before they decide to purchase or not,” he shares.
Understanding this, Chin says that a cookie-cutter, copy-and-paste method does not work and is instead refining his AI tools and channels to create a custom tone and manner for his brand as their distinct personality which would communicate better with customers.
“Interweaving between different industries, I would always use the tech angle to look at things,” he adds.
Still, there is one area where Chin let his gut feeling guide and that is finding business partners. Brushing it off as him being lucky with the partners he has made so far, he, however, believes that there is a common trait among them that goes beyond having a good mindset, and is instead something he calls “heartset”.
“A growth heartset is even better: It means you don’t see challenges or difficulties in front of you as an obstacle or something annoying,” he shares.
“You see it as a learning opportunity.”
People with this “heartset” are those who take responsibility and skip the blame game, and instead change, pivot and solve problems, all essential traits for agile and fast-moving businesses that he involves himself in.
“Otherwise every day is full of obstacles and frustrations. So rather than see it as a frustration, see it as a learning opportunity,” he says.
When suggested that his partners saw the same thing in him, he laughs.
“I guess so.”
