Humble origins to 800 worldwide stores selling wooden combs.
Quirky — By ken on March 4, 2010 at 10:23 amCarpenter Tan is a very famous Chinese brand that stand out amongst others for its remarkable success amid great odds selling handcrafted wooden combs, wooden mirrors, chopsticks, hairpins, beads and scented fans.
The journey began 15 years ago when Tan Chuanhua, a physically handicapped man decided to enter the comb making business in Chongqing in south western China.
Born into a poor carpenter family and saddled with debt, Tan left his job as a primary school teacher due to discrimination from colleagues over his disability. He then tried his luck in a host of other professions, before concentrating on his expertise as a carpenter.
In 1993, Tan set up a company for making wooden combs and named it Tan Carpenter. In 2006, the company diversified into wooden products beyond combs and by 2008 it had expanded into a company with a sales network of over 800 chain stores, including six overseas outlets. At the end of 2008, Carpenter Tan has developed more than 2400 comb products, obtained more than 60 patents. With products sold in nearly 760 stores in Mainland China, Singapore, Malaysia, South Korea, USA, Spain, France and Hong Kong.
Carpenter Tan is planning an initial public offering of its shares in Hong Kong and revealed in its prospectus that, before the end of 2010, it plans to open three craftsmanship halls, including exhibition areas, craftsman workshops, cultural and commercial centres, artistic performance platforms, and leisure areas, to fully display its handicrafts, home supplies, and Chinese-style furniture products.
In addition, the company said that it will open 200 new stores in 2010, including high-end comb stores, directly-managed flagship stores, and upgraded franchised stores. Apart from these 200 new stores, it will renovate its existing 800 stores in phases.
Carpenter Tan’s only North America store is located in the Flushing Mall (133-31 39th Avenue, Flushing) in a neighbourhood in the north central part of the City of New York borough of Queens, ten miles (16 km) east of Manhattan. Flushing’s diversity is reflected by the numerous ethnic groups that reside here including people of Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern, European and African American ancestry.
Carpenter Tan’s Flushing Mall showroom displays prayer beads, letter openers, hair brushes and mirrors all crafted from various forms of wood, including sandalwood, peach wood, boxwood, and mahogany.
Carpenter Tan – A Store That Sells Only Combs and Brushes
From: AssociatedPress – March 03, 2010
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The promotion of the fine arts over the decorative in European thought can largely be traced to the Renaissance, when Italian theorists such as Vasari promoted artistic values, exemplified by the artists of the High Renaissance, that placed little value on the cost of materials or the amount of skilled work required to produce a work, but instead valued artistic imagination and the individual touch of the hand of a supremely gifted master such as Michelangelo, Raphael or Leonardo da Vinci, reviving to some extent the approach of antiquity. Most European art during the Middle Ages had been produced under a very different set of values, where both expensive materials and virtuoso displays in difficult techniques had been highly valued. In China both approaches had co-existed for many centuries: ink and wash painting, mostly of landscapes, was to a large extent produced by and for the scholar-bureaucrats or “literati”, and was intended as an expression of the artist’s imagination above all, while other major fields of art, including the very important Chinese ceramics produced in effectively industrial conditions, were produced according to a completely different set of artistic values.
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