Republic Asia – Our Story
TLDR: Our founder, YS wants to accelerate and elevate entrepreneurs, Startups & SMEs to compete on a levelled playing field against digitally forward industry peers.
Defying Status Quo – The rise of Digital
In 2011, a finance graduate, understood that digital is about to leapfrog, revolutionise industries verticals & emerge as the go-to channel.
The neck-breaking internet connectivity penetration & Moore's laws are leading indicators that pave the exponential rise of today’s digital economy.
Food, transport & fashion which by large are most of our lifestyle recurring expenditures have seen waves of digital advancement against entrenched players.
For instance, the following lifestyle categories landscape are been digitalised by the following factors:
- Food & transport verticals. The densely populated metropolis, mounting societal pressure of being productive and living a time-pressed lifestyle drove demands for ride-hailing/ food delivery services.
- Fashion vertical. The increasing inclusion for financial accessibility, the advancement of the delivery network, users’ preference for convenience, the dosage of dopamine for unboxing & consumers mobile devices coupled with micro-moments drove e-commerce sales.
The finance graduate, our founder, YS, traded a trading desk role for a digital role. An action that rose eyebrows back then. He co-founded an m-commerce social shopping app at the start of the m-commerce era. when a venture capitalist remarked, “this generation of men won’t transact for clothing via mobile”.
Digital Natives will take down Digital Dinosaurs
Digital by large is an unfair advantage for today’s business. Businesses that are resistant in the integration of digital channels or offerings will be challenged.
For the past 10 years, our founder recounts he was fortunate to work on a multitude of freelance assignments for the business of different scale on their digital imperatives. Services range from digital marketing, digital transformation, performance optimisation, digital products development & project management.
Today’s digital marketing & transformation services industry is highly saturated. Many agencies claim they are no. 1 in what they do. We all come across agencies & talents with astounding knowledge and execution. But also, agencies and freelancers that over-promised and failed to deliver. Some of their works are mind-boggling and how they execute is jaw-dropping (in a bad way). Our founder wants to change that.
A levelled digital playing field
In 2017, with the increased of freelance projects & client requests. Our founder started Republic Asia, scaling up the capabilities and our infrastructure to better serve clients.
The execution of such imperatives needs individuals or agencies with the right values, growth, agility, wealth of experiences, synergy with clients & a risk appetite to derive rapid learnings to drive home better results/ ROI for clients. The processes, people and technologies (PPT) must be aligned towards the real-time adaptation of market conditions.
The values that our founder build on Republic Asia remains the same of which he built his initial clientele. Trust. Quality of work. Long term sustainability of client.
Read our other article on how to choose the right agency to work with & 20 key questions to ask.
No dinosaurs left behind. Let’s move forward together with agility.
"At Republic Asia, we march as one towards the Agency’s founding goal: To help more firms compete digitally and doing it utmost right."
- YS Koh