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- 🤯 Nanyang Optical: 65 Years of Awards, Then Liquidation
🤯 Nanyang Optical: 65 Years of Awards, Then Liquidation
How a 65-year Singapore eyewear chain won global design awards but lost the mall retail channel it depended on.
Admond Lee
August 30, 2026
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Hey Founders,
Welcome to The Runway Ventures — a weekly newsletter where I deep dive into failed startup stories to help you become the top 1% founder by learning from their mistakes with actionable insights.
Today's story is about how a 65-year-old Singapore eyewear chain won international design awards but couldn't outrun mall rents and Johor Bahru shoppers. Let's get to it! 🚀
Today at a Glance:
☠️ 1 Failed Startup → Nanyang Optical
⚠️ 2 Mistakes → World-class R&D trapped in a mall retail channel
🧠 3 Lessons Learned → The best time to pivot doesn't feel urgent
🔗 The Runway Insights → How the GTM playbook has changed in 2026
💰 Southeast Asia Funding Radar → Ajaib raises $270M (Series C) to expand its online stock trading platform for Indonesians buying stocks, ETFs, and mutual funds
☠️ 1 Failed Startup: Nanyang Optical
🚀 The Rise of Nanyang Optical
🇸🇬 Founded in 1960 by Yang Choon Ming (who had been grinding lenses in a Geylang workshop since the 1950s) and later rebuilt by his teenage son Yang Wah Kiang, Nanyang Optical was Singapore's home-grown eyewear chain — a lens-grinding workshop that quietly turned itself into an internationally awarded optical designer over 65 years.
🕺🏻 Founders’ Story
Nanyang Optical started in the 1950s when Yang Choon Ming set up a small lens-grinding workshop on Geylang Road with just over S$10,000 of personal savings.
He couldn't compete with the bigger factories buying industrial lens machines — so he moved downstream, grinding lenses cheap for students and building a following one prescription at a time.
Then in 1963, he died unexpectedly. Leaving 5 young children.
🎒 His 16-year-old son Yang Wah Kiang left school and took over the workshop. 5 years later, he opened his first proper Nanyang Optical shop — and spent the next 6 decades turning a Geylang side trade into a design brand that could hang in Paris.
The Problem — 👓 Quality eyewear in Singapore was either too expensive or too fragile.
Frames broke, screws loosened, and there was no home-grown option that felt both affordable and durable.
Independent lens grinders couldn't compete with bigger manufacturers buying industrial machines.
Kids' spectacles fell apart the moment they hit the playground.
The Solution — 🔬 Nanyang Optical built a vertically integrated optical chain — retail up front, lens grinding at the back, and later a full R&D operation designing its own frames from scratch.
Opened a 1,000-square-foot Shenzhen R&D studio in 2002 with 10 senior designers, plus design centres in Japan and Paris.
Launched proprietary brands like Urband, Eyelet, Glossi, and Linkskin — many winning international design awards.
Ran multiple retail formats: mainstream Nanyang, premium Alexis boutiques, Sport On, and franchise outlets.
🇸🇬👓 In short, Nanyang Optical was a Singapore family retail chain that quietly became a world-class eyewear designer — without ever leaving the mall.
 Nanyang Optical since 1960 | 🏆 And they weren't just winning at home. Urband Origami — a frame made from a single 0.4mm stainless-steel strip bent 23 times with zero soldering — won Singapore's President's Design Award in 2009, plus Red Dot and a Silmo d'Or special prize in Paris. In 2014, Eyelet Flip won the President's Design Award again, for a screwless hinge stress-tested to withstand 10,000 flips over 7 days. |
🏔️ At its peak in October 2017, Nanyang:
ran 16 outlets across prime Singapore malls plus 4 stores in China
had reported ploughing 10-15% of revenue into R&D back in 2012 — insanely high for a retailer
had proprietary brands sold across 20+ global distribution nodes in Asia and Europe
collected wins at iF, Red Dot, Silmo d'Or, IOFT, and 2 Singapore President's Design Awards
was chasing 80% of turnover from in-house brands, up from ~20% at the time
For a family shop that started with one man edging lenses in a Geylang workshop, this was a Singapore success story.
📉 The Fall of Nanyang Optical
💸 But great design didn't fix broken retail.
Even at peak in 2017, Yang Wah Kiang's own younger brother Yang Hua Zhou — who ran a rival chain of 8 stores under the Frames & Lenses and Kingdom brands — told Zaobao that conditions were the most severe he had felt since starting his own business. Malls proliferating. Foreign chains entering. E-commerce maturing. A strong SGD pulling shoppers to Johor Bahru for cheaper glasses.
Then rents kept climbing. Customers kept crossing the Causeway. And the math kept getting worse.
📌 Here’s what happened to Nanyang Optical:
In our years of running retail in Singapore… rent has been going up all the time. It's a question of how much.
🏆 From Geylang workshop to Red Dot winner
1960 — 👓 Yang Choon Ming opened a small lens-grinding workshop on Geylang Road with just over S$10,000 of personal savings. Nanyang Optical was born.
1963 — Yang Choon Ming died unexpectedly. His 16-year-old son Yang Wah Kiang left school and took over the workshop.
2002 — 🔬 Wah Kiang opened a 1,000-square-foot R&D studio in Shenzhen with 10 senior designers, plus design centres in Japan.
2009 — 🥇 Urband Origami won Singapore's President's Design Award, plus Red Dot and Silmo d'Or.
2014 — Eyelet Flip won the President's Design Award again, for its 10,000-flip screwless hinge.
Oct 2017 — 🏔️ At its peak, it had 16 Singapore outlets + 4 China outlets. Proprietary brands still just ~20% of turnover, against an 80% long-term target.
⚠️ When the mall stopped working
23 May 2023 — ⚠️ Group affiliate Eye-Biz Pte Ltd was compulsorily wound up on a Johnson & Johnson creditor application. The proprietary-brand vehicle collapsed 2.5 years before the retail chain itself.
May 2025 — 🚪 Closed its Causeway Point outlet after a proposed 12-13% monthly rent hike. Management publicly cited Johor Bahru cross-border shopping as a factor.
4 Jun 2025 — CNA reported that Nanyang Optical had downsized its Marine Parade unit by almost half and cut part-time hours.
Dec 2025 — 🕰️ Stars of Kovan shifted to appointment-only operation because of a severe manpower shortage.
⚠️ On 23 Dec, customer Karen prepaid S$1,800 for a year's supply of contact lenses at Northpoint City — about a month before the company filed for liquidation.
26 Jan 2026 — Sole director Bernard Yang lodged a statutory declaration in the Government Gazette that Nanyang Optical could not continue "by reason of its liabilities". Provisional liquidators were appointed.
28 Jan 2026 — 📰 The liquidation went public.
4 company-operated stores were flagged for closure.
Stranded customers surfaced publicly, including Karen with her unfulfilled S$1,800 order.
Feb 2026 — 🤝🏻 Lenskart offered 1-to-1 cash credits to affected customers and interviews to displaced Nanyang Optical staff.
Capitol Optical committed S$20,000 in dollar-for-dollar replacements, first-come first-served.
13 Feb 2026 — ⚖️ Creditors' meeting held via Zoom. EGM formally passed the winding-up resolution. 65 years, done.
23 Jul 2026 — 🙏🏻 Liquidators publicly tendered the Shenzhen inventory. The Junction 8 and Clementi Mall franchises, unaffected by the liquidation, carried on trading independently.
For 65 years, Nanyang Optical did the hard part right. They designed frames that Paris and Frankfurt actually noticed. They ploughed as much as 10-15% of revenue into R&D when most retailers spent zero.
But award-winning products still need to be sold somewhere.
🙏🏻 By the time Karen prepaid S$1,800 for contact lenses in December 2025, the mall model those products depended on had been quietly breaking for years — under rising rent, cross-border shopping, and customers who no longer needed a physical store.
Want to learn more about Nanyang Optical’s downfall?
⚠️ 2 Mistakes
Screenshot from Karen (she prepaid S$1,800 for a year's supply of contact lenses at Northpoint City — about a month before the company filed for liquidation)
Mistake 1: World-class R&D trapped in a mall retail channel
The logic on paper was sound: spend a reported 10-15% of revenue on R&D, escape the commodity trap, build IP that competitors couldn't copy. And Nanyang Optical delivered — iF, Red Dot, Silmo d'Or, plus 2 Singapore President's Design Awards.
🤦🏻♂️ But the retail model couldn't cash in on the IP.
The company sold those award-winning frames through mall stores that also stocked the global brands consumers already recognised. Walk-ins came for those familiar labels. Proprietary brands stayed stuck at ~20% of turnover against an 80% long-term target.
🕶️ While Nanyang Optical was perfecting screwless hinges, the Lenskarts of the world were redesigning distribution itself — DTC-first, vertically owned. Product innovation was hyperdrive. Business-model innovation was still built for the pre-DTC era.
Mistake 2: Reading the 2023 Eye-Biz collapse as an isolated event
Eye-Biz was the proprietary-brand vehicle Yang Wah Kiang set up in 2000 — the specific mechanism meant to grow own-brand turnover from 20% to 80%.
When Johnson & Johnson wound Eye-Biz up on 23 May 2023, that engine was legally dead.
It was easy to compartmentalise — Eye-Biz was a legally separate wholesale entity, and the design work kept going under Urband.
🚨 But the retail chain kept making tactical trims instead of confronting the strategic question the collapse raised:
May 2025 — Causeway Point outlet closed after a 12-13% rent hike
June 2025 — Marine Parade outlet downsized by almost half; part-time hours cut
December 2025 — Stars of Kovan shifted to appointment-only amid manpower shortage
Its most recent regulatory filing dated to 2020 and no financial statements were publicly available, Business Times reported — so there was little outside scrutiny forcing the question either.
And on 23 December 2025 — 34 days before Bernard Yang lodged the insolvency declaration — Karen prepaid S$1,800 for a year of contact lenses at Northpoint City.
The board should have read Eye-Biz's collapse as proof that the entire Nanyang Optical thesis needed either a radical pivot or an orderly wind-down — while there was still cash to protect customers, staff and creditors.
🧠 3 Lessons Learned
Bernard Yang (Director of Nanyang Optical)
Lesson 1: Innovation only pays off in a channel you own
Nanyang Optical ploughed as much as 10-15% of revenue into R&D and won iF, Red Dot, Silmo d'Or, plus 2 President's Design Awards. But on the last public figure, proprietary share was still only ~20%.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
R&D creates a moat only if you own the channel that showcases it. On a shared shelf, your innovation quietly subsidises the incumbents beside you.
In categories dominated by global brands, DTC or vertical retail is the only channel where proprietary IP earns proprietary margins.
🛠️ Operator Playbook:
📊 Track proprietary share vs proprietary shelf space
Every month, compare % of proprietary SKUs on your shelf with % of proprietary revenue.
If proprietary revenue % is less than 60% of proprietary SKU %, the channel is holding your IP hostage.
🏗️ Pilot one owned channel before scaling R&D past 5% of revenue
Prove distribution innovation before scaling product spend.
Test a DTC site, a flagship boutique, or a subscription rental for 6 months. If proprietary conversion in the owned channel isn't 2x the multi-brand rate, your bottleneck is distribution.
Lesson 2: When your growth engine dies, rebuild the plan
Eye-Biz was set up in 2000. When Johnson & Johnson wound it up in May 2023, that part of the business was gone.
Yet, Nanyang Optical continued for over 2 more years — accepting a S$1,800 customer prepayment in the weeks before the company's January 26, 2026 statutory declaration of insolvency.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
When the entity purpose-built to execute your growth thesis collapses, the thesis has collapsed. Everything downstream is a lagging indicator.
Regular outside scrutiny forces a business to face its numbers. Private companies get far less of it, so boards can drift for years while strategic signals go unread — build your own review cadence.
🛠️ Operator Playbook:
🗺️ Map the entities carrying your growth thesis
List every subsidiary, partner, or key customer that carries your strategy, even those with no near-term cash impact.
Assign each a quarterly "strategic health" flag: revenue trend, filing status, key personnel retention.
If any entity flags red, schedule a strategic review that week — even if it means postponing operational fixes.
Lesson 3: The best time to pivot doesn't feel urgent
😦 In October 2017, Yang Wah Kiang's younger brother Yang Hua Zhou — who ran his own rival optical chain — shared the 3 shifts squeezing the trade:
malls multiplying across the island and thinning out every shop's catchment
deep-pocketed foreign chains moving in
e-commerce plus a strong Singapore dollar pulling shoppers across to Johor Bahru.
Nanyang Optical was at peak footprint that very month, its 16 Singapore outlets sitting inside those shopping centres.
🌮 Key Takeaways:
Warnings at peak cash flow are the most valuable, because you can still afford the pivot they point to. Warnings at trough are eulogies.
🛠️ Operator Playbook:
📈 Schedule a "peak-cycle stress test" during your best quarters
Every quarter you hit record revenue, block 2 days to answer: "If our main channel disappears in 5 years, what does the business look like?"
Allocate 10-15% of that quarter's excess cash to building the alternative channel.
The principle: fund your channel pivot from strength, well before your current channel becomes a legacy business.
🎧 Set up a "competitor commentary" tracker
Create a free Google Alert on every direct competitor's founder, MD, or spokesperson.
When they voice distress in interviews or LinkedIn posts, log it and review the collection quarterly.
If 2+ direct competitors flag the same macro trend in one quarter, treat it as a leading indicator and plan a response within 90 days.
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Thanks for reading. I hope you enjoyed today's issue. More than that, I hope you’ve learned some actionable tips to build and grow your business.
You can always write to me by simply replying to this newsletter and we can chat.
See you again next week.
- Admond
Disclaimer: The Runway Ventures content is for informational purposes only. Unless otherwise stated, any opinions expressed above belong solely to the author.
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