Entrepreneurial opportunity
If you go back to the Greenway of 2009, no large department stores had yet opened, the Citizens’ Plaza (a large open grassy park) had just been completed, and there wasn’t a whole lot of commercial activity going on along the periphery. But some could see the potential for future development in the area. There were a lot of idle old houses in the lanes and alleys in this district, and even though the asking prices or rents were not high, there were still few people interested. It turns out that Chung’s elder sister was the landlady of one of these old houses.
“When I first started out on my career, I took a lot of cases of public infrastructure or large buildings, but I didn’t feel fulfilled. Then my sister asked me to help her renovate her old house.” Chung says that by the time he had overhauled the place, it was an open, spacious home with a real sense of aesthetics. He figured it would be easy to find someone to rent it, yet much to his surprise the months passed and it remained empty.
Perplexed, Chung gathered together his colleagues and they launched a market survey. They discovered that following the opening of the large-scale shopping centers, many young people wanted to start their own businesses in this district. But their budgets were limited, and most could afford only NT$10–20,000 per month for rent. Therefore large, spacious houses, despite being cheap per square meter, were still outside their range.
And yet the demand was there, so it was up to them to figure out how to meet it. So Chung renovated an old two-story house in such a way that it was divided up into seven separate storefronts. At rents of less than NT$20,000 per month, they were all snapped up in short order. This was Fantasy Story’s “Venue #1,” the result of a “beautiful accident” made possible when a number of conditions matured around the same time.
Chung officially founded Fantasy Story Company in 2011, and in the same lane as “Venue #1” he proceeded to renovate four other old houses. The next year, he transformed an old structure on Zhongxing Street into a project called “Sweets Woods” (also known as “Fantasy Story Venue #7”), which is a pastry and baking venue with multiple shops set in a green space shaded with old trees. He has since undertaken a whole series of projects, including a bookshop and handicrafts collective, and a diversified lifestyle community has taken on a definite form.
Shops that have opened in spaces renovated under the “Green Ray Project” carry a wide variety of unusual and niche products. Some also offer lectures or classes, so that both the businesses and local residents have the opportunity to continually grow. (courtesy of Fantasy Story)