Kuen Cheng Career Week 2019
Day 3: Rhea Tan Design (High Heel Shoes Designer)

By:
Tan Yi Khai (Sr1ScD)

We have extended an invitation to designer, Rhea Tan, over to the school on 19 July 2019 for a career talk and workshop. She is an alumna of Kuen Cheng, and what made it even more interesting is that she was once a student of our current Deputy Principal, Madam Chong Siew Fah. The workshop kicked off with a warm welcome and quick self-introduction of our guest speaker.

Rhea told the audience about her secondary school life in Kuen Cheng High School. She said she sometimes dozed off in the middle of the class because she used to hold busy post and was very active with her club activities, which made her tired during classes.

Following on, she described about her cooperation and job relationship with a few different companies including Samsung, Focus Point, Lynda Rahim and so forth. She was meant to create a shoe design that could fit into the custom of those events. During the crossover with Focus Point, she made a shoe design that was based on the idea of a Japanese fish market.

She continued to elaborate on her process of becoming a shoe designer. As soon as she graduated from Kuen Cheng, she entered SML Fashion Academy to further her studies. She stated that designing to her is more about doing extra, because the more you put into it the more you get out of it. She is active in participating designing competitions whenever it is available. There was once where she was in a difficult position as she had run out of idea in what to design for the upcoming competition and what she did was just thinking outside of the box.

She further on insisted that being a designer might not be good source of income so if students insist on becoming one, passion and attitude are fairly equally important. A student asked a good question which then stunned her for a slight moment as the question was what was the cost of a certain shoe and how can some design be so expensive. She gave the response and replied that the actual price of a shoe is based on its design and cost of producing it. The main price of a shoe comes from the design as it is not easy to come out with a good one. After all, it involves a lot of designing hours and hard work.

We had had a good time exchanging more ideas and thoughts with Rhea for our future career plan. The workshop ended with a quick group photo.