Right here’s one other documentary about one other of the world champions in shoe shining, 2018 champion John Chung from Singapore. It’s made by the Malaysian/Singaporean channel Astro AEC and is a pleasant portrait of the profitable shoe shiner.
Just a few weeks in the past I wrote a couple of lengthy documentary made by Japanese public service about Yuya Hasegawa, the primary world champion in shoe shining. This time it’s the second world champion that’s featured. The documentary has been aired on prime time each in Singapore, Malaysia and Taiwan. It’s about 25 minutes, the documentary crew has adopted John Chung for fairly a while. John based the primary shoe shine bar in Singapore in 2013, Mason & Smith, which these days additionally makes shoe repairs and promote footwear, in addition to internet hosting numerous small shoe occasions and shoe shining faculties.
World champion in shoe shining 2018 John Chung (to the left), along with Sergio Barange from Saphir.
The documentary offers a private portrait of John Chung. All the pieces from how was impressed to start out his personal enterprise promoting second hand footwear on a market in Singapore, after travelling in Asia seeing this performed in numerous international locations. It wasn’t actually successful, and since he wanted to become profitable someway, he began the primary shoe shine service in Singapore. He then was invited to have his shoe shine service at a luxurious resort space in Singapore, the place issues took off and he made much more cash. He then was in a position to arrange his personal shoe shine bar, Mason & Smith, which has grown right into a profitable enterprise.
The documentary additionally tells about how he goals at changing into a bespoke shoemaker, and has educated in each Hong Kong and Japan, however put that on maintain after he received the world championships in shoe shining 2018, because it opened up many new alternatives for his shoe shine enterprise. It’s fairly heartwarming for me as organiser of the competition to listen to how folks’s perspective to his work as a shoe shiner modified after he received the world champs title, from a sceptical view to being marvelled by his success.
Watch the documentary under (English subtitles):
