Starting small | at Boutiques Singapore

A place where we test our product and connect people.

Boutiques Singapore is a celebration of independent, original and design-forward brands which held twice a year. It showcases over 300 designers from Singapore and beyond, each unveiling exclusive launches and design sensibilities. rehyphen first joined Boutique in Spring 2018 with a 2x2m space to display our collection. Since then, it has been our seven editions.

Every brand in Boutiques is handpicked by Boutique's curatorial team for their design vision, brand story, and social responsibility. Boutiques Singapore began in 2002 with a simple idea: to connect more designers directly to shoppers. The event was established and continues to be directed by Charlotte Cain, who has made Singapore her home since moving here in 1989. As an advocate of independent businesses and an artist herself, Charlotte wanted to create a platform where small business and designers could showcase collections, engage directly with customers, and gain valuable feedback about their work. Over the years, Boutiques has grown from a showcase of 17 brands to one that hosts more than 300 brands each time. The heart of Boutiques Singapore, however, remains the same: to foster deeper community connections with the small businesses around us.

We started with a simple concept collect- weave- product in late 2016 and in 2018, we have left over too many cassette casing after the brown tapes were used finished for our MusicCloth®. We developed a new product line called “tweet tape” - an upcycle greeting card to help people to pass love message around the world since 2018. It is exactly a tweet (140 languages, in any languages) in a tape. Customers are able to customised their love message on the end tapes and give it to their love one. The receivers have to turn and read the message inside the tape. During the Covid period, we received feedback from customer that they missed the music inside the tapes. We added a new feature - “scan and listen” feature in all our MusicCloth® products. Customers could be able to scan and listen to the curated playlist for different cities via our Spotify private playlist. After Covid period, we evolved into a new concept organically where we combined up-cycle design with cultural heritage aspect and positioned ourselves as a mobile cassette tapes museum which focus on three major parts :1) Mobile Museum  2) museum shop 3) New song .

A mobile museum is a versatile museum comes in different form and different ways of engagement. The key is we bring the museum to the people rather than vice versa. It involved tribute special exhibition-showcase and curated musician cassette tapes with different theme; Host CSR workshop with different organisation - corporate, school, hospital and government event to promote up-cycling design and showcasing our cassette tapes archive; Sharing up-cycling design concept in different schools and forum; Collaborate with brands to utilise waste we can't use. One of the example is we collaborate with a Taiwan soap maker- DaChun to use the Video Tape Box casing that donated from United International Pictures for their Soap packaging with a 60s movie ticket soap design in it. 

A museum shop curates a large collection of arts & design objects weaved of discarded cassette tapes. It is an extension of our museum exhibitions. We collect discarded cassette tapes from local community; Weave cassette tapes into pieces of MusicCloth®; Empty cassette tapes casing are turned into up-cycled greeting cards -- Tweet tape, which allow customer to customise 140 characters in a tape and send it to their loved ones; Curated City playlist for different cities ; Turn MusicCloth® into arts and design products. In addition, we also collaborate with different local brands to launch different MusicCloth® design objects, for example - Cassette tapes edition Cold brew coffee with Kizuna;  MusicCloth® speaker with Decibelist; Cassette tapes lamps with Shiok Lighting; Tweet tape music award trophy with Fresh Music Award. The partner that we selected are partners to share the similar mindset with us with different community group to create a win-win collaboration to extend both of our customer outreach goal.  

Last part, Rehyphen® collaborates with different musicians to co-write new songs. During Covid period, our founder J J Chuan learnt lyric writing from Mandopop lyricist Xiao Han and  Taiwanese lyricist Vincent Fang. After two years, she started to learn song writing with local song writer Derrick Tham. Her writing style combines her multi-national background and diverse experiences in life with a touch of retro elements that is encoded in a cassette tapes collector's genes. Her previous published co-write lyrics which include Donnie Yen's daughter Jasmine Yen first single <idk> and first album <tbh>, and Diana Wang <Bedroom> which all released by Sony Music Entertainment's RCA Greater China Record.  Her aim is to use new music as a bridge to connect the pass and the present.  Besides, rehyphen also were spotted and featured in MTV Asia as one of their MTV original story. 

In conclusion, everything we collect in rehyphen, will eventually return back to the public in a different form. At the end of our project, there will have no cassette tape left over in our studio. 

For more information:

https://www.boutiquefairs.com.sg/

Products are all available here: https://www.rehyphen.org/category/all-products