Founder, Pocket Projects
Founder, Pocket Projects
When Karen Tan went to look at a derelict cinema on the fifth floor of a seedy building on Beach Road, she knew right away that she was looking at a diamond in the rough. “It looked like it had so much potential,” Karen, who has a passion for bringing old things back to life, shares. While most entrepreneurs would run a mile away from what she was trying to do, the founder of design consultancy, Pocket Projects, was steadfast in her belief that she could transform old neighbourhoods into inclusive community-driven spaces in a similar vein to what she had already done with the Lorong 24A shophouses in Geylang and The Row in Kuala Lumpur. She and her co-founders raised the funds to renovate the space, put together an inventive business plan that featured multiple revenue streams and lo and behold, The Projector was born. “We didn’t want to do too much in terms of rejuvenating it. That’s not the point of injecting life into an old space,” she explains. “We have to move on from the obsession with newness, because life is not about newness and shininess all the time.”
WORDS TO LIVE BY: “Don’t be afraid of failing.”
