Notes from an evening at Soho House Hong Kong, on women, work, and cross-border careers.
Last Wednesday at Soho House Hong Kong, JC Legal hosted a panel called Leading with Cultural Fluency: Women Leaders Navigating Cross-Border Careers. The Blue Room held about fifty people — entrepreneurs, lawyers, communicators, educators — and four panellists who had each, in different ways, built a career across more than one country.
Our founder Frederieke van Doorn was one of them. The others were Yamilette Cano, the former ballerina turned founder of LOUDER Global; Gina Wong, who has built one of Hong Kong's largest outsourced contact centres over twenty-one years; and Bonnie Yip, whose thirty-seven years across publishing and social enterprise have spanned Hong Kong, Australia, and the Greater Bay Area. Janice Chew of JC Legal moderated.
It was the kind of evening where the conversation outran the format. What follows are a few ideas from the room — the ones worth taking out of it.
Cultural capital is rarely loud.
The phrase that kept returning to the conversation was cultural capital — the quiet competitive advantage of having lived in more than one place. The room was full of women fluent in multiple languages, raised between cities, working across borders that don't always overlap on a map.
What was striking is that none of the panellists framed this as a credential. It was rarely something they had named on a CV. Instead it showed up in the small things — how they hired a team, how they briefed a colleague, how they read a room before speaking in it. The capital was real, but rarely visible. It earned trust before it asked for any.
For a founder like Frederieke — Dutch, twenty years in men's tailoring before founding FREY, building now across Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, and London — cultural capital looks like knowing that a brand voice that lands in one market doesn't always land in another. That a launch in Singapore is a different conversation than a launch in Shanghai, even if the pieces on the rail are identical. That the woman walking into the studio in Hong Kong is rarely the same as the one ordering from London — but both, somehow, want the same thing in the end.
Building across markets is less about scaling, and more about listening four ways at once.
There is a quiet myth in business writing that international growth is a question of scale: take what works, and do more of it, in more places.
Building across cultures, is the opposite of scaling. It is listening four ways at once — for the way a brand is heard differently in Hong Kong than in Singapore, the way an interview question lands differently in Mandarin than in English, the way a value (sustainability, transparency, craft) becomes a polite word in one market and a meaningful commitment in another.
For FREY, this has become something of a working principle. The collection that drops in Hong Kong is the same as the one that ships to Shanghai, but the conversation around it is rarely identical. The fabric story matters everywhere. What changes is the way it's introduced — through which channel, in which season, alongside which other ideas. Cross-border isn't a strategy. It's a habit of attention.
The future is being written by women who came in sideways.
What linked the panelists was the angle of approach. None of these women came in through the front door of their industries. Yamilette was a ballerina; Gina built a company from scratch when no one was funding women founders in Hong Kong; Bonnie crossed from publishing into education and back. Frederieke spent twenty years dressing men before founding a company for women.
The pattern is hard to miss: the next generation of leaders in Asia is being shaped by women who didn't follow a straight line. The fluency they're trading on isn't only cultural — it's the fluency of having had to translate themselves between rooms.
A note on what FREY took from the evening.
FREY was founded on a quiet conviction — that women working across cities, languages, and decades deserved the same quality of tailoring that had been built for men for two centuries. The panel was a reminder of what that means in practice. The women in the Blue Room weren't dressing for the office. They were dressing for the next room, and the room after that. The brief, in a way, was always the same.
Thank you to JC Legal for hosting, to Janice Chew for the kind of moderation that makes a panel feel like a conversation, and to the women in the room — on stage and in the seats — for the kind of evening that stays with you.
FREY is a women's workwear brand built around the fabric. A quiet rebellion against corporate dressing, softly tailored from natural fibres and Italian mill deadstock, and made to last beyond a single season. Available at frey-tailored.com and through select stockists in Singapore and Shanghai.