Meet the brewer breaking gender – and age – barriers

Everything happened so quickly, which was a good thing for Breer, a food upcycling craft beer brand, but meant I had to accelerate my pace of learning to keep up. I didn’t know much about setting up a company. I didn’t know how you maintain business relations. I went from pitching to friends and having them try the beers we were making for fun to walking into executive boardrooms and convincing the C-suite why an 18- and 19-year-old co-founder were worth making a bet on.

Pitching in your first language can be tough, but pitching in a second language is a lot tougher. Most of these meetings would happen in Cantonese, and I was the only one on our team who could speak it, meaning, more often than not, I would solo army it. It was intimidating, but I realised very quickly that nobody in any room knew Breer better than I did. I built it from the ground up and even if I was X years younger than them, I still know the business far better than they did. There really was no reason for me to be nervous. I got the hang of it eventually.

Luckily in Hong Kong, the gender skew in entrepreneurship feels as though it’s a little bit less than elsewhere in the world. There are some absolutely incredible female entrepreneurs that I look up to and often work with. We have quite a few women-focused communities.

The challenges I’ve faced as a woman came more by virtue of the industry I’m in: beer brewing. There are so many more men, whether it’s in research and development, sales or actual brewing – a realisation I only had once I’d started Breer. Suddenly I would just be surrounded with rooms and rooms filled with men, which wasn’t too unfamiliar to me because studying engineering also meant I was always in rooms of pretty much only men. In the brewing industry, there aren’t as many female role models to look up to though.