D&J Founder & Managing Director

The first lady of D&J is the founder and owner, Siuwan Tang, or Wendy to our western customers.

Siuwan grew up in Southern China hungry and poor, eating sweet potatoes if she was lucky and planting peanuts on the small allotment of land her family was allowed to use. Offered a push bike by her mum at age 20 to stay home and help harvest the peanuts she refused and moved to Guangzhou to seek her fortune.

Deng Xiaoping’s Chinese Economic reform and Buddha were on her side, searching for financial backing and then designing and building her own sock factory on her first land purchase Siuwan begun manufacturing and selling socks B2C at a time demand outran production.

A typical day would be to rise at 6 am to manage the manufacturing of the orders she had worked for the previous week, pack them into her first car and drive 5 hours to deliver the socks to her customers and to her stall in the Hong Kong night market, then drive home sleep, and start again the next day.

At the same time Siuwan was a mother to 2 children and a wife, but divorce quickly saw her a single mother of 2 whilst still running a successful sock factory. China’s mushrooming garment manufacturing industry soon saw more sock factories open than the domestic market could cope with and she saw the coming downturn in the market quickly approaching. How to move forward and keep growing her business so her children would never experience the life of hunger she had? Siuwan saw the opportunities of the Great Opening and the influx of western business, she asked herself what she was good at and loved to do? Fashion was the answer, and she, with her indominable courage choose to risk it all to move to Hong Kong and start a women’s fashion business.

Named after her two children, David & Joan, she opened her company and from nothing but pure vision and will power begun approaching customers and at the same time knew that to really succeed she needed to learn English, which would be her fourth language after her hometown dialect, Cantonese, and Mandarin. Two children, single mother, new company, English lessons, and no income. This was her reality at the time, yet she never doubted herself and kept the vision of one day raising her family to a better level of life.

The reality that life was more touched her one day and being the type of person who takes action Siuwan began her journey of self-improvement through the study of Buddhism.

Decades of hard work and self-improvement, goal focused and disciplined she never stopped the constant struggle to improve her family’s situation even after being the victim of ruthless local businesspeople were she nearly lost everything. She continued against all odds without support from anybody and has finally bought herself, family and staff to a level of success that not even Covid or Putin has been able to bring down. Success always looks easy from the outside.

Siuwan has built D&J from a vision to an international manufacturing company over decades of hard work and constant effort and now employs over 1,000 people in 6 different countries and has succeeded in her goal of irreversibly changing her family’s future for the better.