The owner of Franz Collection Inc. capitalized on the fall of another company, Wedgwood,and turned around the events into a successful venture in the branding and decoration industry. Although his involvement in business was as a result of his brother’s lack of knowledge of the German’s, Chen maximized on his understanding of the language and delved into business selling subcontracting ornaments for the German market and later extended his customer base to the American market.
Despite realizing increased success in the business, he lacked design ownership making it difficult to satisfy some customers who preferred commodities from producers and not intermediaries. He started to engage in designing by hiring competent, young and creative craft designers, which fostered customer confidence from as far as United Kingdom and Japan translating to about 5,000 sketches annually.
With the expanding market and increasing cost of labor, which made it easy for competitors to take advantage in the market, Chen established a company in China and after three years of operation, the company had opened three more companies employing about 8,000 workers. The need to have a personalized brand emerged in 1999 when one of the designers made the Papillion Butterfly as a brand name for several commodities. He later tried out a porcelain line, Franz, which was his nickname in college as a brand name.It performed exemplary in the market winning a number of awards in 2002. The indulgence in the porcelain industry enabled him to have a wide base of customers from all over the globe.
He later established the company as a brand so as to enable his customers to identify it from other competitors. The company launched new designs per year with its headquarters in Taipei employing about 200 employees, 60 designers and in the year 2008 the total employees the entire company had counted to over 4,000. Over 6,000 stores worldwide trade commodities from Franz’s collection.