In 2001, two weeks after the Sept 11 attacks, she came to Singapore to visit the ex-boyfriend, Mr Ronald Chen.

"I was here for three days. On the third day, we were having chicken rice at Chatterbox when he suddenly asked me if I would consider being with him. I was in the midst of pouring black sauce on my rice. Needless to say my chicken rice was all black," she recalls.

She told the Singaporean banking executive "no" because she was not ready to give up her career. Undeterred, he sent her big presents for Christmas and Valentine's Day and clinched it when he flew to the US to visit her.

The partners at her firm thought she was mad when she resigned.

"They asked, 'Who is this guy? Why are you doing this when he doesn't even have a ring for you?'

"But I knew I needed to if I didn't want any regrets. Even though we were not together, this guy had always been there for me for more than seven years."

She relocated to Singapore, but could not get a job. "No one would hire me here. They said I was over-qualified and too young to have a senior position."

So she contacted her old bosses at Ogilvy in Bangkok and landed a job as a strategic planner. Mr Chen, whom she married in 2003, would fly up regularly to be with her.

Her role was to bring in new business. She did just that. She also secured the account for Nike, which later hired her as its marketing communications manager based in Singapore.

One day, her husband asked what she would most like to do before they had children.

"I said I'd always wanted to have my own store combining my three passions: fashion, food and art. And he said, 'Let's do it'."

It was, in her words, "a giant, monstrous undertaking".

They plonked all their savings, totalling half a million dollars, into Front Row - which stocked several labels and operated a cafe and art gallery - in a three-storey shophouse at Ann Siang Hill.

But it did not quite take off.

One morning, barely six months after opening, she received a call from the bank telling her the company had only 30 cents left in its account.

She wanted to call it a day but her husband said no.

"He said, 'It's your dream, we're going to make it work.' That's when I knew I had picked the right person and married my soulmate," she says. "The next day, we had a VIP who spent $3,000 in the shop."

She rolled up her sleeves, let go of her buyer and store manager, and decided to buy stock, manage the store and tend to clients herself.

"Once you do that, you get a sense of what they want and you are smarter in your buys," she says.