Madam Mary Chia was only 12 years old when she decided to take her life to end the brutal beatings she regulary received from her father.

Her mother stopped her just in time, but what followed was even more brutal: She was told she could kill herself if she wanted to, but to go far away from home to do so.

In the face of such unrelenting harshness, she might have really killed or abused herself in countless other ways.

Yet, she took what is perhaps the most unlikely route, becoming the matriarch of a beauty empire in Singapore that has stretched to Malaysia.

Almost six decades after that turning point, she is the founder and executive chairman of Mary Chia Holdings, which launched a $5.65-million initial public offering earlier this month, listing on Singapore's Catalist board.

The Mandarin-speaking Madam Chia says the public offering move was to raise money to expand the company's network of 15 outlets in Singapore and three in Malaysia, and to build a solid public image.

The company may be considered a pioneer in the local beauty industry that today has four to five major players, including the Jean Yip group and Expressions International.

Life! meets Madam Chia at her flagship spa for men, The Cocoon by Urban Homme, at Ngee Ann City. It is one of four such outlets under her brand.

The vibe is soothing and the lighting, dim. The reception area is a stylishly designed space where white lounge sofas are enclosed in a spherical metal cage. The sound of running water in the background adds to the zen experience.

Madam Chia cuts a regal figure in a royal-blue silk blouse, elegant black pants and high heels. She is flanked by her daughter Wendy Ho, 38, who is chief executive officer of the company and seemingly inseparable from her.

As one of the first home-grown lifestyle and wellness service providers to list on Catalist, the mother-and-daughter-driven Mary Chia brand is clearly going places.

Madam Chia says: 'This did not happen overnight. Everything that I have now is after years of tough training and my childhood experience.'

It is not just another rags-to-riches tale. It is the quintessential rags-to-riches story.

Her family lived in a kampung in Choa Chu Kang, growing vegetables and farming poultry for a living. She and her 10 siblings did chores and sold their fruit and vegetables at the market. School was in the form of night classes and she eventually dropped out at Primary 6.

If that was not tough enough, she was singled out for beatings by her father, simply because she was born female at the wrong time. She recalls: 'I was the third child. The eldest was a boy and the second, a girl. My dad was happy. But when it came to me, he wanted another son.'

Bearing the brunt of her father's disappointment, she often had to endure senseless beatings. With a slight shudder, she says: 'He would use those really thick ropes to whip me, the kind used for boat moorings.'

She even had to give up meals so that her younger siblings could eat.

Her father would beat her for the slightest reasons. If he came home to find that birds had damaged their crops, she would get it. Madam Chia recalls that she often kept watch and frantically banged objects to create a din to scare away pests so she could be spared the beatings.

After years of abuse, she decided to commit suicide. She says: 'A child who has had to endure beatings will always think about what he or she did wrong. There is no self-worth.'

Her mother, Madam Ong Ah Kow, found her just as she prepared to hang herself with a piece of cloth.

Madam Chia says: 'She slapped me really hard on the face. Then she told me that if I wanted to die, go far away from home to do it, but not in our house.'

Those harsh words marked the turning point that sparked her ambition. 'I felt angry. I thought, 'Since you always think I am useless, I will prove to you that I can make it'.'

New beginning

Her teenage years were spent away from home, first living in a workers' dormitory in Tanjong Katong where she trained and worked as a seamstress, sewing bridal gowns.

By 16, she rented a tiny room in a nearby shophouse to live on her own. Life as a seamstress was hard and she got by on only three hours of sleep on some nights. Eventually, she developed a sideline from sewing that was to take her to the multi-milliondollar success she enjoys today.

Madam Chia, who says she has 'always been vain', used her basic make- up skills on brides who wore her dresses.

She also started selling face powder for a customer to other clients, moving on to cleansers and more cosmetics.

By the late 1960s, she was offering free facials and massage treatments along with her wedding gowns as a package.

She met and married bank worker Ricky Ho, now 61, in 1969. The couple have two children, Wendy and son Freddy, 34, who works in the property investment industry.

The family lived in a three-room HDB flat in Ang Mo Kio. When Madam Chia realised that she could earn more going into beauty treatment full-time, she started providing door-to-door facials with an eight-year-old Wendy in tow.

The duo made house calls from 8am till 10pm, serving customers islandwide and sometimes even going without meals because of a tight schedule.

On schooldays, her daughter tagged along with her in the afternoons after school.

Says Ms Ho: 'As a kid, you're just happy to go out. However, as I grew older, I did think, 'How come other kids get to play but I have to do this all the time?' I learnt to accept that I was helping my mother.'

As an assistant, she helped find the way to clients' houses and assisted her mother on facial and tummy massages, changing the water used for treatment and so on. The hours were gruelling but they earned up to $100 a day.

By 1984, Madam Chia had saved enough to set up her first shop, a 300 sq ft place in Yishun, for $10,000. Two staff were hired. Her days of house calls were over and the business did well.

Then came health problems for Madam Chia the following year: high blood pressure and fainting spells caused by weight gain from her two pregnancies and eating irregularly.

She says: 'I was 85kg. I tried dieting and all kinds of techniques but in vain.'

This adversity, too, turned into fortune. While in Japan on a study tour sponsored by a cosmetics company in the late 1980s, she came across slimming technology involving a vibrating chamber that circulates steam. She tried it daily and says she lost more than 10kg in the two months she was in Japan.

On her return to Singapore, she made the ground-breaking decision to incorporate slimming services in her beauty practice, using the new-found technology, whose cost she declines to reveal.

By 1989, she moved to an outlet four times the size of her Yishun one at Goldhill Centre in the Novena area.

Her business took off mainly because of the loyal client base she had built up. And there was little competition since the local beauty and slimming industry was in its infancy then.

The Goldhill Mary Chia branch had up to 140 customers a day, with queues forming outside the shop as early as 7am.

In 1991, Madam Chia opened a second branch, in Tampines Central, and more followed.

A sharp eye for the market saw her launching Urban Homme, offering facial and spa services for men, in 2003.

She says: 'Men nowadays are paying more attention to their appearances. Some are even more vain than women.'

The Sars outbreak that year was but a bump on the road to success, she adds, as lost customers later returned.

Last year, Mary Chia Holdings posted a 158 per cent jump in net profit to $3.1 million from the year before.

It is not resting on its laurels, having recently launched the Mentsu brand, an outlet in Tampines, comprising lifestyle and wellness services targeted at young professionals, managers, executives and business people, both men and women.

The group also has its own MU label of skin and beauty products.

Madam Chia says: 'My dream is to expand to all corners of the globe.' The company has plans to set up shop in markets such as China and Dubai.

Family focus

Despite her harsh upbringing, she has kind words for her parents. Her mother, in her mid-80s, lives with one of Madam Chia's brothers and visits her 'often'.

Her father, Xie Re Qian, died in the 1970s at the age of 56. Madam Chia says they were reconciled at his deathbed where he asked for her forgiveness.

'In a sense, I am grateful to my parents because they inadvertently taught me how to be tough and how to love and pamper my family now.'

Still, she says, her voice quavering with emotion: 'I had no childhood and sometimes I do feel like I've also deprived Wendy of one. But she has never held it against me. When we did house calls, I saw that other people's children had regular meals to eat and time to play, and I felt some heartache for my daughter because she was always working with me.'

Now she is the proud grandmother of six children aged six to 12. Ms Ho is married to an entrepreneur and has a son and two daughters. Freddy's wife helps out with the chain's operations and the couple have three girls.

Home for the close-knit family comprises a pair of semi-detached houses in the city area with the dividing fence knocked down. Madam Chia shares the estate with her retiree husband, their children and their families and three maids.

Because of what she went through, Madam Chia says she never lays a finger on her grandchildren. She spends weekends going to the parks and taking walks with them.

A typical day at work for her involves office meetings and shuttling between outlets. She also makes it a point to attend beauty seminars overseas, keeping up to date with the latest technology from Italy to Japan that her outlets use.

She estimates that her chain has served more than 300,000 women through three generations, adding that what gives her the most satisfaction at work is simply to see her loyal clients and staff, some of whom have followed her since the beginning.

Retiree Ng Guai Heok, who is in her 50s, is one of the chain's long-time customers and has become a good friend of Madam Chia's.

Madam Ng says: 'I've known Mary for more than 20 years but she has never changed. She is still a very caring person and always takes time to stop and chat with me when I see her.'

Ms Irene Goh, 45, is a customer who joined the Mary Chia outfit in the 1980s. Now, she is a branch manager at the Goldhill outlet.

She says: 'Mei-jie (big sister Mary) is a boss who gives you a lot of space to develop your skills and we have become good friends after so long. She takes care of her staff. Just a few years ago, she took me for check-ups when I was pregnant.'

This familiarity that Madam Chia strikes up with clients and staff is evident when she takes a call from one of her long-time customers, chatting in Hokkien. For a moment, she lets down her polished guard, sounding like any other heartland auntie at the market.

Her poise returns when at the close of the interview, you try once again to obtain an elusive bit of information that she has always withheld - her age.

She says she is 59, although past reports would place her in her 60s.

Asked if she gets offended when juniors call her 'auntie', she says: 'No lah, I don't mind. They can call me whatever they want. After all at this age, I am 'ah ma' (grandmother) already.'

This article was first published in The Straits Times.