It's a mall world after all

As children, many of us would have indulged in the fantasy of staying after store hours in the toy section of a department store, or having a whole mall as our personal playground when everyone has been shunted off for the night. For CA Exhibits Network’s China Aurelio, growing up as a young girl meant finding more exotic or unique fantasies  this on account of the fact that having the run of a closed mall was a regular occurrence! Established in 1988, the 1990’s saw China’s parents planting the seeds of their business that organizes trade fairs and bazaars in different malls all over the Philippines.

Supervising the ingress of one’s vendors, setting up the food stalls, handling all the logistics; this required being inside the mall when no one else but the maintenance and janitorial people are around. This would be a regular “thing” for China as she would accompany her parents as a precocious child. She smiles remembering those hours spent wandering the mall, and the food stall vendors offering her sweets and goodies. And she laughs when I ask if the company was named after her, saying that is what her mother insists on, but knowing her father is named Clement means we can take that with a grain of salt!

What CA essentially does is lease sizable prime areas at malls, and then they divide the area into several booths and stalls, which they sublease to small-scale businesses, who, on a regular basis, would not have the resources to have mall presence of their own. Whether in Metro Manila, Cebu, Davao, Iloilo, Pampanga or Cagayan de Oro, CA has steadily grown to the point where they now have over 700 retail outlets, spread over 30 malls around the country. Automobile exhibits and events, Oriental fairs and bazaars, and even specialized one-client driven events (e.g. BDO’s Deals on Wheels for their car loan business), CA has cashed in on its pioneer status in this niche enterprise. The company’s true equity is its reputation, dependability and the trust it carries  whether from the point of view of the mall owners or the vendors, who regularly apply to the CA-organized events, or the consumers themselves, who have to come to know that CA events are better organized and worth attending.

It may seem preordained that China would be involved helping her father run CA, but it wasn’t a “hop, skip and jump” from college to the family business. The road travelled is what makes China quite a unique character. Eschewing that expected “easy” transition, China insisted on first doing corporate work  two years with the San Miguel Beer Division and followed this up with a stint doing foundation work. In fact, the first time I met China was two years ago, at an ABS Publishing event, when Metro Society tied up with SSI/Tod’s for Bantay Bata, and China represented the foundation on that day. For China, this fierce desire to do substantive foundation work was something she harbored since her college days (at the Ateneo, Saturdays would mean working with street children under the Musmos outreach program) and was something she discussed with her father. It was a prerequisite before entering the fold of the family business.

Today, whether the C in CA stands for Clement or China is moot. The two work together  protecting, sustaining and expanding on the enviable equity and reputation that has been carefully built over the 22 years of the company’s existence. CA Exhibits Network has been cited by Agora Excellence, the National Product Quality Excellence, and the Philippine Quality Awards for Business Excellence as an Outstanding Exhibit Service Company; and China’s wanderlust has brought her back home.

Master Class

Books from and about the masters.

The books today have to do with two of today’s masters of literature  Julian Barnes and Haruki Murakami; and a master of the cinema  Martin Scorsese. Throughout their writing careers, both Barnes and Murakami have excelled in terms of the sustained quality they produce, the variety of topics and themes they tackle and how they’re globally recognized as being such impeccable writers. The Hugo Companion is Brian Selznick’s chronicling of Scorsese’s adapting his bestseller book and a must for all movie lovers.

The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes (available at National Bookstore). Barnes has always been the master of the urbane, subdued, yet deep novel. Reflective to the max, this new, slight volume has to do with how events from the distant past can still stretch its arms and affect one’s life in an unforeseen manner. College life, the women we get entangled with, an unexpected suicide, these all form the elements for this novel’s theme and premise. When decades later, it comes to the attention of our protagonist, that a letter he had sent to aforementioned classmate who committed suicide is now in the hands of his ex-girlfriend, who then took up with the deceased, strong emotions are released. What’s subtly powerful here is how even one’s perception of oneself can come into drastic reassessment because of the most minor of things we may have done in the past.

1Q84 by Haruki Murakami (available at National Bookstore). Quirky, part fantasy, part social tract; and coming in at just under a thousand pages, this new novel of Murakami may not be his very best, but it is one of his stronger ones of the last decade. The main characters are Aomame, a female assassin who murders those who have treated women badly; and Tengo, a frustrated writer who gets involved with a very dubious ghostwriting scheme  the rewriting of a novel by a 17-year-old girl. As in the past, this Murakami novel has to do with alternate realities, synchronicity and coincidences. The lives of our protagonists get enmeshed with a suspicious religious cult and its leader, when the debut novel mentioned above turns out to have strong implications for the survival of the cult, and exposing the lifestyle of said leader. A lengthy but absorbing read.

The Hugo Movie Companion by Brian Selznick (available at National Bookstore). Hugo is the new film directed by Martin Scorsese that is his first about children. Based on the novel written by Brian Selznick, those familiar with the novel will know it’s also about the love for movies from the silent film era, French director Georges Mieles, orphans and family and a whole lot of adventure. This wonderfully rendered movie companion takes us behind the scenes  how the cast is chosen, how the sets are constructed and costumes designed, how the cinematography and lighting add to the magic, how research on automatons and the early 20th century details enhance the atmosphere, and the cinematic experience. And most of all, it’s about how people work together on a labor of love...in this case, a film that’s touted to win some Oscars in March!

All that glitters

Always good to hear about how the women entrepreneurs I’ve featured over the months are doing well. Young jeweller Janina Garcia has her second solo private show this Thursday evening, Feb. 2, at the Lawton function room, Essensa, BGC. It highlights her Maja handmade jewelry and her Pepitas Bangles. Go early to reserve the pieces, as she sold out her first show at the Skye Rooftop late 2011.