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Their family collected scrap for decades. Today, they sell restored furniture worth thousands.
One of Singapore’s oldest vintage furniture businesses runs a 7,000 sq ft store and offers refurbished furniture ranging from S$15 to tens of thousands of dollars.
In a world driven by consumerism, one Singapore business is giving pre-loved furniture a second life. Meet Hock Siong & Co., a family-run business that has spent decades collecting, restoring, and reselling secondhand furniture.
Today, the business is run by sisters Brillyn Toh, 38, Beaunice Toh, 33, and Blessance Toh, 30, who grew up surrounded by used furniture and discarded household items.
The trio are the second generation of a family deeply rooted in Singapore’s karung guni trade. Their grandfather went door to door collecting unwanted newspapers, clothing, and household items, while their father, Toh Chin Siong, 65, grew up helping in the trade before founding Hock Siong & Co.
We spoke with Brillyn about how she and her sisters have grown Hock Siong into a 7,000 sq ft showroom in Tai Seng, with no plans of slowing down.
It started with old newspapers & used clothing
The story of Hock Siong began not with furniture, but with old newspapers and used clothing.
It started with Brillyn’s grandfather, a karung guni man (rag-and-bone man) who, in the 1970s, travelled through Singapore’s housing estates sounding a horn to announce his arrival and collecting whatever residents no longer needed.
His son, Toh Chin Siong, grew up helping with the collections. After finishing school, he worked briefly as a lorry driver before founding Hock Siong in the early 1990s.
The business initially served as a middleman in the karung guni trade, buying from individual collectors, sorting the items, and exporting them to overseas markets where there was demand. Used clothing was shipped mainly to Indonesia, while electronics found buyers across developing countries in Southeast Asia.
The pivot into furniture came in 1998. That year, Chin Siong learned of an opportunity to tender for the contents of the former Marco Polo Hotel, which was slated for demolition in 1999. The once-prominent hotel has since been replaced by a condominium on the same site.
He partnered with a Malaysian agent to purchase everything inside the hotel—beds, mirrors, tables, chairs, restaurant furnishings and lounge pieces from roughly 300 rooms.
The pair split the haul, with half going to Malaysia and the other remaining in Singapore to be sold through Hock Siong. At the time, storage was inexpensive, and the family had access to a large warehouse in the old Sungei Kadut area, making it feasible to keep such a massive inventory.
That single project transformed the business. From then on, secondhand furniture became Hock Siong’s primary focus.
What Hock Siong won’t buy
Today, Hock Siong is run by sisters Brillyn, Beaunice and Blessance Toh.
Each oversees a different part of the business. Brillyn heads procurement, assessing and purchasing incoming furniture; Beaunice manages operations, overseeing how pieces are sorted, stored and displayed in the showroom; while Blessance handles the administrative side, including finance and payroll.
Hock Siong acquires furniture from homes, restaurants, corporate offices and hotels that are renovating or clearing out their spaces. The team is sometimes even called upon to help families empty the homes of loved ones who have passed away.
Most enquiries begin with a WhatsApp message. Customers send photographs of the items they wish to part with, and Brillyn personally reviews each one to determine whether Hock Siong can take it.
Material is the biggest deciding factor. Pieces made from solid wood, such as teak, mahogany, or elm, are far more likely to be purchased, as they are durable enough to be restored and represent decades of growth.
“Sometimes I find that this wooden piece is beautiful, and I think it has the potential to be remade,” she said. “I will buy it.”
On the other hand, Hock Siong passes on items whose storage costs would outweigh their resale value, or pieces that would require so much refurbishment that the time and effort simply wouldn’t justify the eventual selling price.
Today, Hock Siong’s sprawling showroom carries everything from a S$15 vintage desk lamp to a three-metre Raffles statue priced at S$3,000. At the top end are bronze sculptures by Chinese artist Liu Ruo Wang, which can fetch tens of thousands of dollars.
What the refurbishment process looks like
The carpentry team at Hock Siong typically performs two distinct types of work. Structural refurbishment addresses what daily use does to a piece of furniture: loose joints, stuck drawers, shelves that have buckled under weight.
The other form is exterior refurbishment, such as sanding, refinishing, and revarnishing, which helps to make something look almost brand new.
Brillyn said that most pieces typically need both types of restoration. For example, a sideboard cabinet that arrives with cloudy, discoloured lacquer goes through structural fixes first, then sanding and refinishing.
The refurbishment capability wasn’t baked into the business from the start, but developed gradually as a necessity. With the design of furniture evolving with the changes in interior design, some items from the Marco Polo Hotel could not be sold as-is, and so Hock Siong had to innovate and repurpose some furniture.
As such, there are some larger modifications made to match current interior design trends, like adding fluted glass to cabinets that previously had plain glass, because that conveys a contemporary look to some buyers who prefer a modern element in their secondhand furniture.
Another example is old television cabinets, the hulking built-in units that were standard in Singapore homes a generation ago. They’re often solidly built, sometimes from good wood, and almost impossible to sell as they were.
Hock Siong’s experienced carpentry team has developed ways around this by removing the TV cavity, adding shelving, and making what was unsaleable into a storage cabinet with some character.
Such work is labour-intensive, and with skilled carpenters becoming increasingly difficult to find, every restoration has to make commercial sense.
It’s this ability to reimagine old furniture for modern homes that has become one of Hock Siong’s defining strengths—and one reason the business has remained relevant for decades.
Of course, not every item that passes through Hock Siong is an ordinary cabinet or dining table. Over the years, the business has handled its fair share of unusual pieces, each with a story of its own.
One of the most memorable was an old Mini Cooper. The team had it cut in half at a workshop before transforming it into a sofa with custom cushions. Today, it sits inside Brunches Café.
Another was a three-metre-tall statue of Sir Stamford Raffles salvaged from a hotel before it closed.
The statue was eventually bought by a retired private collector known for filling his home with unusual finds. Rather than placing it indoors, he displayed it prominently in front of his house.
The economics of a traditional business
Hock Siong currently occupies a 7,000 sq ft store at Tai Seng with a team of 28, split across sales, operations, delivery, carpentry, and administration.
With years of being in the business, Brillyn is honest about the structural limitations of Hock Siong’s business model. “This is really not a super scalable business,” she said.
A conventional furniture retailer can look at a catalogue, identify a bestselling chair, and order 20 more, but Hock Siong cannot.
Everything in the store has arrived from a different location, in varying conditions and at an unpredictable time. When something sells, there is no restocking, and it’s more likely than not that the next piece of rosewood will be different from the last.
Brillyn explained that this means the business has to be exceptionally good at managing what it cannot control and at creating the ideal conditions for pieces to sell.
As such, store arrangement matters more than it might appear to strangers to the business. Hock Siong’s team regularly repositions items because changing how a piece sits in the space changes how customers imagine these restored pieces in their own homes.
Being a family business, Hock Siong is also open to dynamic pricing and bargains as they see fit. With global geopolitical instability, rising raw material costs have squeezed profit margins in ways that are harder to manage.
For example, turpentine, a material regularly used by Hock Siong’s carpentry team, has gone from S$30 to S$40 per tin to S$50, by nearly 20 to 40%.
Diesel for the collection trucks has climbed too.
Despite rising costs, Hock Siong has held its free delivery threshold at S$400, absorbing some of the increase rather than passing it on, partly because it considers its relationship with regulars as a long-term asset.
“Customers are very understanding,” Brillyn said. “I’m really very grateful.”
A sunset industry that is slowly rebounding
When Brillyn joined the business full-time in 2011, after graduating from NUS Business School, the secondhand furniture trade was not exactly seen as a growth sector.
Over the years, cheap imports from China had compressed the prices of furniture and made buying new a reasonable alternative to buying restored secondhand items. Brillyn used to refer to her family’s line of work as a “sunset industry,” a traditional business that is facing long-term stagnation.
However, what Brillyn and her sisters did instead of accepting that was to begin marketing Hock Siong online.
Facebook pages were new in the early 2010s, and it cost almost nothing to ride the wave of social media and share about the business. On Hock Siong’s Facebook page, Brillyn would post pictures of restored pieces for sale, and that eventually led to a following.
Later, Hock Siong hopped onto other digital platforms like Instagram and eventually established its online store.
Besides digitalising the business, Brillyn shared that the secondhand furniture market in Singapore has changed over the past decade in ways that have worked in the business’s favour.
Western thrifting culture, globalised by social media, has made buying secondhand feel like an intentional choice rather than a compromise for something brand-new.
Moreover, a growing number of younger homeowners are prioritising items with a backstory, while more interior designers want something that stands apart from the usual offerings, leading to a demand for secondhand furniture from businesses like Hock Siong.
I think it’s really very heartening that people are beginning to accept all this and really find the beauty in old things.
Brillyn Toh
Looking ahead, the Toh sisters are focused on growing their family business further, adding to the family history of dealing with secondhand items.
Featured Image Credit: Hock Siong
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