♪ haslinda: hello, and welcome to "high flyers," the show that gives you a 360 degree view of the world's business elite. today, we meet someone who could truly be called an undercover operator. a man breaking boundaries in a woman's world. our high flyer has taken his family's lingerie business and built exclusive market brand. lets meet christopher karam.

it started as a way for his mother to go back to the u.s., but the overwhelming response he received convinced the family to go all in. from one small stand in beirut, he is using his own company to market the brand and boost his success. time now for this high flyer to join us on the singapore flyer as he tells us how he is designing the future. ♪ haslinda: christopher karam. welcome to highfliers. it was a coincidence and it was a love story.

tell us your story. christopher: i am born to an american mother and a lebanese father. the way my father ended up in united states was via scholarship. there was a civil war in lebanon that lasted 25 years and it made it difficult for him to continue his education there. a best friend of his applied on his behalf to the university of texas and he coincidently got a scholarship to go there. so he moved there and my mother, out of 40,000 students, fell in love with the only lebanese guy who had no money, and when he finished his education wanted to go back home. [laughter] christopher: because he was very much a family man. haslinda: blame it on the stars. christopher: and so, when he had to move back, my mother was adamant on moving with him to lebanon. when she ended up in lebanon, it was in the middle of the civil war.

bombs were going off. it was not the safest place to be at the time. my father asked her -- are you sure you want to move here? and she said yes. this is one of the lessons my father taught me in business. don't just get a yes. a yes is easy to get. it must be a meaningful yes. what did he mean by that? he felt she might have put herself under pressure to make it work and he wanted to remove the pressure from her. he told her to go back to the states. go back to your own environment for one month and if you still feel a you can accept this change to move to lebanon, then you will move back and we will get married. he sent her some money. because to make it to lebanon, you have to go through four airports and you might miss a flight. and you might have to spend three or four nights in a hotel, and who knows about availability?

this was a time where the fax was the newest invention. she booked her flights and saw she had money left over. she told him. she said, should i send you back the money? he told her no, keep it. ,your your home there is an exhibition at the dallas apparel mart. lightweight,all, made in the states so she could bring it back and sell and that is the way he could pay his brother back. the exhibition happened to be a lingerie exhibition. [laughter] and that is how the story started. haslinda: if i got the story right, it started with a five dressing downs. -- gowns. christopher: right. this is a bit of a funny story. after she bought the first long downs -- gowns, he said here is

my life savings. find the brand, buy it with the money, what you see fit for the market and come back. she came back and said -- i met someone from japan. they have a subsidiary in the states. this is what i bought. he looks at the merchandise and he got very worried. it was lingerie for a man is seductive and lacy. something with color. here comes my mother buying with his entire life savings a nude colored bra that was very basic. he thought it was the beginning of the end. the merchandise game. it proves to be an immense success. even until this day the number one selling color is nude and the number one selling bra is a basic bra. that is how he made a mark in a lebanese market, by being the first person to sell to the

needs to fulfill a fashion solution for women. haslinda: it was never part of the plan for you to take over the family business. because all this while, you wanted to be a doctor. christopher: i think that was a bit of the affect of living through the civil war in lebanon. i always thought i wanted to help people and becoming a doctor was a way of helping people. however on one fateful morning, , my father was very proud of me becoming the first doctor in the family. and so he started thinking if he should sell the business. he asked me how much i thought it was worth. as a young kid, i told myself, my father wants to sell my mother's name. and that is when something changed in me and i said no, i cannot have himself in mother's name. i will have to be the one that takes over the business. haslinda: but you were involved in the family business even as a

young kid. age 14 you were tagging barcodes. 40,000 lingerie pieces in the warehouse. so you have personal experience. christopher: here is the deal with my father. people think of him as strict but i think he did the right thing. he told me to get straight a's, you get to spend the summer in whatever way you like. if you do not straight a's, you have to find a job. now, 20 years later, i am very happy that i never got straight a's because i ended working with him every summer and i learned from the ground up what it is to run the business. haslinda: having had this personal experience as a young boy, what is the most important lesson you learned? christopher: to have strong roots. i think of the business as a tree that is surviving all kinds of weather. it is easy to grow tall and quickly, but once an economic

storm comes in, the tree will be easily removed. that is why we have grown our business without having any partners or bank loans. we have strong roots. when the economic storm comes, we still stand in our place. we grow slowly but surely. annie step we take is very well studied. -- any step we take is very well studied. it is not about following people. it is about making the right decision. one of the major lessons i have learned is to learn how to walk away from something and how to say no to what seems like an opportunity. haslinda: and that economic storm you talked about came in 2009 when growth came to a halt. christopher: exactly. we were the only ones that were still able to grow during that time. and even currently, the market situation has not been as favorable as before.

dubai relies heavily on tourism. the numbers have been slowly decreasing because of a global economic storm. right now, we are still able to grow since we have reinvested all our earnings into the company and not spreading ourselves too thin. haslinda: up next -- christopher: well he first started everyone was a cup d, all the lives of 44.

♪ haslinda: christopher karam started in beirut. how did you end up in the uae? christopher: i asked my father refused to me in joining the business. i asked him how come? if anyone should take over the business, it should be me. he told me if i was going to join him in lebanon, i would only learn the same mistakes he what he had done. he wanted me to get fresh ideas. i thought it would be a good idea to continue my education at the time because he had done his masters and i wanted to do that as well. i have chosen new york. it's a beautiful place to go and study. haslinda: and play. christopher:. right before i had to go to new york, i went to dubai and it was being built from the ground up.

i told myself -- why would i want to go to new york where the city is already built, if i could travel back in time and see a city being built from scratch. haslinda: you said that opportunities were falling from the sky. what exactly did you see that convinced you dubai was the market to be in? christopher it was still there : barren. they were building the mall, billing the city. but it was not fully filled. it was not occupied. i saw a place for me to answer a market from the beginning. one of the hardest things is market penetration. that gave me a big step over my competitors to start. that is how we were able to take over a lot of distribution from the beginning. don't forget in the early 2000, the middle east was still a little bit of a scary place. even dubai. people now talk about dubai. back then, it was the middle east. and the middle east has been known as an area of conflict and

nobody really had their eye on it and that is how we were able to take that market quickly. haslinda: the middle east and lingerie, they hardly go together. you would not think of the middle east. how has demand been? what are the women wanting? christopher: our lingerie business is not what people think of. our number one color that we sell is nude and our number one bra is a pure, basic, everyday bra. that is how lingerie works in the middle east. it is not the idea that people have that lingerie is only about fantasy and seductiveness. it is an every day basic need. that is the strength of klynn. we sell our bras as a basic beauty product.

just like women must do their hair and makeup, they must have the right bras to feel comfortable during the day. that is how we were able to grow despite having a cultural difference between what you can say and what you cannot say in the middle east. haslinda: isn't it fair to say that you were thrown into the deep end when you started the business in dubai? christopher: definitely. i did not think the opportunity would come that quickly. luckily, the market growing at a pace that will never be seen again. i was able to make a lot of mistakes that did not cost the company of a lot of money because of the high turnover we were experiencing. haslinda: what were some of the mistakes? christopher: it was in buying the merchandise. i bought into many different categories in a small area. to test the market. if i was not in a mature market, i would still be stuck with that

inventory today. haslinda: yours is the biggest was redistributed in the arab world. how did you manage to convince the likes of oscar de la renta? collective either soul distributor? christopher: k.lynn offered a platform of being the sole brand with this concept. we were not the only but the other people did not move and change with the times. they stayed selling their bras in boxes or in drawers or on demand. he also did not focus on sizing. even in lebanon, when we first started, everyone was a cup b. we were the first people to introduce different cup sizes. we had the service that these brands needed in terms of training our sales staff and a platform which was our branding and our image which allowed us to enter the mall.

the other brands were not able to enter the mall. huntsville this day, slowly but surely unfortunately for them, , they are fading away and we are becoming the sole future for these premium brands. haslinda: amazing to note that you have 20 stores and yet you sell your products through word of mouth. why is marketing, or on a bigger scale, important to you? christopher: marketing will become bigger once we can put in a sole image for the shop. the last four years, we have been building that image. when we first started, or when my parents first started, they were targeting all kinds of consumers. luxury consumers, medium and daily consumers. it worked in the beginning but then there was a big influx of stores. i decided to cut that part of the business out and i focused

on the d cup up to a k cup. if you think about that -- changing the customer base was not easy. we had to lose out on some of our loyal customers that were used to the medium and value brand. it was a big risk that i took. right now, we are in a very strong position and we can see that it was extremely successful. now, we are focused on one customer target. we can finally have an emotion tied to our brand -- and that is, what is your love story? k.lynn started from a love story. haslinda: that is slightly different than victoria's secret where they use angels, beautiful models. christopher: they focus on a

younger consumer. their main target is 28 and below and ours is 28 up to 70's and 80's. being 70's these days is still young. the reason why we chose that target is because people might by other brands because of the name, but essentially they will not get the same comfort they do when they buy from us. that is why we consider ourselves a value for money brand. what does that mean? you pay a little bit more from a medium brand, but what you get in return is five times or 10 times more beneficial. a mature person is more calm. a curious secret is more -- victorios secret is more exciting. we feel that a nice value to have is love. love is something that we live with every day. it is a word that can be

interpreted into it so many emotions, between a mother and her children, between best friends, and between significant others. that will be the base of all of our future marketing. spreading love. haslinda: next -- christopher: they thought it was something glamorous. they were all jealous of me. ♪

♪ haslinda: christopher karam, when you were a young kid, a teenager, what was it like telling your friends that you were dealing with lingerie when -- christopher: they really thought it was something glamorous and they were jealous of me. supposedly being surrounded by these models. but in reality, the business was like any other business and i was in the warehouse putting barcodes, implementing software. and that was something i really loved. making a system.

creating systems on how things should happen. it is not as glamorous as people think it is. haslinda: i have never met a man so comfortable talking about lingerie. i did not even know k cups exist. how do you feel about being in a woman's world? we always talk about a woman in a man's world. it is the opposite for you. christopher: the challenge about being a man in a woman's world is the groundwork. i perform excellently in the office and the warehouse but once i am in the shop, it is difficult for me to interact with the customers to understand their needs. sitting in the office, i can look at the numbers. me what i have bought and what i will sold. they will not tell me what a consumer is asking for. that is why, slowly and slowly, i am passing on this responsibility to my wife. after all, why should the man be buying for a woman's needs?

a woman would understand much more than i do. haslinda: isn't it true that the lingerie business is pretty much dominated by men? that is the reality. christopher: it is true because i guess it all boils down to finances. i don't think that this will be something that will last in the future. women are becoming much more courageous and much more avant-garde in starting their own businesses. 30 years ago, even in the middle east it was a taboo because women were supposed to be housewives. i am glad that is changing. because there are a lot of these that women are looking to fill. haslinda: k.lynn started really small 30 years ago. it now has scale. it is an exciting time for the company because this is a time when you can look at global expansion. what are some of the ideas you

have? christopher: to start global expansion, you have to produce your own merchandise. right now, we are the exclusive distributors of over 20 brands that are sold in our stores. we are wholesalers and retailers. when we look at the retail side, the only way to grow globally is to start producing ourselves. in production, i like to say -- to compare that to what comes first, the chicken or the egg? because for production you have minimums you need to reach. with 20 stores, we are starting to look for suppliers to produce for us under our own brand name. right now around 20% of our sales are done under the name of k.lynn. haslinda: are there plans to list the company? does that make sense? christopher: the only person that can answer that is my son.

being a family business i would , like to see him take it over but at the end of the day, just like my father never pressured me to join the business, it was never something he groomed me for. despite the working with him. he always told me i was free to do whatever i wanted. i will follow the same path for myself. -- my son. i won him to choose his own life and for him to decide on his own future. if he does not want to join the business, perhaps it is an option, but right now it is too early to say. haslinda: you started dabbling in business at a young age. does it pay off to be an entrepreneur at a young age? it give you time to experiment , to make mistakes, to take risks. christopher: i have been fortunate that my platform to make mistakes was dubai. i must admit i am extremely grateful for what dubai has given young entrepreneurs. it gave us the opportunity of really focusing on the business. has there were no taxes.

we did not need to worry about bureaucracy. you focus only on selling. it is such an expanding market, that mistakes would not show. if i had advice for a young entrepreneur, it would be to make mistakes at someone else's expense. [laughter] haslinda: work for someone else first. christopher: get the experience first and learn what your system should be like, 5-10 years down the line. when you first start it is difficult to see what systems you have to have in place. it is kind of learn as you grow. if you want a mature brand and really learn the systems, you have a few steps ahead when you start your own business. haslinda: did you have to grow up in a hurry? you did say that you jumped into the deep end. christopher: i never looked at it as growing up, i looked at it as my mission and focusing on what i had to do. work hard and things will pay off.

haslinda: where will k.lynn be in 10-20 years? where would you like it to be? christopher: definitely in india and africa. i would like it to be a brand that always stands for value. you have these days some brands that are only selling a name and you pay a premium for the name. you can get the same quality for a lot less. our motto is to sell value for money. what you are spending is well worth it. haslinda: huge success in a very short period of time. looking back how do you feel? christopher: i feel that i hopefully made my father proud. haslinda: christopher karam, thank you so much for being a -- being on "highfliers." christopher: thank you. ♪

narrator: our world today is wealthier than ever. but not everyone shares in this wealth. today's young business leaders are challenging this, changing the way we think about money. its power and its purpose. this is a new generation. this is the new philanthropy. ♪ dehli, india, home to 25 million people.

a city of great riches and great poverty. it is also home to roshni nadar malhotra, the young ceo of a multibillion-dollar company. for all the challenges of her position, she has charged herself with even loftier goals. roshni: it is like rich education for rich people and then poor education for poor people. you know, the amalgamation is rich education for rich people and poor people. narrator: she is trustee of a philanthropic project seeking to transform education in her homeland. if she succeeds, she will change millions of lives. roshni: whether in my parents' lifetime or mine or after mine, that is the kind of vision. i am

roshni nadar malhotra, the ceo of hcl corporation and a trustee of the shiv nadar foundation. hcl was founded in 1976 with my father and six other founders. these group of individuals and entrepreneurs decided to start a company and really bring technology to india. they started with calculators and then moved to building their own computers. sundar: we were young entrepreneurs that started this company pretty much the same time as what was happening in

silicon valley. they could change the world in a sense. roshni: a lot of the companies such as coca-cola and ibm were leaving india, and it created a hole that needed to be filled. it was a great opportunity to really create homegrown talent and technology within the country. sundar: everything had to be done in-house. lots of technology innovation happened during those years. and this put india on the map in a sense.

roshni: what i find amazing about the indian culture, a lot of people feel like they are part of the family. they grew up here, they are a part of it. our ownership is monetary, but the ownership of the company and its values, beliefs, and growth is everybody's. i assumed the role of being the ceo of hcl corporation. i think, at least on my father's part, it was a deliberate decision. he is not getting any younger, and i am also getting older. how many years would we have together to really overlap, learn, grow and develop together?

that is my father's office, which is always closed. that is my office, which is always open. the office i used to be in before was the size of this table. i liked it to be compact. this one is so big, i look like a little ant. it is ridiculous. that is why i hold a lot of meetings here because i need human beings. it is so weird. there are times i'm sure he also thinks i nag him. "just leave me be, i'm 70 years old. i am much more experienced than you -- leave me be." i think we can do it this way. i think it works both ways. a foray into healthcare and talentcare was a response to just india's need for that particular area.

india is such a diverse and big country, and there is so much more to be done in healthcare that it seemed like the right fit to go there. and again, when we conceived of it, we thought hcl healthcare would be strongly driven by technology because that was originally in our dna. hcl talentcare wants to be able to create a skilled labor force for the banking industry, the i.t. industry, the insurance industry, and eventually also the healthcare industry. there are so many graduates coming out of colleges within india. some of them go to the best schools. why is it not all of them get employed? there is a little bit of a gap between what educational institutions are offering and what companies and the industries are demanding. economies are moving so fast, times are changing so fast, so how can we bridge that gap?

a lot of what happened in the 1970's and 1980's where there were a lot of brilliant students that came out of great institutions which existed, but there was also a huge export of that. what we commonly refer to it as "green dreams." from an economic standpoint and just the sheer growth that is taken place in asia, there are a lot of people moving back. a lot of opportunities within india. we hope that we can ride that wave and train students who are much more value driven and morally bound to their own country to come back and make a difference, whether it be in the field of business or in philanthropy. ♪

narrator: roshni nadar malhotra heads up hcl. with success comes challenges. and how india meets those challenges occupies much of the young ceo's time. roshni: i was born in delhi,

raised in delhi. but i think i was raised in a unique family. my father is a south indian and my mother is a north indian. back in the day, they had a love marriage, which was very unheard of. i think it has been such a privilege and such a blessing to be raised by such progressive parents. because i think that has really helped shape the kind of individual i am today. the only thing that was quite predetermined and set was my parents were extremely keen that i go and pursue education, higher education, outside india. so an mba was the good route to go.

when i was in business school, i wasn't only studying and pursuing management and strategy, and i was exposed to social enterprise and social entrepreneurship just by way of classes and majoring in that particular area, doing a few projects in and around chicago. you know, india has a myriad of issues, is such a hotbed to do social entrepreneurship. it just so happened that that was the time that the shiv nadar foundation was being born. i felt i had to come back, and i saw a kind of entrepreneurial enterprise i could really drive and be a part of. rita: she is still very young, and she brings a different perspective to foundations. she brings a conviction, a passion into whatever she does.

she wanted to give back something to society. she has a passion for doing something for india. being an indian i think brought her back. roshni: i think it is not building a modern india, but building a new kind of citizen for india. that is the really the genesis of the shiv nadar foundation. we are providing a platform -- for the meritorious. better schools and universities, the best and the brightest, and that could be rural, urban, underprivileged or not. to create a highly competitive environment that offers the best in education and allows development of leadership.

the shiv nadar foundation comprises the college of engineering, our oldest institution and one of the top five private engineering colleges in the country. and then we have the shiv nadar university, which was established a few years ago. we have three schools within the national capital region. and we have shiksha, which is really a program to improve literacy. how can we improve literacy using digital classrooms and technology? sundar: roshni decided to focus on philanthropy, and he said that is fine, and that is the

catalyst. rita: it is very easy for all of us to give money and forget about it. we can sit in our own air-conditioned room, but traveling to a village, spending time with them, has made her realize we should surround india, surround the area where our schools are developed. that is why she feels so passionately about those children. roshni: children have to sometimes walk five to 10 kilometers to get to a school. infrastructure is not very great. attendance of teachers tends to be a problem. attendance of students tends to be a problem. electricity is a luxury. space is a luxury. you are talking about classrooms which might have had 60 or 70

students packed in. now you are talking about schools which might have 200 or 300 children with just two or three teachers. a lot of children come into these schools at grade one, but by the time they reach grade 3, 4, and 5, they are still illiterate. they still have not learned how to read and write hindi. they still have not gotten the basics of mathematics. then what ends up happening is at grade 5 or grade 6, they drop out. robin: literacy does not just bring the knowledge of understanding language or

understanding reading texts. literacy brings four basic idea of development. the first is social development. understanding the democracy and the rights of equality. the third is economic development. with literacy comes more job opportunities and information. the fourth and most important is human development, the quality of life and standard of life gets improved drastically. roshni: i think technology, in general, is a very powerful tool that made the world more effective and efficient. we have to apply similar basic principles in the rural setting and see how far that gets us. robin: this whole curriculum has been designed and redone. english, which they are doing, and this animation is delivered

to the classroom by the teachers by using a small set of computers and projectors. these students are from a background where they are not exposed to television, they do not have any media at their house. this is the first time they are actually experiencing animation, cartoons. so for them, it is a magical thing happening in the classroom. roshni: we also, after every module, do a round of testing. formulative tests and summative tests because we are trying to see, is this really working? is the child really learning? it has shown some early significant results. robin: when i see the glitter in the eyes of the students, i can see that yes, it is really making a difference. when i heard there are students in grade two who taught their parents to write, then i feel i am really doing something.

that is the real satisfaction. the real satisfaction. roshni: we all know that 12 years of school, or eight years of school, those are the formative years of all leaders. how can you provide that kind of tools and leadership and skills at the school level? ♪

narrator: at 34 years of age, indian businesswoman roshni nadar malhotra is ceo of a multibillion dollar company. but she is also a trustee of a wide-ranging philanthropic foundation, which is seeking to transform india's education sector. her most ambitious project is vidyagyan, two schools which aim to turn some of the poorest

children in india into future leaders. sumant: my name is sumant kumar. i am 15 years old. roshni: i think talent exists everywhere. opportunities do not exist everywhere. opportunities are selective, talent is everywhere. how can we make it a more level playing field? that is how vidyagyan came about. >> [speaking foreign language] sumant: i am an average person. my father is a farmer and a shopkeeper, too. as soon as i came to school, my

dream changed. going to the hospital, the people of my village have to go 11 kilometers away. even if there is an emergency, they cannot call the doctor. to minimize that, i have plans to start a hospital. >> [speaking foreign language] roshni: these children came to us. some of them had not worn shoes before, some of them had not washed their hair before. they definitely did not speak english before. they had zero hygiene sense. civic sense. it is not just doing charity,

signing a check, and getting a bunch of poor and saying "study." it is not about that. it is serious commitment. we actually put advertisements on the radio as well as newspapers to give the message to the parents, if you think that your son or daughter is brilliant, this is the date the tests will take place, please register. every year we intake around 400 students. just with 400 students, we had 250,000 students that showed up for the examination. shashi: you can measure the height of the building using this projector. i am shashi kant. i am working as a math teacher here for the last two years. we select from the meritorious students of the rural area.

we give them a facility like an urban facility. in terms of education, in terms of infrastructure, and the type of food they get, and the type of advanced technology they see here in the education system. so it is totally different from the normal. manvi: i am manvi chaudhury. i am 16 years old. i had the fortune to stay with an american family and be like their american daughter. roshni: she jumped from her village to an airplane to a family in minneapolis. nothing in between.

she'd never visited delhi before. she went for a year to live in the u.s. with an american family. manvi: i attended a local public school. there i got to learn how the american education system is different from the indian education system. i also learned so many things about american culture. not only american culture, but there were other exchange students who came from other countries around the world. i learned about them also. now i have friends not only in america but also in other countries. roshni: she could not have had that exposure, even if she was an extremely bright student at a good school let's say in rural india. would that have happened? how can you provide that kind of exposure as a stepping stone? most great leaders in the world that have stemmed from great education have had great

exposure. manvi: i am hoping to go to a university in the united states, so that i can do my major in international relations and economics. i aspire to work with the u.n. and other peace organizations like that, so i can help my society grow. roshni: today, you do have kids who want to be artists, film stars, bollywood stars, they want to be filmmakers, or want to be in advertising. the world has changed and the exposure has changed. i feel like i had that exposure as a student, and we have to make sure these children have that exposure as well. the shiv nadar foundation, when it started, it was so small, and now it has become so big.

as the alumni body grows, students coming out of our institutions and the kind of work they do all over the world, i think that is going to define my legacy here. yeah. yeah. i am not dying tomorrow. what do you mean, my legacy? [laughs] i have 30-40 years to go. i hope, you know. and then we can talk about legacy. [laughs] ♪

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ashlee: this is my happy place. and it has been for a long, long time. it is the ferry that goes from my parents' house at manfield beach to downtown sydney. locals ride this thing every day. but really, that is what makes this ferry so special. no commuter ride on the planet offers up more amazing city views. it's routine made spectacular. you will not know it from my accent, but i spent a lot of