haslinda: hello, and welcome to "high flyers," the show that gives you a 360 degree view of he world 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 boutiques across the middle east. let us meet christopher karam.

it started as a way to fund trips for christopher karam's 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, to stores across the gulf, he is using his own company to arket his brand. time now for this high flyer to join us on the singapore flyer and tell us how he is designing he future. haslinda: christopher karam. welcome to "highfliers." good to have you with us. christopher: thank you for having me. haslinda: you are born in the

1980's, but it was a coincidence and a love story. christopher: i was born to an american mother and lebanese father. the way the lebanese father ended up in the united states was by a scholarship. there was a civil war in lebanon that lasted 25 years and that made it difficult for him to continue his education. a best friend applied on his behalf to the university of texas. and he got a scholarship to go there. he moved there. 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. christopher: because he was very much a family man. haslinda: blame it on the stars. christopher: right. 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. so bombs were going off left and right. it was not the safest place to be at that time. and my father asked her, you know, 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. but it must be a meaningful yes. what did he mean by that? he felt that she might have put herself under pressure to make it work, and he wanted to remove the pressure from her. so he told her to go back to the states. go back to your own environment for one month and if you still feel that you can accept the change to move to lebanon, then you will move back and we will get married. so he sends her -- he borrowed money from his brother and he sent a large amount of money at the time 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? we're talking at a time that the fax was the newest invention. she managed to book all of her flights and saw she had money left over. she told him -- she said, should i send you back the money? e said, no, keep it. he told her to go to the dallas apparel market. go there and find something that is small and lightweight , high in value,and made in the states that she could bring back and sell and that is the way he could pay his brother back. the exhibition happened to be a lingerie exhibition. and that is how the story started. haslinda: if i got the story right, it started with five dressing gowns. christopher: right. this is a bit of a funny story. after she bought the first long one, he said, go back to the

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

sell 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 an effect of living through the civil war in lebanon. i always 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, you know, becoming the first doctor in the family. so he started thinking if he should sell the business. and he asked me how much i thought it was worth. and 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, no, no, i cannot have him sell my 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 he is strict, but i think he did the right thing. he told me, if you get straight a's, you get to spend the summer in whichever way you like. if you do not, you have to find a job. now, 20 years later, i am very happy that i never got the straight a's because i ended working with him every summer and i learned from him from the ground up what it is to run the business. haslinda: having had this experience as a young boy, what is the most important lesson? christopher: the most important lesson i learned is to have really strong roots. i think of a business as a tree that is surviving different economic weather. it is easy to grow tall and

quickly, but once an economic storm comes in, the tree will be instantly removed. and that is why we have grown our business without having any partners or any bank loans. to have a very strong root so when the economic storm comes, we still stand in our place. we grow slowly but surely. any step that we take is very well studied. it is not about following people. it is about making the right decision. and 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: the economic storm you talked about came in 2009 when growth came to a halt. christopher: right, exactly. and we were the only ones who were able to still grow during that time. and even currently, as we eak, the market situatn has not been as favorable as before. dubai relies heavily on tourism.

and the numbers have been slowly decreasing because of a global economic storm. and right now, we are still able to grow since we have really reinvested all of our retained earnings into the company, and not spreading ourselves too thin. haslinda: up next -- christopher: from the start, everyone was a cup d. from 32 all the way to 44.

haslinda: christopher, k.lynn started in beirut. how did you end up in the uae? christopher: when i finished university, i asked my father if i could join him in the business. and he refused me. i asked him how come? i am your son. if anyone should take over the business, it should be me. haslinda: it is not a birthright. christopher: it was not a birthright. well, sort of. he told me if i was going to join him in lebanon, i would only learn the same mistakes he did, and probably copy what he has done. he wanted me to have 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 had to go to new york because it was a beautiful place to study. haslinda: and play. christopher: and play. right before he had to go, 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 fully built, if i could go 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? christopher: it was still barren. they were still building the malls, building the cities. 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. now, people 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. that is how we were able to take the market quickly. haslinda: the middle east and lingerie, they hardly go together. i mean, when you talk about it, the lingerie business, you do not think of the middle east. how has demand been? what are the women wanting? christopher: well, our -- the lingerie business -- our lingerie business is not what people think of. our number one color that we sell is nude and our number one bra that we sell is a pure, basic, everyday bra. so that is how lingerie, or our 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 k.lynn. we sell our bras as a basic eauty product.

as women do their hair, or their makeup, they also must have the right bras to feel comfortable during the day. and that is how we are able to grow, despite having a little bit of a cultural difference when it comes to what you can say and 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: yes, definitely. i did not think the opportunity would come that quickly. luckily, the market was growing at a pace that will never be seen again. i was able to make a lot of mistakes that didn't cost the company 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 tastes, many different categories in a very 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 one of the biggest in your area, how did you manage to convince the likes of oscar de la renta and spanx to be a distributor? christopher: we offered a platform of being the sole brand with this concept. we were not the first people to have a premium lingerie store in the east. however, the other people did not change with the times. they stayed selling their bras in boxes or in drawers or on demand. they also did not focus on sizing. even in lebanon, when we first started, everyone was a cup d. from 32-44. 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 malls. the other brands were not able o enter the malls. to this day, it is unfortunate for them that they are fading away. we are becoming the future for these premium brands. haslinda: amazing to note that you have 20 stores, yet you sell your products through word of mouth. why isn't marketing, or on a bigger scale, important to you? christopher: marketing will become bigger once we can really put in a sole image for the shop. the last four years we have been building that image. when we first satrted, or my parents first started the lingerie business, they were targeting all of the consumers. the luxury, the medium and value brand. when i moved to dubai, it worked in the beginning but

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 the k. if you think about that -- d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k. 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 brands. it was a big risk. right now, we are in a very strong position and we can see that it was extremely successful. so now we're focused on one customer target. we can finally have an emotion ied up to the brand. that emotion will be, what is your love story? since k. lynn started from a love story. haslinda: that is slightly different than victoria's secret, for instance, where they use angels, beautiful models.

linked to perhaps a celebration. christopher: they really focus on a younger consumer. their main target is 28 and below, while ours is from 28 up to 70's and 80's. being 70's these days is still young. the reason we chose that target is that people might buy other brands just 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 even 10 times more beneficial. you know, a mature person is more calm. victoria's secret is more exciting. we feel that a nice value to have that is calm is love. love is something that we live with every day.

and it is a word that can be interpreted into so many different emotions -- between a mother and her children, between best friends, and between significant others. and that is what is going to be the base of all of our future marketing. spreading love. haslinda: next on "highfliers." christopher: they thought it was something glamerous, and they were all jealous of me, you know.

haslinda: christopher karam, when you were a young kid, maybe a teenager, what was it like telling your friends that you were dealing with lingerie when the season was out? christopher: well 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 and i was in the warehouse putting on barcodes, implementing software. and that was something i really loved was making a system, creating a system about how hings should happen.

it was not as glamorous as people thought it was. haslinda: i have never met a man so comfortable talking about lingerie. i did not even know k cups existed. how do you feel about being in a woman's world? we always talk about a woman in a man's world, but it is the opposite for you. christopher: the challenge, i would have to say, 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 really understand their needs. sitting in the office, i can look at numbers, but they only tell me from what i bought, what i have sold. they will not tell me what a onsumer 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 the one who is buying for a woman's needs? the woman understands more. haslinda: isn't it true that the lingerie business is pretty much dominated by men? that is the reality of it. christopher: it is true because i guess it all boils down in the end 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 and starting their own businesses. 30 years ago, in the middle east, it was a little bit of a taboo because women were supposed to be housewives. i am glad that is changing. you really need -- there are still a lot of things 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 the time when you can look at global expansion.

what are some of the ideas you have? christopher: to start global expansion, you need to start producing your own merchandise. right now, we are the exclusive distributors of over 20 brands that are sold in our stores. we are wholesalers as well as retailers. if you look at the retail side of the business, the only way for us to grow globally is to produce ourselves. in production, i like to say -- to compare that to what comes first, the chicken or the egg? for production you have minimums you need to reach. now, at 20 stores, we are able to reach those minimums, and we are starting to look for suppliers to produce for us under our own brand name. right now around 20% of ourselves 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. it is 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 me working with him. he always told me i was free to do whatever i wanted. i will follow the same path with my son. i want him to choose his own life, and for him to decide on his own future. if he doesn't want to join the business, perhaps it is an option, but right now it is still too early to say. haslinda: you started dabbling in business at a very young age. does it pay off to be an entrepreneur at a young age? that gives you time, you know, to experiment and make mistakes, take risks? christopher: i have been very fortunate that my platform to make mistakes was dubai. i must admit that i am extremely grateful for what dubai has given to young entrepreneurs. because it gave us the opportunity of really focusing on the business. there were no taxes. we did not need to worry about

bureaucracy. we had to focus only on selling. at the same time, it was 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. 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 really difficult to see what systems you have to have in place. it is kind of learn as you go. if you want a mature brand and to 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? because you did say that you jumped into the deep end when you started. 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 eventually things will pay off.

haslinda: 10 or 20 years down the road, where will k.lynn be? where would you like it to e? 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. while you can get the same quality for a lot less. so our motto in life is to sell value for money. what you are spending is well orth it. haslinda: huge success in a 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 high flyer. such a pleasure. christopher: thank you very much. thank you.

>> the following is a paid presentation for invia, the mental performance supplement to promote mental clarity, alertness. if you have active children, work long hours and need to stay alert and want to focus without distraction and think more clearly, stay tuned for the next half-hour and learn how you can gain mental clarity.