by Julius Zheng, GIA GG
The 90-year story of On Cheong is really the story of Singapore itself.
When the late founder Mr. Ho Yew Ping opened his small goldsmith shop at North Bridge Road on Christmas Day 1936, Singapore was still a British colony. Customers then did not buy jewellery for beauty, they bought gold as savings, the way people today buy unit trusts. There was no design, no variety. Just gold, weighed and sold by value.
What made On Cheong different from the very beginning was people. Mr. Ho Yew Ping was known for remembering his customers by name, knowing their families, understanding what they needed. That personal touch was the seed of everything that followed.
Ninety years later, On Cheong is still in the same Chinatown neighbourhood, one of the last two original goldsmiths remaining on what was once called “Goldsmiths’ Row” on South Bridge Road. The shop has grown from a single counter to Singapore’s largest jewellery showroom in Chinatown. The product range has evolved from plain gold bars to exquisite Type A jadeite collections, certified diamond rings and one-of-a-kind designer pieces. But the soul of the business—knowing your customer, serving with sincerity, and building lasting trust—has never changed.
On Cheong is not just a jewellery shop. It is a living timeline of Singapore’s economic and social transformation, from a colonial trading post to one of the world’s most prosperous nations. The jewellery changed as Singapore changed. And On Cheong changed with it, while staying true to its roots.
Good Times and Bad Times
On Cheong has survived every storm that Singapore has weathered, and there have been many.
The Japanese Occupation (1942 to 1945) forced the shop to close. The racial riots of the 1960s rattled Chinatown. The Asian Financial Crisis of 1997 wiped out businesses across the region. The dot-com bust, SARS in 2003, and the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 each threatened the livelihoods of Singapore SMEs. And then COVID-19 in 2020, which shuttered retail for months.
Through every single one of these crises, On Cheong did not retrench a single employee. Not one.
During COVID-19, when many retailers were cutting staff and reducing salaries, Mr Ho Nai Chuen made the deliberate decision to keep every team member employed at full pay, and used the downtime to send everyone for training. “If you take care of your employees,” he says, “your employees will take care of your customers.”
The result? When Singapore reopened, On Cheong’s team was more skilled, more motivated and more loyal than before.
The secret to On Cheong’s survival is not financial engineering or strategic pivots. It is the belief that a business is only as resilient as its people. In every crisis, On Cheong’s instinct was not to cut, it was to invest. That counterintuitive approach has kept the company alive for 90 years.
Ho Nai Chuen, the 2nd Generation
Mr. Ho Nai Chuen, son of Ho Yew Ping, did not plan to be a jeweller.
He was building a career as a management consultant, working with Coopers and Lybrand in Singapore, then seconded to Brunei Shell Petroleum, when his mother called him home in 1982 to help with the family business. He agreed reluctantly, enrolled in an MBA programme at Aston University in Birmingham, and told himself he would decide afterwards whether to stay.
Forty-three years later, he is still there.
What kept him was not the jewellery. It was the people. The customers who came in nervous about their engagement ring purchase and left beaming. The staff who joined as teenagers and stayed for decades. The elderly regulars who brought their grandchildren to meet the same counter staff who had served their grandparents.
Mr Ho brought something unusual to a traditional trade, a professional management mindset combined with a deeply human approach. He obtained his GIA gemology certificate. He became a Chartered Management Accountant. He introduced structured training, performance management systems and digital tools, while insisting that no staff member would ever be paid a sales commission, because he did not want anyone to serve a customer for the wrong reason.
He is currently President of the Singapore Jewellers Association and a long-standing council member of Chamber of Commerce and Industry having served as the Vice President from 2017-2022. He has been cited by the Minister for Manpower as a national model employer. On Cheong Jewellery has been published in a Harvard-style business casebook by a National University of Singapore professor.
But ask his staff what they think of him, and the answers are less formal. He leads the company exercise sessions himself. He visits the shop floor regularly. He knows staff members’ families. He personally follows up on customer complaints.
“What we sell,” he says, “is not just a product. It is a unique precious happiness gift.”
Mr Ho is the rare combination of a professional manager and an old-school shopkeeper, someone who can read a balance sheet and also remember a customer’s anniversary. In an era where retail is being disrupted by algorithms and platforms, his style of leadership, deeply personal, profoundly human, may be exactly what keeps heritage businesses alive.
Serving Singapore as a Unique Market
On Cheong is perhaps the best proof of serving a unique market.
Singapore is one of the most diverse societies on earth. In a single day, On Cheong’s South Bridge Road showroom might welcome a Chinese grandmother buying jadeite bangles for her granddaughter’s wedding; an Indian professional selecting a diamond pendant as an anniversary gift; a Malay couple looking at gold chains; a Japanese tourist drawn in by the shop’s heritage signage; and a Singaporean millennial who discovered the brand on Instagram. On Cheong is perhaps the best proof of serving this unique market.
Each of these customers has a different cultural relationship with jewellery. For the Chinese community, jadeite carries deep meaning, it is not just decorative but protective, symbolic of family love and continuity. Gold is not merely a precious metal but a form of savings and security, accumulated across generations. For Indian customers, gold is woven into every major life ceremony from birth to marriage. For international visitors, On Cheong represents something increasingly rare in Singapore: a genuine, unpolished piece of local heritage in a city of global brands.
On Cheong succeeds in this complex market because it never tried to be all things to all people through marketing alone. It succeeded by being genuinely knowledgeable about every product it sells, genuinely interested in every customer who walks through the door, and genuinely humble enough to recognise that a customer who comes in to browse and leaves without buying is still a customer worth knowing.
The shop’s location, opposite Sri Mariamman Temple, the oldest Hindu temple in Singapore; adjacent to Jamae Mosque; near the Buddha Tooth Relic Temple; a few minutes’ walk from a Methodist church, is not incidental. It is a physical embodiment of what Singapore is. And On Cheong has served all of them for 90 years.
Singapore’s diversity is often described as a challenge for businesses: how do you market to so many different communities with different tastes and values? On Cheong’s answer is that you do not market to communities. You build relationships with individuals. One at a time, for 90 years.
Goals Toward the Centenary Milestone
The 100th anniversary falls on 25 December 2036. That is ten years away. But On Cheong is already building toward it.
The company is actively developing new collections that reimagine Singapore’s most culturally significant gemstone, jadeite, for a younger generation of buyers who want personalisation, uniqueness and a genuine connection to heritage. The focus is on making something deeply traditional feel fresh, personal and relevant, without losing the cultural meaning that makes it special in the first place.
On Cheong is also embracing technology, not to replace its people, but to make them even better at what they do. The goal is to take decades of jewellery knowledge and expertise, built up over 90 years by the company’s long-serving team, and find new ways to share it with customers in a more engaging and accessible way.
On the business front, the company remains focused on strengthening its financial foundations, growing sustainably and building a stronger presence, both locally and regionally, as a trusted Singapore heritage jewellery brand.
But beyond all the plans and initiatives, the real goal is a simple one. To still be here in 2036. Still trusted. Still relevant. Still serving customers the way the late founder Mr Ho Yew Ping served them when he first opened his doors in 1936, with sincerity, knowledge and a genuine desire to make every customer feel special.
Most businesses celebrate milestones by looking back. On Cheong is using its 90th anniversary as a launchpad, staying true to the same values while embracing the future with the same quiet confidence that has carried the company through nine decades of change.
