Generations Of Leather

Yamani United Group CEO Phil Chang was raised on the smell of leather from his family’s factory. Now it’s the buzz of technology motivating him to ensure the quality of leather goods flowing off the production lines.

- Wendy Kay

When asked to reflect on his daily challenges, Phil Chang says he often thinks back to more simple times decades ago when running the family’s leather goods business relied on a solid reputation and good basic accounting to evolve and survive.

As a self-described numbers man with a degree in accounting and applied statistics, the CEO of Yamani United Group understood that world well. He also knew the world of leather, having grown up with piles of the product spilling out of the company factory or filling any available space in his Taiwan home.

Today, 79 years after the company was launched by his grandfather, Yamani is reliant on technology as much as numbers, a change brought about largely by Phil’s awareness of the risk of being left behind. In fact, when Phil was brought on board 27 years ago as an assistant to his father, Charles, who was Chair at the time, his first priority was to introduce emails.

“Yes, in 1993, we were still using telexes and faxes,” he says. “I hired my first real IT person to set up emails and started working with him to advance the existing IT systems. Dad had set up some infrastructure, but they were starting to get more complex. It wasn’t only about working internally with our numbers anymore; it was about connecting and receiving information externally. But having a numbers background, the logic of IT actually came easily to me.”