Celeb Hairstylist Addy Lee Now The Boss Of Southeast Asia’s 1st & Largest Live Streaming Hub; Sales Hit 7 Figures Monthly
Addy, who co-founded Mdada with Michelle Chia and Pornsak, says he earns almost as much as he did doing live stream sales in China.
When celeb crimper Addy Lee, 50, first launched online social commerce platform Mdada.live with Michelle Chia and Pornsak last September, the trio had invested a grand total of $0 into the venture (not counting the cost of the phone they used and the products they already had on hand to sell).
Since then, they’ve done over 500 live stream shows on Facebook… and to say that business has been going well is a huge understatement.
Last Friday (Aug 6), Mdada officially opened its very own dedicated live streaming hub, a sprawling 12,000 sq ft space in a building on Jalan Kilang Barat with a dozen soundproof rooms for streaming sessions, offices, and a 4,000 sq ft warehouse to store their merchandise.
Their team has grown exponentially as well, with Mdada now employing over twenty full-time staff and 10 KOLs (key opinion leaders).
Yup, safe to say gone are the days when live streaming was simply done from the comfort of one’s living room.
Mdada’s swanky new HQ is said to be the first and largest fully-equipped live-streaming hub in Southeast Asia, and as you might probably have guessed, it didn’t come cheap.
While the press release we received states that renovations cost almost S$500,000, Addy told 8days.sg that the amount is actually closer to S$700,000 — almost twice their initial S$400,000 budget.
That doesn’t even include the deposit, which would bump that figure up to nearly S$900,000, and their monthly rental fee, which Addy would only describe as “tens of thousands of dollars”.
“We haven’t bought our own place yet, but give us a year!” he laughed.
Looking back at Mdada’s achievements over the past year (less than a year, actually), we can see where his confidence comes from.
The platform currently boasts a unique monthly reach of over 100,000 viewers and fulfils more than 30,000 orders a month, with an average of 10,000 to 30,000 items being sold in a single live stream session.
Some of the more expensive things they’ve sold include cars and pre-loved Rolex watches, which go from S$5,000 to over S$30,000 apiece.
Addy estimates that Mdada sells a seven-figure sum worth of items per month, although he declined to disclose how much profit the company makes or how much he personally earns from it.
All he would say is that he’s “very satisfied” with his pay and that it’s “almost as much as [he] made in China” doing live streams for brands like Unilever, which, according to an earlier report by The Straits Times, was “close to a six-figure sum”.
Knowing how lucrative the live auction biz in China is, we can’t say we’re that surprised.
Addy is certainly no stranger to starting his own businesses.
In addition to founding Monsoon Hair Group, he has also dabbled in F&B with dessert cafe AfterCoffee and artiste management with talent agency Starlist, which previously managed young stars like Chantalle Ng, Chen Yixin, Tay Ying, and Calvert Tay.
Both establishments have since closed down, allowing Addy to focus “90 per cent” of his attention on Mdada. He still returns to his salon to cut hair about twice a month.
These days, he is more keen on grooming live streamers than showbiz’s Next Big Thing as he believes they have “more potential”.
Speaking of grooming live streamers, Mdada recently roped in actor Shane Pow to do a few sessions for them not long after the 30-year-old was charged with drink driving and parted ways with Mediacorp.
Pornsak was the one who invited him as the two are quite close, and Shane joined them for a while before being sentenced to five weeks’ jail in early July.
When we asked what made Addy agree to let Shane come on board despite his controversy, he replied, “Who hasn’t made mistakes? If someone does something wrong and you don’t give them the chance to change, they’ll always be that way and might become even worse.”
He continued, “At Mdada, we believe that no matter who you are and what you’ve done, as long as you have the determination to become a live streamer and want to start over and stand up again, come and look for us.”
“I can’t say that Shane and I are very close, but he is a super, super good guy.”
Visit Mdada.live’s official Facebook page here.
Photos: Mdada/Facebook and Instagram, Addy Lee/Instagram, PRecious Communications for Mdada.live
