Edwin Wang’s Journey From Corporate Burnout To Healthy Retail

Eleven years on, Edwin Wang has grown Signature Market beyond just a nut business—it’s now a community-driven wellness brand where purpose, clean ingredients, and people-centric shopping experiences come together.

I make my way through the crowd within the familiar confines of Mid Valley, on the lookout for Signature Market, where Edwin Wang, one-half of its founding team, is expecting me. It’s only after a wrong turn or two that my directionally challenged self finally arrives at the store to find Edwin, cup of coffee in hand, engaged in pleasant conversation with the woman behind the counter. I go up to him and introduce myself.

Dressed in a black overshirt layered over a pale blue button-down, relaxed light-wash jeans, and white sneakers, Edwin cuts a slender silhouette. He sports a radiant complexion that belies his years, paired with a soft-spoken demeanour. He asks if I’d like a coffee, and then orders me one from the woman he’d just been talking to. Coffees in hand, Edwin takes me on a tour around the store, and that’s how our interview begins. Normally, I sit down with a person when we do these things, but this was a welcome change of pace.

Things are going well, Edwin tells me, with Signature Market having just celebrated its 11th anniversary. Things are going so well, in fact, that I’m told we can expect a few more outlets on the horizon. The business began as an expression of Edwin’s belief in wellness, something he had to learn the importance of the hard way.

It all stemmed from his past life spent slaving away at a corporate career that took a punishing toll on his wellbeing. “When I started working in corporate, it was extremely stressful. Corporate is a different animal, it’s always about fear. If you don’t deliver, you’re going to get fired. Then they throw a lot of money at you to incentivise you to work harder. What I did was I got the money, and I spent it on food, just to escape from all the stress and everything,” he relates.

This vicious cycle caused Edwin’s weight to balloon, leading to feelings of discontent with how he looked and felt, as well as how he was living his life in general. “Then I actually quit the job, and I was really obese,” Edwin reminisces. He decided to turn to nuts to help reverse his physical decline. “I actually relied on nuts. Nuts are great because they fill you up and are natural. Whenever I was hungry, I ate nuts. It helped me lose 20 kg.”

And it proved to be from Edwin’s affinity for nuts that the business sprang, as he and his co-founder would go on to start a business selling nuts that would eventually evolve into the Signature Market we know today. The bulk of their business still comes from nuts, Edwin says. “On a monthly basis, we roast around 20–30 tonnes of nuts. All of this goes to our online shop, and all our outlets. That’s our cash cow.”

As the company went from strength to strength, Edwin and his partner weren’t just content to sit on their laurels, they were visionaries and saw the potential in a rapidly developing landscape. “Instead of just pocketing all the money, or buying a Ferrari and everything, we decided to invest all our profits. We had to create a wellness grocer because Malaysia is upgrading. It’s worth investing in a wellness grocer.”

Time has proven them right, as this happened to be the ninth store that we were standing in. I ask Edwin what the impetus was to expand on physical stores in such aggressive fashion when the core of their business was all online. It’s all about the experience, he tells me. He observes that it was COVID that played a major role in people gravitating towards more experiential shopping. “It was post-COVID, and everyone didn’t want to shop online anymore because they were so fed up with it, because they were forced to shop online exclusively during COVID. So post-COVID we actually pivoted to open more stalls.”

Edwin reckons that with the way things are heading, this realignment in consumer perspectives is here to stay. “We are transitioning to a creative economy where people want experience. They want an experience like, hey, how do you make me feel? Instead of just, I come in to get my product, and that’s it. So the packaging and the experience are very important. That’s why we have a drink bar in this outlet—so you can shop and shop, and then after you spend a certain amount, you’ll get a free drink as well. It completes the whole experience instead of just buying your stuff and going. That’s the trend we are looking at, and we think this trend will continue for the next 10 years.”

It’s all part of a greater shift towards not just health, but something more holistic altogether—wellness. “Health is just a small part of wellness,” Edwin notes. “You can see nowadays that everyone’s so crazy into pickleball, so crazy into pilates, you know, cold plunge, running clubs, and doing that Hyrox thing. So it’s a very huge body, mind, and soul kind of thing. Yeah, and it involves the mindset as well.”

It’s a salient point that Edwin touches on. The current climate, in terms of optionality when it comes to exercise, has never been better. Gone are the days when exercise meant slogging away at a gym, or monotonously and solitarily dripping buckets on a treadmill in an effort to shed a couple of extra pounds. The city is awash with options, and physical activity has now become a communal endeavour that means you can hang out with your friends, and have a good time while you burn those calories.

Edwin observes that “Now people are no longer saying, what’s the best practice? What do you do? I want to follow that. No, now they’re more like, okay, I’ll keep on trying, and I want to find my alignment, the things that align with me, that speak to me. It’s a different kind of mindset right now.”

As we walk around the store, we arrive at a vibrantly coloured aisle, stocked with rows of different personal care products. I ask Edwin about them, and he tells me that it’s all part of their holistic approach to wellness, and that all of these products are formulated free of any harmful or unnecessary additives. “It’s all in-house,” he says. “At Signature Market, we have around 700 products, and we have been in the market for 11 years. We’ve used the last 11 years to scout all the best manufacturers, and now we work with around 400–500 of them around Asia that produce these products.”

As our chat begins to wind down, I ask Edwin, in light of Signature Market’s success, what he hopes to achieve for himself in the time to come. For somebody who places such importance on wellness, and strives to abide by its tenets in his day-to-day, what does his dream life look like? Edwin tells me that for him, there’s nowhere to go, because he’s already arrived. “So for me, I’m living it already, and I feel very happy when I can help other people live amazing lives. The whole brand is a representation of that. I’m already living my dream life.”