One of the people who has been an inspiration for entrepreneurs and children alike in Beijing is the founder of Plastered 8; Dominic Johnson-Hill.

Plastered 8 makes iconic Beijing lifestyle inspired graphic T-shirts that are now so much a part of the city culture that you can’t visit Beijing and not bring back a Plastered 8 shirt as a souvenir. Since their little shop in Nanlouguxiang opened back in 2005 they’ve gone from creating only T-shirts to shipping all types of apparel, lifestyle products, artworks globally, and have created in murals in restaurants and hotels around the world. All of this came from the mind of Johnson-Hill, an optimist from Guildford, UK who first came to China in 1992 as a backpacker with no money to his name or much of a plan.

Looking at him today you’d never think that Johnson-Hill, a TV personality, public speaker, artist, and businessman grew up thinking he wasn’t talented in art and (to this day) considers himself an introvert. He’s the epitome of a self-made success story.

Johnson-Hill left home at the age of 17 and has been supporting himself ever since. He backpacked from country to country, making his living doing odd jobs until fate brought him to China. He fondly looks back on his first year in Beijing. He was living with a Chinese family and only had one friend in the city. When his parents came out to visit, his mom felt so bad that she gave him a €500 note, for the first time. With that money in his pocket, Johnson-Hill recalls feeling so incredibly rich that he went to Lido and treated himself to a whole pizza to splurge. He would have brought his one and only friend along, but it was still just €500 and that money needed to last.

Johnson-Hill didn’t make his name using family connections or money. This adventurer, and now dad to four beautiful daughters, paved the way for himself. “I like the feeling of not knowing what’s going to happen next. I think that’s why I became an entrepreneur. I wasn’t the kid who was sold. I hated doing sales, so I wasn’t an entrepreneur in that respect. I was an entrepreneur in the sense that I’m willing to take risks. I didn’t want to focus on making sales. That was embarrassing! Eventually, I worked out that I like to create things.”

Plastered 8 started in that spirit. Johnson-Hill rented a storefront on Nanlouguxiang way before he knew what he wanted to do with it. “The idea for Plastered 8 started when I saw a foreigner wearing one of those “I climbed the Great Wall” shirts.” It was a shit t-shirt and I thought I could do better than that, so I went home and downloaded a picture of a woman in a bikini and plastered it on top which became my very first design.” The direction for the Plastered 8 that we know and love today also came by chance. For his wife’s birthday, Johnson-Hill took an old Beijing subway ticket and had it blown up and framed it. He later put the same subway ticket design on a t-shirt and that became an instant hit at the Plastered 8. He had found his niche. “The woman in a bikini surfing the Great Wall was too out there. People didn’t get it. But they loved the subway ticket. It was that iconic meaningful Beijing nostalgia that people wanted” he tells beijingkids.

Today, this proud dad of four inspires not only his daughters but kids all over to take charge and find that missing niche in whatever they love, radiating positivity everywhere he goes and sparking up their entrepreneurial spirit. As someone who started from nothing, Johnson-Hill encourages others to pursue their passion and dreams. As someone who’s doesn’t believe in helicopter parenting and forcing their kids to follow a detailed life plan, Johnson-Hill says that he “just wants them to be brave and to bring ideas to life.”

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This article appeared in the beijingkids 2020 March – April issue

Since our magazine first hit the Beijing streets some 11 years ago, we’ve met a lot of enterprising people who took a chance and seized the many opportunities in this city, which might not have been available to them in their home countries.

Such a person is Dominic Johnson-Hill, the founder of Plastered 8, perhaps Beijing’s most iconic pop-up t-shirt brand.

His clever reinterpretations have made the city’s hackneyed imagery fashionable, in the form of funky t-shirts. Five years after Johnson-Hill last graced our pages (in our Talking Shop column), he’s back, this time not to talk about the continued success of his Plastered brand, but to help jump-start the careers of budding student entrepreneurs from Canadian International School of Beijing (CISB).

Henry, 16: What do you do when you face economic challenges
Dominic: A lot of people who come to China and do business lose their moral compass. I believe you should be strong on that side and never lose your values. If I face an economic challenge, my number one thing would be to try to be even stronger or more aggressive on marketing, and get even more people to talk about the brand. A lot of companies that encounter economic challenges cut back on marketing first because they see it as unnecessary or non-essential. Of course, I would evaluate the cost of the product and try to bring it down as much as possible.

Samuel, 16: What’s your biggest challenge so far?
Dominic: It’s understanding myself as an entrepreneur: I started to grow beyond what I wanted, I started to lose a lot of money and became very unhappy. I think that the mindset of many entrepreneurs is all about growth, or what they like to call “scale”. But I realized it’s somebody else’s dream and not mine. As my business became well known, I started to expand beyond what I originally wanted, so I had opened more stores in Beijing and Shanghai. One day I stopped myself and said, “What am I doing?” and then closed down all of those different businesses and brought them just back to Beijing. I realized that the reason that I got into Plastered is because I want to have fun and create things.

Bryan, 16: How did you learn about business, considering that you dropped out of school?
Dominic: I picked it up by doing it. I’m not proud of dropping out of school, but it’s just that school wasn’t for me. Where I went to study in England was traditional, and it wasn’t like it is now. It didn’t fit me; I was very much outside of the mainstream of learning: I was dyslexic and had ADHD and so I dropped out. But when I started traveling on my own, I learned to stand on my two feet and realized I could pick up languages and skills quite quickly if I just got my hands dirty. And so I found business a natural step for me and quite enjoyed it. I found that business is about building relationships. If you guys learn business, there’s no reason you can’t start businesses even at your age now.

Joanna, 16: You said you traveled around the world, so where did you get your money from?
Dominic: The first job I got in England to make money, I made GBP 800 working in a donkey sanctuary – of all places, I looked after donkeys! I got other jobs in Zimbabwe, Bolivia, and India. When I arrived in China in 1993, there were only two bars in Beijing and then you’d find yourself sitting next to the COO of Boeing at that bar, and I was like, “Hey, what do you do?” He said, “I’m the COO of Boeing,” and I responded, “Cool! Can you give me a job?” Eventually, I would be teaching his personal assistant English. So basically, I just did jobs and I started my first business in 1995. So it’s just meeting people, relationships, being a good person, and whatever job I did, I did it better that you would ever imagine.

Britt, 17: What’s the best way to attract people when you do online business?
Dominic: Do something incredible. First of all, I like the product to be able to speak for itself as well. I create a product that I hope would spark a conversation. A lot of people make average products and spend millions trying to get people to buy them. I’ve made products that have gone viral because they’re ridiculous. Of course, on social media you’re trying to create conversations out of your products. There are many ways, of course, to drive traffic to a website. But be consistent, be original, be creative, have fun – that’s what I’m trying to do.

Arman, 16: How do you drive people to buy your products?
Dominic: If your place isn’t popular but you want people getting in there, then put your business online. If it’s a restaurant where you need people to get in the door, it’ll be down to, first of all, having an incredible product. Why not spend the majority of your money, in the beginning, making your food incredible? Because that is what will bring people to what you might call a footloose business or a business where you’re out in the middle of nowhere but people come to you anyway.

Kevin, 16: What are the advantages of running a small business? How about the risks?
Dominic: The advantage for small businesses is they’re a small boat and they can move fast and change direction, and for big businesses, this takes a long time. I’m in a creative business so I have to be creative. And to do that, you have to be prepared to fail. You have to be in the mindset that it’s more likely that you’re going to fail. You can’t look for some kind of security that if you’re constantly analyzing your customers and always thinking, “I only want to deliver stuff that they want,” then eventually I’ll lose my brand. I have to take a risk and excite people with new things so I can keep my market alive. But when you’re peaking, that’s when you need to restart and take high-risk chances all the time to be able to create new markets.

This article appeared in the beijingkids November 2018 Beijing Makers issue
Photos: Uni You