Hong Kong's 'queen of shopping', Helen Giss loves helping people find special pieces in the region's shopping paradise

Hong Kong's allure as a shoppers' paradise continues to impress visitors from overseas, says Helen Giss - a woman who should know.

A long-time Hong Kong resident, the entrepreneurial Ms Giss, who loves to shop, turned her hobby into a business by setting up Asian Cajun, a high-end personal shopping and sightseeing service for visiting corporate clients. Twenty years on, the business is going from strength to strength with many repeat clients and word-of-mouth recommendations.

The business was formed in the early 1980s after Ms Giss constantly found herself "showing off" Hong Kong to visiting friends and the wives of her banker husband's overseas associates. Realising that this was a service people might be prepared to pay for, she set up Asian Cajun - so named to reflect both the Giss' Louisiana (US) heritage and their new home in Hong Kong.

The company specialises in one-on-one services tailored to meet individual needs. Working with a team of carefully picked, English-speaking staff, Ms Giss still loves to take many of the tours herself. These can range from shopping expeditions to house and garden tours, lectures on Asian culture, guided museum tours, or even cooking classes. Many of her clients are the partners of business people visiting Hong Kong to attend exhibitions and trade shows. Some are private art collectors, and others those who come looking for that "special something".

Shopper's paradise

Ms Giss, often known as Hong Kong's "queen of shopping", recalls the time a client visiting from Texas wanted to shop for hand-made shoes. She took him to a shoemaker in Tsim Sha Tsui, whereupon the client opened his case and unrolled the skin of an alligator he had hunted. Two pairs of boots were duly ordered.

"Hong Kong still has the edge as a shopper's paradise," Ms Giss said. "It is still the best place for jewellery of all kinds, for superb quality tailoring, hand-made shoes (especially for those hard-to-fit feet), antiques, fabrics, linen, tableware and many electronics products." Additionally, all of the leading European designer brands all have outlets in Hong Kong.

And shopping in Hong Kong is always fun, she adds. One can spend hours browsing through the curios shops in Western district, fossick for bargains in the lanes around Central, keep up with designer trends in the world-class shopping malls, or gather gifts and souvenirs at Stanley market.

"I'm very bullish about Hong Kong," Ms Giss adds. "It is a lively place where there's so much going on - you can feel excitement in the air. Clients constantly tell me that Hong Kong is one of the world's great cities, and the public transport is so good that it's really easy to get around.

"I have an enormous number of repeat clients who all want to come back to Hong Kong. It's top of their list for shopping and sightseeing - and it sure is a lot of fun."

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Asian Cajun