Simply cool!

Made in Malaysia for a French company. Royal Selangor’s Yong Yoon Li tells RACHAEL PHILIP that the award-winning Veuve Clicquot champagne cooler was a challenge to make

IT’S a cool idea and certainly much cooler than it looks. Like a bucket, it can keep a bottle of wine chilled at the ideal temperature of 9º Celsius.

The bright yellow top opens easily and ice cubes are dropped in. Soon tiny droplets of condensation appear on the outside.

“It was quite a challenge to make this cooler,” says Yong Yoon Li, general manager for Royal Selangor International. “The pewter had to be cast in one piece and the mould was quite intricate. Also, getting the yellow right was tough.”

Royal Selangor manufactures this cooler and other fancy paraphernalia such as unusual buckets, useful trays and glass holders for Veuve Clicquot, the 236-year-old champagne label.

Partly conical in shape, with one side “sliced off and hollowed out”, the cooler hugs your champagne bottle snugly, keeping it tilted it at an angle.

More importantly, the label is not dunked in icy water — instead it is clearly displayed at the “sliced off” part of the cooler. This way, the label can become a keepsake, especially if the bottle is opened to commemorate a special occasion.

Franco-Argentinian artist and designer Pablo Reinoso first designed the cooler for the champagne house last year. This year he gave the design a touch-up, replacing the plastic bits for pewter and giving it a satin finish.

In June, the Veuve Clicquot cooler picked up a Gold Award from the 2008 European Popai Awards in the Service Units category.

“It’s specially created to update the serving ritual for the Veuve Clicquot range, in particular Veuve Clicquot Vintages,” explains the trim 38-year-old Yong.

“They started working with us two years ago. I suppose they chose us because we provide the whole works, from packaging to leaflets, instruction manuals, styrofoam, etc.”

Veuve Clicquot, he says, is a fascinating company to work with. “They are constantly reinventing ways to serve champagne. Their ideas are really off the wall and it’s good to see their ideas work.”

Also, he finds it inspiring that the champagne house uses its products in restaurants, cafes and hotels on an everyday basis. This is exactly what the Royal Selangor has been trying to get its customers to do for its products.

The iconic brand has been manufacturing items that make excellent gifts but has always stressed that each and every piece should be used and enjoyed on an everyday basis.

Its tableware, desk and wine accessories featuring inspired designs and excellent craftsmanship have been also made with practicality in mind.

Dents and scratches, meanwhile, make the pieces look quite nice, while the patina of aged pewterware is beautiful, says Yong who is married with two daughters, aged nine and seven.

Over the years, Royal Selangor has picked up a number of awards for its innovative pieces, most notably, the Wine Celebration funnel.

A clever and beautiful creation inspired by Palladian-architecture, the funnel has four tiny openings at the spout that allows the wine to neatly stream down the sides of the decanter instead of sploshing into it.

Recently, Royal Selangor also ventured into the field of interior architecture with Metalesce, the technology of applying other materials onto pewter to come up with interesting tiles for walls and other surfaces.

Although the 122-year-old family business seems to have settled quite nicely on Yong’s shoulders, his career actually took off in the fast lanes of racing cars.

With a Masters in manufacturing engineering from the University Of Birmingham in 1993, Yong worked as a design engineer for Team Lotus International, building F1 cars.

The following year, he joined Nissan Motorsports Europe, a Didcot-based team that participates in both race and rally events. Yong returned home in 1994 and was involved in the start up of TVR Malaysia, a company that manufactures sports cars.

“None of us was expected to work for the family business. Instead we were encouraged to study whatever we wanted,” he says of himself, his siblings and cousins.

Today Royal Selangor is made up of a strong team of the fourth (and third) generation of founder Yong Koon Seong who are engineers, IT and design specialists.

Just before he joined the company in 2005 in the retail sales department, Yong secured a Masters in business adminstration from IMD Lausanne, Switzerland.

He admits to not travelling much for work these days. He goes to the gym everyday but after work, he prefers to relax at home with his daughters, playing Pick-Up Sticks and Uno.

“A lot of that is good too,” he says, pointing to the bottle of Veuve Clicquot nestling in the cooler.

After manufacturing for one of the most prestigious champagne houses, what now?

Yong’s very modest. He is not telling much, except that he would like to work on a full range of pewterware for the brand. That, and to continue breaking the mould in the areas of design and manufacturing.