Our Story
Why I'm Building This Shop for My Left-Handed Kid (and Every Other Leftie in Singapore)
I still remember the ink stains. Not a dramatic memory, nothing that "happened" exactly — just years of small, quiet moments that added up to something. The side of my hand smudged grey by lunchtime, so annoying! Scissors that never quite cut where I wanted them to, that got me (as a kid) thinking "I'm so bad at using a scissors!" My mum is a right-hander so no one has ever explained that difficulty to me. Nobody was unkind about it. It's just that nobody built any of it for me in the first place, so just use lor. You make do, you adapt, and eventually you stop even noticing you're adapting.
That was basically my entire childhood strategy: make do. I got quite good at it, actually — good enough that by adulthood, I genuinely didn't think about being left-handed most days. It was just a fact about me, like my height, filed away and mostly irrelevant.
Then my son came along
He's left-handed too. And the first time I watched him sit down to trace his letters, all of it came rushing back — except this time I wasn't the one holding the pencil, and somehow that made it so much harder to just shrug off.
I remember thinking: he's going to smudge his homework the same way I did. He's going to think his handwriting is messy, and he won't know it's not really about him. And this time, unlike when I was small, I actually knew there was a reason. I'd have to explain it or fix it — and honestly, at first, I didn't know how to do either.
So I did what any slightly obsessive parent does at 11pm — I went down a rabbit hole. Left-handed pencils. Left-handed scissors. It turns out there's a whole world of proper, well-engineered tools out there, made by people who clearly understood the actual mechanics of why things felt wrong for us. I just... had never encountered any of it growing up in Singapore. Ordering meant hunting through overseas sites, guessing at shipping, wondering if it would even work here.
That's when the idea started, quietly: if I'm going through all this just to get my kid one decent pair of scissors, how many other parents are doing the exact same thing right now, alone, at their own kitchen table at midnight?
Singapore didn't really have this
I looked. There wasn't a shop here — not really — that brought this together properly. A few scattered listings on marketplaces, sure, but nothing that felt like it understood why any of it mattered, or curated it with any care. Just generic listings sitting between a thousand other products.
I'm not a manufacturer, and I'm not pretending to be some big operation — it's just me, part-time, figuring this out order by order. But I know exactly what it feels like to hand a child a pair of scissors and watch him actually cut a straight line for the first time without fighting the tool. That moment is worth building a small business around, honestly.
What this shop actually is
The Other Hand isn't trying to convince every left-hander in Singapore that their life is secretly miserable and they need to buy everything immediately. Most of us adapted fine to most things — I still use an ordinary sharpener with my right hand, and I'm not losing sleep over it. This is really about the handful of tools that do genuinely matter — scissors, kitchen tools, and especially the stationery kids use when they're first learning to write — brought together properly, sourced honestly, in one place, by someone who actually understands why it matters instead of just selling it.
If you're a fellow leftie, or a parent watching your own kid navigate a world quietly built for the other 90%, I'd love to hear from you. Not for a sale — just because I think we've all got a version of the ink-stained-hand story, and I'd like to know yours.
— Cherlyn