Penshoppe Brand Guidelines: Bernie Liu’s 1986 Cebu T-Shirt Label and the Golden ABC Group

Graphic T-shirts from a Cebu garment business.

Penshoppe is a Philippine casual-wear brand that began in Cebu in 1986. It is the flagship label of Golden ABC, Inc. (GABC), which The Philippine Star described in April 2026 as the company “popularly known as the Penshoppe Group.” Its founder is Bernie Liu, an architecture graduate of the University of San Carlos in Cebu, according to SunStar Cebu.

The brand grew out of a family garment business. In a 2002 interview with The Philippine Star, Liu said his family had run a small garment company, set up with partners in Manila and later moved to Cebu, that made commercial T-shirts of the kind given away at Christmas. Because that trade was seasonal, he and a group of friends, all fellow architecture students, developed a private label in 1986, working nights around their day jobs and starting with graphic and printed shirts. He said the venture lost money in its first years and that the team had to learn advertising, merchandising and store operations from scratch, a business that began, in his words, as a sideline for all of them.

SunStar Cebu reported in August 2016 that the family also ran a lumber trading business, where Liu had worked before turning to T-shirts, and that Penshoppe was first aimed at young shoppers in the Visayas and Mindanao, the central and southern Philippines.

The name comes from the pen. In a 2008 column for The Philippine Star, Liu wrote that the founders wanted their clothes to be as accessible and indispensable to students’ lives as “the ubiquitous pen.” The Philippine Star reported in 2013 that Golden ABC began in Cebu in 1986, right after the People Power Revolution of that February.

From department stores to a mall boutique.

Penshoppe’s shirts sold first through department stores. The Freeman, Philstar’s Cebu newspaper, reported in May 2019 that Liu began by designing shirts in his parents’ garment factory, that his designs reached department stores, and that in 1991 Penshoppe opened its first boutique, at SM City North EDSA in Quezon City. Liu told SunStar Cebu that the first decade, to 1996, was spent entering the market and learning the business, and the second on widening the product range and expanding across the country.

Endorsers became a large part of the brand’s image. In the 2002 interview, Liu said the early “Club Pen” models were not yet famous, naming Ryan Agoncillo and Paolo Bediones, and described the signing that year of the American singer and actor Mandy Moore, with shoots in Los Angeles, as a marketing test tied to the brand’s expansion in China. The Freeman later listed One Direction, Zac Efron, Cara Delevingne and Leighton Meester among Penshoppe ambassadors who visited the Philippines. Liu summed up the brand’s character in 2002 as “fun, youthful, and wholesome,” and said Penshoppe had never been presented as cutting-edge or sexy.

Golden ABC added labels around Penshoppe for different customers. In his 2008 column Liu described Oxygen as clothing for young adults, Memo as casual work wear for young professionals, and ForMe as a women’s brand cut for different body types. The Philippine Star counted seven labels in 2013, including Tyler and the direct-selling arm Red Logo; by December 2024, Inside Retail Asia listed six brands, among them Penshoppe, Oxygen, Regatta and Bocu. The company’s own website writes the second brand as OXGN.

Southeast Asian fashion and lifestyle.

Southeast Asia’s fashion, bag, accessory and lifestyle brands mostly speak through their own channels: a wordmark over a shopfront, a seasonal campaign, a named collection and an online shop. Many began as small businesses (a leather wholesaler, a garment maker, a family shop) and only later built a retail identity, so the brand story is often told through a founding date, a first boutique and a list of markets reached.

Collections and collaborations do much of the visual work. Labels name their lines by occasion, material or season, and add licensed characters, local actors and regional pop stars as ambassadors or muses. These partnerships change from season to season, while the name, the lettering and the shop interior usually stay fixed.

Ownership is often layered. Several labels sit inside larger groups: in Malaysia, Padini Holdings runs Vincci alongside its own clothing labels and sells them together in its concept stores, and Bonia Corporation holds a family of leather goods brands. In the Philippines and Thailand, groups such as Golden ABC and Jaspal Group own more than one label each, and each guide in this series describes its group from that brand’s own sources. Some companies are listed on their home stock exchange and publish corporate pages on founders, directors, subsidiaries and shareholdings; others remain private.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand: who founded it and when, who owns it now, where it sells and how it presents its name, with dated reporting from newspapers and trade press, and with the companies’ own claims marked as theirs. The palettes and type samples are our own interpretations, not official brand assets.

Stores across the Philippines and abroad.

Store numbers have grown in steps, each figure tied to its date. Liu wrote in 2008 that the company had more than 300 stores and 1,500 employees; The Philippine Star reported over 600 stores nationwide in 2013; and SunStar Cebu counted about 660 stores in the Philippines and about 41 abroad in August 2016, with most of the overseas stores in Indonesia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf. The Philippine Star said in April 2026 that GABC had more than a thousand stores and a presence in several countries. The Freeman listed Penshoppe shops in Cambodia, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Myanmar, among others, in 2019, along with online sales in markets including Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Leadership changed at the start of 2025. Inside Retail Asia reported in December 2024 that Golden ABC had named Alice Liu chief executive from 2025, with Bernie Liu turning to his role as executive chairman of GABC and of its holding company, LH Paragon. The Philippine Star reported in April 2026 that she was president and chief executive, having previously served as president and chief operating officer.

The company describes its own business on its website as creating and selling its own clothing, accessory, footwear and personal care lines under proprietary brands, and says it started in 1986 with 40 employees and Penshoppe as its flagship.

For a design guide, Penshoppe shows how a name built on an everyday object, the pen, can stretch from printed T-shirts to a multi-brand group, carried by mall boutiques and a long run of celebrity endorsers. Compare Bench, the Manila brand that began with men’s T-shirts a year later, and Kamiseta. For this guide we use an ink blue, a shirt white and a printed coral with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Penshoppe’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.