Vivienne Tam, designer, Vivienne Tam fashion house

HONG KONG, China (CNN) -- From the runway to the store rack, Vivienne Tam is one designer who uses creativity and business acumen in equal measure.

Since her start in the fashion business in the early '80s and establishing her own brand in the '90s, she has risen to fame with her east-meets-west styles. Today it's her skills in business which have expanded the label to some 30 stores worldwide, from New York to Beijing.

CNN's Andrew Stevens caught up with the designer in Hong Kong to talk about what it's like to lead both the business and creative direction of a global fashion line.

Tam: The business side is like designing, it's like I like the touch of the fabric, I like to know the details about it. And you feel about it, you know about the deal, because who's the person who knows what the best deal for you is? Yourself. It's like designing clothes, I love to know how to solve every single thing, you know. Like what kind of budget

Stevens: It's just natural curiosity?

Tam: Natural curiosity, I love it. I love every aspect of it.

Stevens: Who have you learned your business skills from or have you made it up as you went along?

Tam: I self-taught myself in business; I know nothing about the business, I learned everything -- about the pricing, the shipping, the contracts, everything -- by doing it. When you're doing it yourself, you know everything. If you don't do it, you just listen to somebody telling you how to do it, you're not experiencing it. Once you're experiencing it, you can grow so much from it. Once you experience it, you can go further, much further. It's a feeling of it.

Stevens: When you won the Hong Kong businesswoman of the year award, you said that your mother was one of your greatest inspirations. How did she inspire you?

Tam: She inspired me so much you know, like you say, the determination, persistence. When she really wanted to make something, she would really go to the end, she'd really want to make it happen and I see her, she's really the force behind me.

We were quite poor, we had no money, my parents were working really hard. When I grew up, I saw them working so hard, and then deep inside myself that I wanted to change the situation, I wanted to make something, this one thing.

Stevens: What do you think are the most important qualities for a businessperson?

Tam: For me, it's most important, a vision, determination, and to never say no to yourself. And be open to criticisms, open to learning, and open to criticisms and knowing nothing about the business; nothing, so you can learn everything by knowing nothing, you know, and be successful in the things that you didn't know.

Stevens: You work in a very creative industry, how do you keep your staff motivated in this industry, how do you keep them going, how do you keep them working for you?

Tam: I always tell them my story, how I was in school when my teacher asked for one outfit -- I give them 8 outfits. I told them, do things that I didn't ask you, give me, do your work with passion, it's more important than "Oh, 6 o'clock, I have to leave." Do something that is out of the box. E-mail to a friend