We recently connected with Kelly Wright and have shared our conversation below.

Hi Kelly, thanks for joining us today. Let’s start with the story of your mission. What should we know?

YUNS is a modern hardware store for beginners. Our mission is to inspire self-reliance by making tools and hardware more accessible to more people.

The hardware category is, quite frankly, very homogenous. I grew up in a small, rural area and our local independent shop was the beating heart of our town — it served as a space to learn, help each other out and solve problems. But today, the Big Box stores that have dominated the industry aren’t facilitating that. In particular, there’s a noticeable gap in connecting to younger, less-experienced and more diverse customers. So I as a woman of color, I absolutely wanted to help do that. I imagined a space where more people could feel comfortable and confident getting to know this category in a way that might not be able to otherwise.

I believe that introducing, educating and connecting people with the literal tools to learn and do things themselves, the more they’re able to make a positive impact on their own lives, their community and the world around them. So there’s a greater effect beyond just “me” that self-reliance can have. We can increasingly support and help out the people around us, which in today’s climate is more important than ever in my lifetime.

I named the business “YUNS” because it’s another way people say “y’all” deep in the southern Appalachian mountains, where I’m from. It’s an inclusive term of endearment and the spirit behind the shop. It’s emblematic of our ethos and it anchors the culture of the business and drives our purpose. We want to be a place where everyone is welcome and nobody’s a stranger. And our belief is that whatever the challenge, you can figure it out with the right tools.

Kelly, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m a Korean-adoptee from the rural Appalachian mountains, raised by a family of farmers and blue collar workers. Hardware stores have always been essential for our lives. We buy coffee and clothes there the same as we do our tools and equipment. Growing up loving these spaces and learning so much from them, I saw an opportunity to reimagine the experience in a different way.

One of the core things I am driven by is to bridge outsider voices, beginners and the less experienced to the hardware space. I want to make it welcoming, simple, fun and interesting. We want to be a place for beginners and non-experts to discover tools (and their own abilities) in new ways. What makes us a different concept from your traditional hardware store is that our shop is super curated — we offer a very tight collection of the most essential and most basic tools and homewares that we’d also classify as tools. The reason why we are curated is because the experience of buying and using tools is usually very intimidating for a lot of people. So we want to help demystify that process and that experience.

Everything we carry is chosen based on its quality, its design and its story. I also provide insights for each product on what makes each things special and useful. I’ll write these crazy long descriptions that I hope help people understand what they can use a tool for, where it’s from and all the unexpected ways it could be used in your life that you may not think of.

The problem I hope to solve: after leaving home and moving to New York (which was the exact opposite of what I always knew) I noticed that the skills and behaviors and abilities that came from hardware stores were not really picked up or had been learned by people my age. I obviously had a lot of experience and exposure from how I grew up, but realized that others didn’t, and didn’t know about foundational, elemental tools or how to do very basic things by themselves in their apartments.

So I saw a pretty significant knowledge and experience gap, and thought that maybe there was an opportunity, particularly with my generation, to provide a connection with hardware. How I could serve their specific needs in a tone and voice that felt fresh, friendly and directly for them, helping demystify what can be an overwhelming or confusing category or experience.

Have you ever had to pivot?

Owning my own hardware store has been a lifelong dream. I have always felt my purpose was to help people, to be part of a community and contribute to a local culture. And to do that, it was clear I needed to start with a brick and mortar because it would be a physical space to connect with people and also felt “real” in terms of hardware. My heart was set on it, there was no other option.

Then, years later when I was ready to pivot out of my corporate career and start focusing on planning for my own store, a couple major realities set in. First, when developing a business plan, speaking with independent shop owners and the major co-ops in the industry, I wasn’t in a place financially where I could even remotely think about owning my own IRL store. I thought I could lean on loans, but the money I had to have in the bank to even start a conversation was disheartening and not possible. (Borrowing from family or friends is something a lot of entrepreneurs do, but I don’t come from money and it was never an option.) Second, the pandemic happened. And it left a big question mark over the future of retail… and life in general.

The spark for my big pivot happened during a hike I was having upstate with a mentor and friend of mine who was in my COVID bubble. She talked about how online shopping was thriving and could be a good option for me. I was hesitant at first — it just seemed so cold and un-human, but she helped me see that starting super small as an online shop could actually be an incredible advantage in my situation. It would be a small investment of my own savings (no loans) and also an opportunity to test the idea of a curated hardware store and see if the idea was sticky or not — if there was a market for this kind of thing.

Being able to think differently and find a new way to bring my idea to life helped me find my inspiration again and regain some sort of control for the future for my hardware dream. It has all manifested in a way that was radically unlike anything I could’ve imagined over the years I’ve thought about doing this, but it’s been the best thing I could’ve done for myself and my business.

We’d love to hear the story of how you built up your social media audience?

I’m still very much learning how to build our social media presence, but it’s the biggest question I get asked from other small business owners or people looking to start their own thing. For our first year in business, I feel really grateful for the momentum we’ve gotten and the way we’ve been embraced by our customers.

Building an audience on social really starts with our core mission. (In my opinion, everything, every decision should start there.) So if we want to make hardware and tools accessible to a diverse community of beginners, we have to create a world and entry points into what we do through things they also care about. Knowing that the people I want to connect with aren’t tool nerds or DIY experts and aren’t prioritizing screwdrivers, hammers and pliers in their lives, I wanted to bring culture, design, humor and other personal things I care about into our content to re-contextualize hardware for a new audience.

A couple pieces of advice from lessons I’ve learned along the way:
– Don’t overthink it: test, learn, iterate, experiment and see what sticks and what doesn’t.
– Have a point-of-view: try to integrate what makes you unique – your POV, your personality, etc, and not just build it around products or what you’re selling.
– Find your own style and aesthetic: just because you see other brands doing things doesn’t mean you should copy and paste. Research and learn, but find your own spin on it. People will gravitate towards what feels authentic and real to your business, and can sense when it’s not.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.helloyuns.com
• Instagram: @hello.yuns

Image Credits
Nicole LeBlanc