We were lucky to catch up with Tiffany Zhou recently and have shared our conversation below.

Tiffany , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.

One major thing to know about me: I used to do venture capital investment. From my very first day, I was taught a tough lesson about risk and rewards. A higher risk means a higher yield, and this principle relates to both your business or personal life. And as somebody with an Asian background, this principle is contradictory to my upbringing, because I was taught to never take risks. To avoid thrill-seeking adventures, and always go for stability.

For me, a stable life meant a life in banking or consulting. To work in the field of finance, where I was guaranteed a compensation package I could live comfortably with as long as I worked hard enough. But after spending 8 years in the industry, across various firms, I started to feel my growth cap— as if it was becoming more and more prevalent that there was a glass ceiling above me, above all women in the finance field. My final straw was eavesdropping on a conversation about myself between my boss and my manager, with my boss saying “she’s been doing a great job, but she’s still just a 28 year old Asian girl.”

I had no choice except to not take it personally. It’s just a systemic problem set across the board for females. And it made me realize there was no option left for me to grow, except to leave. And in doing so, I realized I wanted to make my own seat at the table. I weighed the risks, and I acknowledged the amount of work it would take to yield a reward. Once I quit my high-salary career on Wall Street to work for myself, everyone, my parents included, thought something was inherently wrong with me.

Starting my own business: that was major risk number one. Risk number two? Landing Maye Musk as my brand’s ambassador.

A startup is like creating a system of beliefs— your own manifesto.

Financial services, specifically a brokerage type of job, taught me to find who’s selling something, who wants to buy it, and put them in a room together. You make money out of it, but it doesn’t create much value for the world and society. A brand is different: it is more of a creation than a job. It has its own universe and offerings. It sends a message through its offering, and it creates a community who love the offering and the message that comes with it. That’s what made me find fulfillment in building my own handbag brand, because I wanted to build something that inspires and helps professional women— a client base I’m well aware of because I was once part of it. And I wanted to offer both a product and a platform to encourage thousands of professional women to help break that glass ceiling with me.

We had raised enough money at the time to select one brand ambassador, and it was a hit or miss decision: if you choose the wrong person the brand tanks. If you choose the right one, you’ll put your brand on the map and give yourself the foundation to be successful.

As someone who set their sights on working in New York City in lieu of the American Dream, I wanted to play into the value of said dream, and making it all on your own. With that, I knew I wanted to associate myself with a good family name and someone who came up in America: Jobs, Gattes , Musk, Rockefeller, etc. After looking into each family’s profiles, I narrowed my sights on Maye Musk.

At the time Maye had just released her book, A Woman Makes A Plan. Despite the successes of the book, her profile was just based on being “Elon’s Mom.”
Once I read it myself, I knew she was a good fit because of her personal journey. A risk taker, even at her age, she believes in working hard to get where you need to be.

Come down to the budget and age, people told me I had to choose 30-35, maye is 70ish. There’s a gap between relevance I needed to create, but I didn’t understand that method of thinking.

People told me I had to choose an ambassador that was 30-40 years old, for relevancy purposes. Maye is in her 70s. But I didn’t understand their thinking: Maye may not have been known to the mass market, but she’s well-respected in the community of professional women. In the end, several data points returned that she distinguished us severely from our competitors. Maye brought us deeper into the community of strong elite female leaders and business women from across the world.

Long story short: I’m glad I went with my gut on these two huge risks. I can’t imagine where I’d be today without them.

Tiffany , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I grew up in Hong Kong, a brilliant multicultural city in Asia. And before becoming the Co-Founder and Creative Director of my own handbag brand, OLEADA, I had a pretty extensive professional background. I didn’t go to design school, nor art school. I started my professional career as a trained engineer— more specifically Technology-related Strategy Consulting. While working there, I ran a fashion blog called Shevolution. I shared my fashion sense and later my opinions on life as I lived it: my thoughts, my projects, my content, my fashion sense— it all resonated with my viewers.

In my late 20s, I pursued my MBA in New York City, I pursued investment banking and private equity. After spending more than a few years in the industry, I realized I hit my maximum potential as a female minority in this heavily male-dominated field.

From there, I quit working for others and pursued an entrepreneurial endeavor: starting my own handbag brand. The idea to start a handbag brand really came from my background in finance: as a professional woman, it was so hard for me to find a handbag that fit my bulky work laptop, all my daily essentials, and still remain lightweight. More importantly, it was hard to find a bag that could easily be taken from day to night.

People told me I’d fail in this business because handbags are a very saturated item. But I thought to get creative, to see things differently: most handbags are just an accessory to your entire outfit, they aren’t seeking to solve problems for the people that wear them. I sought to create a handbag that was a painkiller—it targets and engineers solutions to pain points for the modern professional woman. Bringing my engineering process into fashion design, coupled design thinking methodologies I learned while working in app development projects, I was able to take charge of women’s fashion in a different way.

After gathering the opinions of about 100 of my professional contacts from around the world, I made the basis of my handbag designs centered around these 4 components:

1. Lightweight
2. Functional
3. Waterproof/Scratch-proof
4. Minimal design & neutral color ways to cater to multi-outfit/occasion wear

But the most important part I want people to take away from this is that even when my designs hit the market, they’re still changing and upgrading. Take our bestselling Wavia bag for instance: it’s spent 3 years on the market, and had 10 upgrades since then.

And that just goes to show what I am most proud of: my ability to build my brand from the ground up. My perseverance in finding a more official way to deliver my personal drive within the grounds of work that I do.

OLEADA’s slogan is “live as your heart desires,” a phrase that is not direct, and not relevant in the lives of working professionals. But to me, it serves as a reminder for my younger-self, to achieve my dreams: whatever they are, and however far they’ll take me. It serves as a reminder to help other women find fulfillment in their lives the same way, to become whoever they want to be and wherever and whenever, especially in this gender-imbalanced world. A woman’s force is one to be reckoned with.

Early on in my life, I wanted to show the world that I can do whatever I wanted, especially whenever they assumed I couldn’t. I wanted to prove I could be an engineer, an investment banker, a tech consultant, an entrepreneur. A handbag designer.

All in all, I use OLEADA as a vehicle to empower and inspire more professional women. I want my brand and its products to plant the seeds for bigger social changes.

Can you open up about how you funded your business?

Instead of stating what I did, I’ll just give you the same advice I was given. The first thing to ask yourself as an incoming or current business owner is this: are you and your brand on a path of self-growth or venture capital?

On the venture capital path, your yearly profits cannot go to dividends to spend by yourself. Whatever you earn is not taken out, but rather put back into the company to help grow it in a more aggressive way so you can be acquired. You are not selling the products you created and making the profits, you are simply selling the company you created.

I assessed these three factors before setting out for OLEADA’s venture capital path:

1. Why this? Pick a market with competition and flexibility. The handbag market is vast, and worth a whopping $99B by 2030. Even if we just have 1% of the market, that’s already a $1B valuation.

2. Why you? There’s so many players on the market— what’s your key differentiator? I chose a niche consumer base of working women, whom I understand the most because I was one of them. I don’t think most designers could understand or get in touch with that lifestyle.

3. Why now? Should you make your move now or later? I kicked off three years ago. With the effects of Covid, people become more rational in choosing any fashion item. They are looking for more multi-functional items with good quality rather than just chasing the brand trends. They are looking to get their money’s worth.

Unless you thought out all the three questions above, VC would not think twice about investing into you.

However, most brands don’t need to be on a venture path. In the United States, the market size is huge. To all of those thinking about pursuing entrepreneurship or a redirection of their current company, you need to pick a good market to give yourself a fighting chance to stand out and see profits. Look at it this way: if your brand is within the $15-20 million revenue range, you accomplished the first step. You’re still a small player on the market, but it would make your lifestyle more comfortable already.

Another piece of advice I would have is this: If your brand’s value is under $1 million, your sample data is not enough to make an informed decision on your next step(s). When you hit your first million, that’s when you can optimize your channel and enhance the basics of your business model.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

OLEADA is a brand that sells primarily online. Everyone that’s a current user of social media hates the advertising aspect of the applications. Your goal as a brand is to sell something without being direct about it.

With that, I give my social media team two key pieces of advice: 1) Understand the platform you’re working with, and 2) Understand consumer behavior. Why? The behavior of users varies based on the app they use most. TikTok is a platform that favors the raw and the real: create captivating content that’s equally relatable to your audience. Instagram is a platform that emanates a more elegant, refined taste. Your budget will be placed here more often in terms of polished content. YouTube favors long-form, educational content. To show, not just tell.

As a brand on these apps, it’s also important to NOT BE too creative. As ironic as it sounds, to “keep it simple” is one hard lesson I’ve learned to swallow as a creative. Having too many ideas is just as confusing for you to create as it is for your audience to correlate your product with your brand message.
There needs to be a balance between stable growth and testing new things.

My social team and I spend 70-80% of our efforts replicating content that research has proven to work in terms of organic growth. 20-30% of our efforts are given free-range creativity to grow and expand our content palate.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://oleadanyc.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oleada_official/?hl=en
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OLEADAofficial/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/oleada-dias-global/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/oleada_official?lang=en
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsnSmkykFG_kx5f99M1V2nQ
• Other: TikTok: @OLEADA_Workbags & @OLEADA_Official