We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Yanz Zeng a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Yanz, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry

I’m very happy that I work in overlapping intersection of art/design, maker/crafter and product development industry.

First biggest trend I see is going multidisciplinary. Don’t worry that you don’t fit inside one box. I’m very proud and glad to see lots of my fellow artists and makers feeling more comfortable to combine knowledge. For example, artists using 3D printing as a process of painting; Cartoonist doing silk screen printing; Illustrator stepping into apparel design… Connecting disciplinary seems to open wide opportunities for creators.

Collaboration is another trend I notice. Not just it happens more often but also it’s more decentralized. There are way more collaborations between smaller brands happening and collaborations between brands that are in totally different industries. Bigger brands nowadays are more likely to collaborate with smaller brands for the bolder and refreshing perspectives. And thank to social media, smaller brand collaborations are more likely to make some noise too.

The last trend I’d like to bring up is limited edition. This is not a new trend anymore but still a very effective strategy. Some of the most beloved pop culture brands and IP base their merchandise strategy on this. It’s a great way to balance art and commerce. And cement brand essence through releasing limited batches of distilled products.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I started Boba Family with my friend Iris in the beginning of Covid. It was a time when optimism was scarce. We are tired of being afraid and helpless and want to express and share our common feeling of being a human at an uncertain time. I’m a visual designer and Iris is a boba tea barista. Boba tea is our childhood memory that we both are very fond of. So our first character is a boba pearl.

We started with simple digital drawings about feelings. They resonate with a lot of people online. Later we printed these drawings into postcards. Postcard is a format that enables people to go deep in connections, so it became our first product.

Later, we looked back into boba tea – the popular drink that inspired us from the beginning. We noticed that the plastic waste of boba tea can not be overlooked. That started our journey of designing and creating our next product – Reusable boba bottle!

We’d love to hear about you met your business partner.

I met my co-founder Iris the last year at school. I was in the design program in SVA while she was in the photography program. We met in a school exhibition. The exhibition was very multidisciplinary and it was about food. Both of us are very interested in cross media art and find that food has been a common topic in both of our art creations. Soon we started to share a lot of ideas and experience in making art.

Our first collaboration is an exhibition called “Foodie ways to make friends”. Later we did a few more exhibitions on the topic of food. We had great fun and got to connect with a lot of people. Until pandemic happened, we had to pivot our collaboration into a new phase. That is when Boba Family was born.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

I realized that I need to unlearn that social media popularity is not an indication of a successful business/brand/project. We started Boba Family by posting digital drawings on instagram. Soon it gained some popularity that we didn’t expect from the beginning. We both were flattered. But soon we had the realization that social media popularity is not a sign of success. We should invest our time, energy and budget in the art itself, production (iterations) and marketing strategies.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.thebobafamily.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/bobafamilyofficial/

Image Credits
image name “Yanz_Boba Family” credit to Colored Colors (watermark is on the right bottom corner of the image)