We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Yvonne Hung a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Yvonne, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. How did you come up with the idea for your business?
Otelier is a furniture design studio and brand that creates sustainable and high-quality products for apartment living. My products typically are multi-functional, space-saving so dwellers can make the most out of their small spaces.
The idea for the company originally evolved from a project I did in graduate school at the Royal College of Art, where I made a chair that comprises of 3 chairs chairs stacked into one. The concept for the “Social Chair” was inspired by my experience living in cities and apartments most of my life – New York, London, San Francisco, Hong Kong – and the loneliness that can come with it, especially when you get older. There were multiple times where I wanted to have friends over for dinner, but my apartment wasn’t set up to have guests because of the lack of square footage and furniture. So I wanted to design something that made it easy to turn the home into a social space.
That project was surprisingly well received by the design community, and won a Core77 award, so I realized there might be more to this than a school project. So about a year after I graduated, I decided to start Otelier, with a focus on furniture for small homes.
There aren’t many companies that focus on this demographic, despite it being the fastest growing cohort globally. Furniture companies are for the most part just selling the same furniture they’ve been for years – products for the single-family homes, just maybe stylistically different, and perhaps smaller versions. But they were designing for the context of small spaces, and addressing the physical and psychological realities of urban living.
Furthermore, from the sustainability perspective, the mass-consumer furniture market has been a race to the bottom, with prices and quality dropping with it. The mentality of fast-furniture, where consumers get to test furniture for a year and return it for free, or buy new furniture and dispose of it in a couple years when they move, is extremely wasteful and bad for the environment. The long term goal for Otelier is to provide a more sustainable option that is still affordable for the middle class, with a resale platform where you can buy and sell used Otelier furniture, which are made to last.
Yvonne, 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 am an Asian American, born in Hong Kong, raised in San Francisco, and have lived in cities like New York, London, and Mexico City. My experience living in cities is why I design products for apartments and smaller homes.
Unlike most furniture designers, I’m actually not trained in industrial or furniture design. This is my fourth career as a designer, from urban planning, to product design, UX design, and finally the founder of Otelier. I studied economics at Stanford and urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, so my work typically is at the ecosystem level. So naturally, I didn’t want to just design furniture pieces, I want to build a business that proves that the furniture industry can be more sustainable and relevant for this generation, from a business and logistics perspective in addition to design.
Even with the Otelier products, my starting point is anthropologic, deeply observing the context that my users are experiencing, physically, emotionally, and psychologically. That’s why I think designing for the home is so interesting and impactful – it’s the most intimate space for any person and/or family – and it’s also very indicative of the cultural, social, and economic shifts happening at the generational level.
Otelier is a design-driven D2C brand, but my hope is for it to be a platform where I can ask those bigger questions and explore options. I also hope to experiment with emerging sustainable materials soon. By creating a studio that is both commercial and exploratory by nature, I hope to scale innovation so consumers can benefit with high-quality, well-designed products that make their lives better.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
Otelier is a constant test of my resilience, navigating unknowns and finding creative solutions, and staying sane at the same time. I started Otelier alone in mid 2020 when COVID was just starting and the world began to quarantine. So my original plans had to be canceled and pivoted. Originally, I was going to try to produce the Social Chair and manufacture in Asia. Once quarantine started, I knew that everyone is going to work from home, and will need a home office. So, I designed the most beautiful standing desk on the market, one that doesn’t look like an industrial machine. I also wanted to design one for apartment dwellers who were working on our kitchen tables, like me. also had to move my manufacturing locally to the San Francisco Bay Area, since I wasn’t able to travel to visit factories, and international supply chains were shut down. That meant that prices for materials, production, and shipping were sky high, increasingly weekly. At the same time, digital marketing costs also increased dramatically.
Luckily, I was able to do most things on my own besides the production, including building the website, digital marketing, PR, logistics. The Eat-Work Table collection ended up winning a number of awards, including the GOOD Design Award, SF Design Week Award, and Best of NeoCon. But from a business standpoint, it was too challenging to navigate the COVID chaos. Eventually, I had to take a break from Otelier to wait out the choatic economy, and took a full time UX job for about a year.
At the same time, I was still designing and coming up with new ideas. Again, with COVID as the backdrop, I resurfaced the idea of the Social Chair because now the mental health effects of quarantining were clear: people were starved of social interaction and feeling depressed. During my break from Otelier, I designed and prototyped the Quartet, a side table that turns into four stools. Again, the idea is to encourage people to turn their home into a social space, even if they live in a small space. That’s the product that we are currently launching.
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
Life is a series of pivots until you are aligned with your purpose. I’ve had four different careers and switched jobs about every year and a half. With two exceptions, I was always miserable at my jobs, even though I was successful and respected professionally. When I was younger, I thought there was something wrong with me, that I was a negative person and my mentality was the problem. That’s what my friends and family kept on telling me.
Only recently after returning to grad school, did I realize that the problem was working in places that weren’t aligned with my interests or purpose. Whenever I was doing my own projects, I did well and I was happy. With Otelier, I finally feel like I am on the path that is right for me, even if it’s not easy and I’m just starting out, and regardless of what happens with the business in the future.
As for pivoting from a business perspective, we’ve already pivoted our business model once because of COVID. Now, with the economic downturn in the US and globally, I’ve changed the priority of upcoming products so we can still have appealing products when people might be spending less on large-ticket furniture items. I love being a business owner and having control of those high-level decisions.
Contact Info:
- Website: otelier.com
- Instagram: @otelier_home
- Facebook: @OtelierHome
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/otelier-home
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@otelier_home
Image Credits
Otelier