Although both of my parents are from Hualien Taiwan, I was born in Brussels because my dad received a full scholarship to study art at l’Académie des Beaux Arts. 

I grew up speaking French but continued my schooling in Los Angeles after I was 15. So I truly feel ⅓ Belgian, ⅓ American & ⅓ Taiwanese. 

I inherited my father’s artistic inclination with a love for design, but mostly because I see it as a problem solving process. 

Framing the problem and finding a solution for it is what draws me. 

Before Opus Mind, I was working for Chanel, which is an amazing couture house with a beautiful story.

But after working in the fashion industry for close to a decade, I was getting more and more frustrated with the lack of initiatives around sustainability. 

In 2017, I was personally conflicted with the problem of waste and seeing the challenges of large companies to adopt changes, I took the plunge and started Opus Mind.

I was convinced that giving proper communication and awareness, the modern consumer will choose a product made sustainably. 

Opus Mind was created to stand for sustainability and in this quest, I decided to focus on one specific complicated area: leather.

Leather has a deep rooted history with the development of civilisation, but the industry has expanded so quickly in the last 2 decades that it is no longer just a by-product of the meat industry. 

We now know the climate impact of a global agriculture footprint, and many movements target the issue by creating alternatives to it.

But as I made research around vegan leather, I was surprised to find how unsustainable the actual material is.

Because I was personally confronted with waste in my previous role, and with my experience with production waste in the supply chain, I knew that there was an opportunity to lower waste and create more sustainable material. 

I converged with the principles of the circular economy movement, which starts with system thinking and basically pushes to extend our existing resources as much and as long as possible.

Knowing the possibility to divert waste from landfills by creating new material in a sustainable way with a low emission process seems like a solution worth pushing. 

I’m often asked what Opus Mind means.

Opus comes from Latin and means a large scale composition. For me it represents our planet, it is a large scale canvas where we can design a system that will beautify it.

Mind is a derivative of Mindfulness, which advocates for the awareness of our impacts, being mindful of our choices. 

My family has always been in entrepreneurship, starting with my Grand-Father in Taiwan.

But, I also recognize the power of collective talents under one company vision and the ability of scaled impact with pooled resources. 

I decided to jump into entrepreneurship in 2017 after being frustrated with years of pushing for more sustainability in large companies.

Now the tides have changed and the awareness and willingness to prioritise these issues are present.

I see entrepreneurship as another problem-solving process where you discover new ways of combining resources to create a new product, service, process while extracting value to propel the company forward.

My motivation is to set parameters that align with my values, such as sustainability and transparency. 

One of the challenges in communication is that sustainability is very broad and encompasses a lot of issues. And so it can be confusing to the public when a product or company only states that it is sustainable. 

Your question is great because not a lot of people ask where I stand on this and how I define it. When you think about the word ‘sustainability’ it means the ability to perpetually continue to ‘sustain’ by meeting the needs of today without compromising the needs of the future generation. 

And that can be arranged in 3 groups: environmental need, economic need and social need. 

I look at the UN 17 Sustainable Goals to understand that in order for our world to be sustainable, it is not only to tackle environmental issues.

With Opus Mind, I tackled one problem, but it is far from the full spectrum of sustainability.

I was always a bit skeptical around talks about slowing down the industry.

That is until this pandemic hit and it halted all industries. 

My take is that the future of fashion is going to split into two segments:

first the second hand market is going to grow with more qualitative retailers who understand the emotional experience consumers seek.

But second is the advancement of a circular fashion where governments are going to start implementing regulations for accountable practices around environmental footprint. 

Also, consumer expectations will rise and demand disclosures around sustainable practices and brands with honest communications will come ahead with their support.