"Just get started–you don’t need to have all the answers before you begin" with Vivian Chan

Vivian Chan is the co-founder of East Meets Dress, a fashion startup that creates modern cheongsams (qipaos) for Asian-Americans who want to celebrate their heritage but also stay true to their style. She met her best friend and co-founder when they were both at Yale University. Outside of work, she enjoys playing basketball and traveling around the world.

Can you tell our readers about your background?

Prior to becoming an entrepreneur and co-founder of East Meets Dress (EMD), I worked at an early stage tech startup that was later acquired as well as several education nonprofits. I was the Maid of Honor for my co-founder, Jenn, and helped her host her Chinese wedding tea ceremony and find a wedding cheongsam to wear.  

We both felt that there weren’t many good options or helpful resources for Asian-Americans who wanted to honor their heritage on their big day. While neither of us had any background in e-commerce or starting a business, we took the leap anyway and haven’t looked back since! EMD has been bootstrapped from Day 1 and with a lot of hard work and dedication, we’ve been able to grow the team and company to become profitable within a year.

What inspired you to start your business?

EMD was inspired by the struggles of my co-founder, Jenn, when she was looking for a modern version of the cheongsam, a traditional Chinese wedding dress. She wanted to wear a cheongsam dress for her wedding tea ceremony to celebrate her heritage and thank her parents but finding a modern cheongsam turned out to be even harder than searching for her Western wedding dress. I was her Maid of Honor and we both felt that Asian-American brides shouldn’t have to settle for low quality options or scouring Yelp to find the one tailor who can make a quality cheongsam. So we decided to start East Meets Dress.

Where is your business based?

We're an online-only store that's based out of the Bay Area, but we serve customers all over the world. We work closely with our dressmakers in Suzhou and Guangzhou who have decades of experience making qipaos and custom cheongsam dresses.

 How did you start your business? What were the first steps you took? 

When we first started, we had zero experience in fashion, e-commerce, or entrepreneurship. We wanted to first test our idea to see how many other Asian-American brides were out there struggling with this same issue. So we decided to create a free landing page via Unbounce and run a $50 FB ad to see if anyone within our target demographic would be interested. Over a weekend, we got over 40 interested subscribers, which gave us the confidence that there might be a market for high-quality cheongsam wedding dresses. We then reached out to every email subscriber and asked if they would answer a few questions to help us better understand what they were looking for. From this quick market research, we felt confident enough to launch a simple Shopify website over the weekend with our initial dress design.

What has been the most effective way of raising awareness for your business?

Facebook with its strong targeting abilities was a great way of raising awareness for East Meets Dress in the beginning. We could specifically target engaged couples who might be in the market for a wedding cheongsam dress. We loved that we could first test our initial idea on Facebook and get results with just a small budget of $50.  

Additionally, Pinterest and Etsy have been other very effective channels for us since many brides are using Pinterest to get ideas and then searching on Etsy for more custom, niche items.

Over the long run though, SEO has been our most sustainable way of increasing our brand exposure. By ranking on the first page of Google, we’re able to get brides who fit our target demographic and are in the process of looking for modern cheongsams and resources on hosting a wedding tea ceremony.

What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?

Since Day 1, we’ve been bootstrapped and self-funded. While that has enabled us to be much more resourceful and gives us more control and ownership over our company, we’ve also had to work on unlearning our risk-averse mindset. Growing up as Asian-Americans, we were always taught to be frugal and careful with our spending.  

But we quickly realized that as entrepreneurs, time is your most valuable resource. While we don’t have millions of VC money to throw at marketing, in order to learn quickly and grow the business, we learned that we had to be willing to invest money early on into A/B testing our marketing channels, growing our dress collection, and experimenting with new growth ideas.

How do you stay focused?

Being an entrepreneur and running your own business means there are often a million different things that you’ll need to and want to work on. It’s easy to get overwhelmed and to go down a rabbit hole on one task. One habit we’ve adopted is to focus one accomplishing one rock (the big important tasks that will actually move the needle) a day, no matter what and time-bounding it to a few hours at most. That way, we can make sure that we are always improving our business by at least 1% each day.

How do you differentiate your business from the competition? 

East Meets Dress is modernizing the cheongsam (qipao) wedding dress for Asian-American brides starting with contemporary designs, quality craftsmanship, and a dedicated customer experience. Our modern cheongsam designs can’t be found elsewhere—we created a blend of modern styles and silhouettes with traditional cheongsam elements such as the mandarin collar and pankou knots. Customer service and support are often lacking from our competitors, so we made sure to offer a dedicated customer service across all channels (chat, email, phone, etc) that allows our customers to communicate to us with ease.

What has been your most effective marketing strategy to grow your business?

Since East Meets Dress is in a particular niche industry, doubling down on SEO has been our most effective marketing strategy. We knew that there was a lack of resources available online about Chinese wedding dresses and how to plan for a modern Asian-American wedding so we invested heavily in writing blog articles to make sure our site was the go-to resource for Chinese-American weddings. One of our most popular blog articles is titled 30 Of the Best Ideas For A Modern Asian Wedding, which brings in 1,000 users (majority of which are newly engaged)  a month organically. 

What's your best piece of advice for aspiring and new entrepreneurs?

Just get started–you don’t need to have all the answers before you begin. You’ll continue to iterate as you build your business and get real-time feedback from customers. 

What's your favorite app, blog, and book? Why? 

App: Audible - one of the best ways that I have been able to read more books per year has been to listen to them on Audible. I love how I can just open my Audible app when I’m driving or cooking breakfast and essentially read wherever I go.

Blog: I have a lot of great newsletters and blogs that I follow but some of my favorites about entrepreneurship and tech are The Hustle and Trevor McKendrick’s “How it Actually Works”.

Book: Atomic Habits by James Clear - this book was life-changing in terms of reshaping how I think about setting goals, forming habits, and applying that to my business. I recommend this to anyone who is interested in self-improvement.

What's your favorite business tool or resource? Why? 

Coda.io - It’s like Google docs on steroids. We use it to manage our customer orders, details, suppliers, and inventory. The great thing about Coda is that if you update one thing about a customer in one table, it automatically updates that detail across any other table you have.

Who is your business role model? Why?

I love the story behind Canva and their founder, Melanie Perkins. She’s incredibly inspiring because of how she persisted through all of her initial startup challenges and never gave up on her vision. As female founders ourselves, it’s awesome to see other women succeed the way she has. She’s built an amazing product and company that we’re huge fans of. We use Canva for all of our design needs from creating our packaging inserts to social media and email templates.  

How do you balance work and life?

Since our business is entirely online and we can work remotely, it’s easy to blend in your work and home environments (especially during COVID) so one thing I try to do is set core working hours and a dedicated working space. During mealtimes, I’ll put away my laptop and phone and take a break from work. I also make it more of a priority now to stop working after dinner and create time for myself to recharge and work on other hobbies.

What’s your favorite way to decompress?

Getting outside in nature whether it’s going on a hike, playing sports or just a walk around the neighborhood to get some Vitamin D.

What do you have planned for the next six months?

Prior to COVID, we had a very successful pop-up event so we’d love to do more physical events and pop-ups once COVID is over. We’re also planning on launching an Ao Dai wedding dress collection for Vietnamese-American brides and continuing to partnering with different Asian-American influencers and partnerships to increase awareness of the beauty of Asian culture and cheongsam dresses.

How can our readers connect with you?

Website: www.eastmeetsdress.com

Instagram: @eastmeetsdress