How's it going everybody .
My name is Kevin Poon.
I'm born in Hong Kong,
educated partially in Hong Kong,
lived in Chicago, Vancouver, Los Angeles and now back here.
I am a entrepreneur with a lifestyle focus, so I've started with a sneaker
store called Juice, which is a select store; our own clothing brand called Clot,
which is a streetwear brand, sold in lots of different countries around the world,
a lifestyle design store called Wow, a chain of coffee shops called Elephant
Grounds, a deli called Morty's, and a Spanish restaurant in IFC called
La Rambla; also a gym in Central called Top Fit, and actually a distribution company
called District, which we distribute some lifestyle products.
So that would be kind
of what I do in a nutshell.
Early on, I knew that I wanted to create something
with, especially, you know, talking to my friends, just having the idea of having a
desk job, a nine-to-five, was really, kind of, scaring us, in the ... in the ... in the
negative way, just because, you know, we feel like there's two types of people in
the world, right, one type of people that, you know, you work every day, executing
other people's dreams, or you take matters in your own hands, and you kind
of come up with your own dreams and get people to buy into that dream, and then
people, you know, have that common goal with you.
Growing up, we were really
passionate about basketball, and basketball
was really in our kind of core DNA, cuz it teaches you a lot about teamwork,
it teaches you a lot about winning, it teaches you a lot about handling how you lose,
also, you know, part ... big part of basketball is looking good on and off
the court, right, so I think we were really big into sneakers, we were really
big into Michael Jordan, at the time, and that was kind of, our whole world, you
know, basketball, music, looking good, fashion, sneakers, and that was all really
kind of in our DNA, and these are our passion and this is what we were
interested in.
And then, there was an opportunity, because as I was doing this
internship, ... that turned into a real job, and then I got fired from my job,
because I was too focused on doing the, you know, I was daydreaming or whatever
it was, and I had an opportunity to ... well I had no choice because my visa got
expired, and I had to move back to Hong Kong, because my parents, like to stop
mucking around, you need to come back and really kind of be serious about your
life, and this was like, when I was like, in my early 20s, and then we started
looking around and seeing, hey how come, you know, in Japan, there's all these cool
street wear stores, or cool stores at the time we were looking at brands like
Bathing Ape, or Neighborhood, or even BisMan, and how come there wasn't any
comparables in Hong Kong, and so we found kind of an opening and we thought hey
this could be interesting to put in a store all the things that we liked that
was hard for us to get, be it sneakers or collectible figures, or
t-shirts or hats or any of these types of things, and that was kind of the
beginning focus on Juice as a retail outlet experiment.
When we first started
you know the idea is quick, and you know, my dad always used to say, hey starting a
business is easy but sustaining it is where it becomes challenging, and we had
no idea what he was talking about, because you know as a young person you
don't really think about the consequences, you don't think things out
that thoroughly, and that's also part of why it's cool to be young, because you
don't think about it that much, and so without thinking about it too much we
went to incorporate a company, and we rented a place, but no one had accounting
backgrounds, and we were unpacking our own boxes, doing invoicing, you know, it
was a lot of work but it was fun at the same time, and you know, some of the
roadblocks I remember was, we didn't really know how to, kind of,
do the year end audit let's say, and we were like, Ah, what is all this, you know,
and so finally, you know, we ... we knew how to hire an audit firm or an accounting
firm to help us with a lot of stuff, but every day, up until now, there's
challenges even every day, and you know, I was just leaving in the office and there
was challenges, from then, you know, so every day is a challenge, and every day is
something new.
you