He Gave Up Cooking at a Michelin Restaurant to Open a Fast-Fashion Home Goods Store | 100 People With Ideas

Beware anyone with a talent for cooking. Today he sells you paella; tomorrow, the tray it came on.

Before he opened a home goods store, Barry Lee, 30, was a cook.

The most familiar public image of the trade is a thickset middle-aged man in white with a tall hat, speaking Mandarin thick with dialect, showing off over a roaring flame as he tosses the wok. Seen head-on, he usually has a belly that juts out.

On popular food shows you see a second kind of cook: a slim young man in glasses, good-looking, fond of healthy dishes with "not a trace of kitchen smoke" — avocado, celery, kale — who wears a fitted suit even at the stove.

Barry Lee is neither.

Tall, his Mandarin precise, this Taiwanese entrepreneur likes reading investment statements and never took school seriously. By high school he was already running small ventures: designing "PowerPoint files that won't open" for students who hadn't finished their homework, or selling course-selection guides to students in a hurry to pile up credits.

After four years as executive sous chef at Jean-Georges, the three-Michelin-star restaurant in New York, he came to Shanghai and founded the restaurant brand Azul, built on the fusion cooking New Yorkers love. He picked Ferguson Lane and K11, the addresses every fashionable person in the city has to visit, and sold mussels with Italian bread and paella.

I never believed the overworked line that "the kitchen is a battlefield" — until I stood in front of his bright, open central kitchen and watched a man in a white chef's coat run back and forth without stopping. "In food service, speed always comes first. If you can't get a customer's clam chowder in front of them within five minutes, you may lose that customer for good." Isn't it about flavor? "Flavor is a variable. The menu has to be designed and changed constantly. Control the rhythm of the kitchen and you have a basis for winning."

So when I saw that he had really taken the business from the food to the plate under the food — with all the product development, interior design, team building and operations management behind it — my first reaction was: can you calculate table turnover for home goods?

Two years ago, after years scrapping in restaurants, Barry Lee noticed that the industry's life cycle was getting shorter. "If a store shows no sign of picking up within two months, it may well close. I reckon the restaurant business has about five good years left." With that came a second realization: it was time to move into another industry closely tied to food — home goods.

Home goods display at the Taojiang Road store in Shanghai

A display built around the theme of home

Shanghai

The lunch ordering area at the Fenyang Road store

"I'd always wanted to do home goods. My mother is a designer, and I like the idea of home myself; I've been looking at this stuff since I was small. Last year I noticed that a lot of big home goods brands couldn't keep going. Hola [a Taiwanese home goods chain] was about to fold, Francfranc [a Japanese home goods chain] pulled out, so I went and studied why they were closing."

"One possibility is that this is the tail end of the current, and it can only go down from here. The other is that it's about to take off. I think every industry has four stages. In the first, a lot of companies fold. In the second, only a few big ones are still alive. In the third, a lot of people come in — and if you haven't taken market share by then, your share will only keep shrinking. The fourth is the tail end: only a few names are hot, and only a few are names you can even think of."

Tableware is the best-selling home goods line

Open first, work it out later: that is how Barry Lee, who came up in fast-moving consumer goods, handles everything. And the way this Michelin cook crossed into a new trade was, in effect, to swap the dishes on a restaurant menu for home goods.

Where Fenyang Road meets Middle Huaihai Road in Shanghai, a retail store called Gonghe Jingpin sits at the far back of the street frontage. From outside you notice nothing unusual. Step in and you find a flower shop, a restaurant, a bar, a classroom and a home goods store — several completely different kinds of business mixed into one space. Besides picking out fine cups, plates and bowls for yourself or for friends, you can arrange flowers, eat, drink, learn to cook, or learn about wine.

The open kitchen space

The wine-tasting area

The cooking classroom

At midday, in the floral area by the entrance, freshly arranged hydrangeas and lisianthus stand beside the florist Chen Chuixun, who is chatting with a customer. On the other side, in the home goods area, kitchenware, decor and textiles are arranged with care by category, and a few young women who look like university students are picking over candy-colored tea sets. Deeper in, the restaurant section is busy, and a small blackboard lists the chef's salad, wine and dessert of the day.

The floral area

Experience. A concept invoked so often it has gone soft turns into something you can feel and see in this space — from bright to dim, from point to plane, from open to private. Every element of the interior looks casually placed; in fact all of it was designed with care.

"Because I come from fast-moving consumer goods, I put a lot of weight on data. What to sell this season, which age groups, which women, which men, what colors they like, from the location down to the item — based on a sample of 100 people per store, our retail director does a detailed data analysis every month. We also take our store managers' views seriously, because they know best what kind of person picks up what kind of thing, and whether customers turn left or right. So we know exactly how to lay out a display and which side sells better. Expensive items above 45 centimeters on a shelf, for instance, just won't move," Barry told QDaily.

Selling atmosphere and experience, personalized spaces, products and service — none of this is new. Beyond being fun, what makes this store striking is speed.

Home goods in every category are changed weekly

Products are refreshed every two weeks, with 300 pieces stocked per collection; once a collection sells out, it is not made again. This is a fast-fashion strategy applied whole to the home goods trade. Bigger names — Zara, H&M and other fashion brands — have been talking about it for years and have opened a run of stores, but they remain stuck in the awkward position of not selling. What is surprising is that contract manufacturers with annual sales in the billions of yuan are keeping this 200-square-meter store running, and those supply channels exist thanks to Barry's father, who works in investment management in the industry.

"He introduced me to a few people interested in investing, and they became our factories. We now work with more than 20, close to 30, but the main ones are just four or five, in Dongguan, Shenzhen and Thailand. To them our orders are as small as orders get, but their second generation is gradually coming up, so I have to put it to them this way: supporting us now is also for your own future."

Original-design plates made with contract factories

Going from contract manufacturing to an own-brand business is too large a subject to open up here. At Gonghe Jingpin you find that original designs account for only 20 percent of all home goods and decor products, yet the materials, styles and colors of many of the rest follow international trends closely enough that you cannot tell where they were designed or made. And for shoppers who come in, alongside design, material and price, the thing they care least about is the brand. "Take this month's best seller, imported Czech wine glasses with 30 percent crystal content. They really move fast; customers buy them six at a time, a whole case, and 119 yuan apiece is fine with them," said Zoe, manager of the Fenyang Road store.

That has convinced Barry that even without exclusive original design, building a brand quickly is no problem. Besides Fenyang Road, Gonghe Jingpin already has two branches, on Kangding Road and Taojiang Road, and an Anfu Road store opens next month. His plan puts eight stores across Shanghai by the end of this year, after which the company will expand beyond the city.

The Taojiang Road store

It works like putting together a set menu. "My idea is micro-localization. Micro means small markets. The customers at Jing'an Temple and at Kangding Road are not the same. Taojiang Road and Anfu Road are close to each other, but their customers are not the same either. Fenyang Road and Taojiang Road are different again. So I work out the concept first, put the set menu together, then look at what suits a given place at a given time and open that. The retail store doesn't move much, but our products do. Look at the Fenyang Road store: it's all decor and small gift items, because people eat here, so you can't sell furniture. So you design for office workers who want a mug after work, or something to give a colleague, or for people living nearby who want to pick up small things."