How Chinese start-up Yi Design turned broken porcelain into a beautiful recycled-tile business
We speak to entrepreneur Caroline Cheng, who transformed mountains of ceramic waste into luxury ceramic retail.
Few start-ups make as much noise during their first 100 days as Yi Design. The Chinese ceramic tile and brick company spent the spring of 2021 knocking on studio doors in Jingdezhen, China’s porcelain capital, asking to buy leftover ceramics and then transporting the broken plates, bowls and mugs to its factory outside the city centre. The resulting pile of high-grade porcelain – weighing millions of kilogrammes – provided the basis of the business’s product development and inspired its slogan, “We move mountains”.
Customers, including Chinese luxury fashion brands Erdos and Icicle, are using the YiTile, made from 70 per cent recycled materials, to kit out their shops and flagship boutiques. International expansion to Japan, the US, Australia and South Korea has come through several design- and eco-conscious clients across Europe. “Cos is extremely supportive of us and global studio Brinkworth is using our tiles for its New Balance shops,” says Caroline Cheng, Yi Design’s 63-year-old founder and creative director. She speaks to Monocle at the company’s headquarters in Shanghai, one of its several outposts alongside those in Jingdezhen, Dali and London.
Born in the UK to parents from Hong Kong who were scions of the Amoy soy-sauce empire, Cheng grew up surrounded by the family business but her career has been dedicated to ceramics rather than condiments. Her artworks sit in the collection of leading museums and she tutors at Central Saint Martins College of Art in London.
Her route into entrepreneurship started in 1991 when she joined Hong Kong’s The Pottery Workshop – a centre based in multiple locations across China that teaches students the art of handmade ceramics to support and provide them with a career after graduation. Now that her daughter has taken leadership of that operation, Cheng is dedicating most of her time to Yi Design.
Her brand’s products, including the YiBrick, an award-winning permeable brick made almost entirely from recycled materials, now sit in the material libraries of firms including Foster + Partners, Brinkworth and Heatherwick Studio.
The business is breaking even and Cheng says that she is in no rush to make a fortune. As interest in Yi Design’s products grows in influential circles, she is focusing on lowering the carbon emissions of her kilns, either by firing at cooler temperatures or making the transition to renewables. “In China, every business likes to explode but I want to do it slowly until one day paying a premium for recycled ceramics is suddenly something that everybody can do.”
yidesigngroup.com
