Connecting the dots
I didn’t go to Kellogg to start a company; rather, I was trying to figure out what to do next in my career. Three years later, I came up with something I had not planned for: SILKAVA, a Chicago-based silk lifestyle brand inspired by a material I had grown up around in Suzhou, China. As a child, I raised silkworms as pets. At the time, it never felt extraordinary. Years later, after living in the United States for more than 17 years, I returned to silk from an entirely different perspective — I found myself building a business.
This is the story of how my MBA prepared me for a path I didn’t see coming and how pieces of my childhood, creative background, life between China and the United States and my Kellogg experience eventually connected into SILKAVA.
Discovering, not just building
My Kellogg journey started even before classes did with ACE, a pre-term program for international students. Immersed with fellow students from across the globe and varied industry experience, ACE reminded me how much I could learn from people with very different backgrounds. That lesson continued in courses like New Venture Discovery and Product Management. We learned to validate ideas, test assumptions and iterate rather than pursue perfection from the start. As an artist, I naturally strive for the best version of a piece of work. Learning that iteration can be more valuable than perfection became especially relevant once I started building a business.
Professor Gina Fong’s Ethnographic Customer Insights course taught me another part of the same lesson: before deciding what to build, understand the person you are building for. Through curiosity, empathy and observation, we learned to uncover insights consumers might not articulate themselves. I carried that approach into SILKAVA, thinking about how people perceive silk, what makes them trust a product and how they think about gifting.
Learning to move before feeling ready
Kellogg also taught me to become more comfortable making decisions without complete certainty. Professor Matthew Levatich, former CEO of Harley-Davidson, instilled in us the idea to take on a job when we are about 60% ready and build the support around us. That idea, from his Rookie General Manager course, has stayed with me as a founder: act, learn, reflect and adjust when the path is uncertain rather than waiting for complete confidence.
I saw the same principle outside the classroom. As co-president of the Kellogg General Management Club, I interviewed Emerson’s CEO in front of more than 100 students with limited time to prepare. I wasn’t 100% sure I was ready, but I stepped onto the stage and adapted. Looking back, I realized Kellogg had been preparing me for moments I could not yet see.
In Asset Management Practicum, we moved from analyzing companies to managing Northwestern’s endowment funds and making investment trades. A lesson that I still carry with me today, as I’m building a venture, is the discipline of looking beyond a single metric and whether the strategy can create something sustainable.
A conversation that put everything in motion
One of the first dots in my entrepreneurial journey, that would eventually lead to SILKAVA, came unexpectedly from a conversation outside the classroom. During my second year, I went to Professor Carter Cast’s office hours, where he helped me articulate an idea that would serve as the foundation for my venture: Be a bridge between China and the United States.
Growing up in China and moving to the United States, I have spent much of my life learning to navigate both cultures, so I began to wonder how I could contribute at that intersection. I didn’t know where it would lead. Eventually, it led me back to something I thought I had left behind: silk.
From Suzhou to SILKAVA
I grew up in Suzhou, a city with centuries of silk-crafting tradition.As a child, raising silkworms as pets was simply part of life. I remember watching them grow, feed on mulberry leaves, and eventually spin their cocoons. At the time, none of it felt extraordinary. It was simply the world I grew up in.
Years later, when silk returned to my life, I began to see it differently — as a material with remarkable softness, comfort and character. Silk, a material that soothed my allergic skin I developed as an adult, became a source of inspiration. Looking at the silk products around me, I saw a gap. Silk was often sold as a commodity, sometimes difficult for consumers to distinguish from imitation or marketed primarily as a wellness product.
Rarely was silk treated as what I knew it could be: a material with a story, centuries of craftsmanship behind it and enormous creative potential.
That was the moment everything started coming together:
- My childhood in Suzhou gave me an intuitive connection to silk.
- My years in the United States showed me a different perspective on how it could be presented to consumers.
- My background in art equipped me with the desire to design around the material rather than simply sell it.
- My Kellogg experience gave me the tools to turn an observation into a product and business.
So I decided to build what I could not find.
For the debut Origin Series, I went back to the very beginning: the silkworm, the mulberry leaf and the cocoon. I drew each motif myself, turning the origins of silk into a visual language for the brand. In that sense, SILKAVA is not something I invented from scratch after Kellogg. It is something I discovered through it, by connecting pieces of my life that had been there all along.
Connecting the dots — a reflective journey
Apple Co-Founder Steve Jobs once said: “You can’t connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backward,” and he’s right. Entrepreneurship was not what I intended to pursue when I came to Kellogg, and it didn’t teach me how to start SILKAVA specifically. It gave me something more useful for an unexpected path: the ability to learn, adapt, understand people, evaluate businesses from multiple perspectives and move forward without having a complete blueprint. Kellogg taught me how to turn observations into action.
Looking back, the dots and the lines connecting them are easier to see. A creative child who spent time around silkworms in Suzhou, and later on moved to a different country all connecting to this moment in my life. This journey has been about becoming a bridge between two worlds.
The different parts of my life have now become SILKAVA.
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