LONDON, United Kingdom — The eponymous founder of London-based design studio Meng has built her luxury silk brand by nurturing creativity and finding innovative new ways to apply it. Drawing on her own diverse experience, which includes working at both Chanel and Inditex, and the shared creative skills and training of her team, Meng has created thousands of exquisite prints ranging from refined chinoiserie to graphic abstracts, each one capable of being expressed in a myriad of iterations thanks to ingenuity of digital printing and its near limitless potential.

Founder, Meng | Source: Courtesy

Stocked in Neiman Marcus, Harrods, Selfridges and Kadewe, among many others, Meng has driven its growth through both creative and commercial experimentation. The small, focused team is encouraged to collaborate with each other and outside experts, expanding their skills and adding to the creative know-how of the business which fuses a mixture of ancient handcrafts and cutting-edge technology. As it has grown, Meng has expanded its product range to include womenswear, menswear, homeware accessories and most recently decorative arts. The studios illustrations and print work will soon be exclusively available as two metre by eight metre wall hangings, wallpapers and room dividers at Harrods — another indication of Meng and her team’s rigorous and exquisite attention to detail.

BoF sits down with founder and chief executive Meng, to hear how she created a plug-in platform for creativity and what the future holds.

BoF: How would you define the DNA of Meng?

M: As a business we try to ignore any preconceived limitations on what we could do, and instead try our hand at any opportunity that excites us. To date, as we have built the business and the team, we have always placed artistic values at the forefront of our process and made a conscious struggle to uphold them.

With an open, curious and flexible mindset we’re quick to take on new ventures such as the wallpaper range that we will launch in Harrods in July, following the suggestion made by their buyer just a few months ago. We are also currently exploring pop-up concepts across home, women’s and menswear, which will give us a creative stage to play out our story to customers. From July we will be partnering with Harvey Nichols Marketplace, so we can manage our product offering on their site from the backend and ship directly to their customer. We are also in talks with luxury hotel chains to work on exciting collaborations for both womenswear and interiors. Again this will be a new area for us, but our creative strengths and expertise remain the same, it just their application that changes.

BoF: Why is creativity the foundation of the Meng business?

M: Our core strength as a brand is the scope of prints we can design. In our efforts to realise their potential we have really benefited from pushing the limits of digital print advancements. We can now achieve a huge variety of complex, coloured designs in a short time where only five years ago this would have been greatly prohibited by time and cost. Tackling such a broad product range with limited team members requires precisely staggered printing timelines and production allocation; at any one time we could be designing a new season of an established collection, researching and developing a whole new product area, tweaking current production and marketing the results of our effort. Now the challenge is firstly convincing suppliers to produce in small quantities, with the understanding that it is an innovative model with a different revenue structure, and convincing buyers to break from their conventional formula shaped by out-dated production capabilities and consumer habit by ordering a broader range.

BoF: How would you define the culture of Meng?

M: We have a flat company structure resulting in a very collaborative spirit within the team and with each new project every member can put forward their own individual strengths, while growing others with the guidance of the consultants we bring in. Collaboration and innovation underpin every process we work with. Within most multi-product brands you will find a design team working exclusively on each category, but neither our team nor or design process is departmentally divided in this way. Each designer could be working on all categories at any time, or exploring a print direction that is yet to be categorised exclusively for one area.

I’m lucky to have seasoned design directors and executives from my former career on hand for advice. As a start-up we are unable to fulfil a full-time role for them, but these individuals join a network of consultants we can call on as we need, at times forming 50 percent of our workforce. I think another area that's very important is actually the cultural diversity of the team. Although it's a small team we are all from different places. I’m originally from China, our designers are from Korea, Japan and Taiwan, and we have French and German members of our sales team. The style itself has a kind of eastern heritage to it, but we tried to make it quite global.

BoF: How do you approach recruiting talent?

M: Conventionally when recruiting, one searches within the specific field they are hiring within. I haven’t followed this formula however; we not only work with designers trained in print and garment design, but also fine artists, illustrators and graphic designers from varying cultures and backgrounds. The key acumen I search for is an eye and appreciation for art. We know how to channel that creativity, and in turn train each individual in new areas, whether it be technical design skills or marketing and sales. Until now the brand and team have been built around our core competence: creating art prints. We are still learning what will grow the business commercially — driving profit is of course key to growth, but equally is identity.

At each fork, where we must consider what makes financial sense as a business and what would fulfil our artistic passion, we have so far prioritised the latter, pushing as far as possible to make new ground in the scope of our collections and the products we offer. Time will tell if we can strike a balance of commercial success while holding on to our original vision, but we believe the latter is not possible without the former.

There are few sectors of the economy that offer as wide and interesting a range of career opportunities as fashion. For more information about fashion industry roles at Meng, visit BoF Careers.