By Laura Gurfein, Racked
Kim Phan, the owner of the flirty womenswear brand Yumi Kim, started out her New York career by opening Project 159 in 2004. “I just bought a bunch of different brands, mainly local designers that were my friends,” she said of her offerings. She continued her boutique domination with one exclusively selling her own line on the Lower East Side—and in 2011, she landed on the Upper East Side.
Kim Phan of Yumi Kim
Phan’s other stores have included Project 234, Project 36, and “bohemian sister” Blessed Peacemakers. We caught up with the designer and business owner to discuss how she distinguishes her uptown and downtown customers and where her silk-based brand is headed.
You must really be a pet lover if you named your line after your dog!
I opened Project 159 and six or seven months later, I got Yumi. That was when I was doing a house brand and I didn’t feel comfortable putting my own name on the label, but I loved the name Yumi Kim. At that time, having her in my life, she just added joy and I was going through this phase of, “Wow, I just opened a store, all these great things are happening.” It just sounded naturally fitting to go and name the brand Yumi Kim.
Where does the name Yumi come from?
It’s Japanese—it means beauty.
How did starting your own line come about?
I never thought I would have a clothing line—when I moved to New York, I wanted to open a boutique store in the West Village, and from there I started creating stuff in the store and everything just fell into place organically.
And why did you want to open Yumi Kim on the Lower East Side?
It was my favorite shopping neighborhood. The owners worked in the stores. It was kind of like, we’re all up-and-coming people doing our own things with our dreams. When you walk into a store here, you see they look nothing like the big box stores. In every store, you see there’s personality.
Have you done anything to adapt to how the neighborhood has changed in the past five years?
With all the bars? That’s all [only] at night. I love being in the store on the weekends because before 7pm., you have tourists, families, people coming down having brunch. I think a lot of the cool restaurants down here, like Beauty and Essex and Stanton Social, they bring in a great crowd and then those customers are introduced to the brand.
You’ve recently made some updates to your LES space—can you tell me about those changes?
I was actually passing by this store in Nolita the other day and I saw these beautiful fixtures that people were going to throw out, and we just put them in the store. If we had a bigger budget, I would dream up a store that I wanted, but when you have a small budget, you make the most of what you have and make it pretty and make it seem like it’s a big budget store.
Read the full article by Laura Gurfein from Racked.
