In conversation w/ CREMAISH

JULY 25, 2022 → WORDS ADRIÁN GOMIS EXPÓSITO

With the concept of the amazing feelings good coffee gives at the core of the brand, with the word crema representing the top layer of the coffee, a synonym of quality and a pretty symbolic trait for the designers Kwai Yuen Chan and Yi Hsuan Tsai, adding the suffix ish to bring the customers products that they have a yearning for on a daily basis, the founders of CREMAISH share with us their story and the peculiar traits of their brand. Kwai Yuen Chan and Yi Hsuan Tsai tell SICKY everything about the brand, from its foundation to the present, the concept behind it, why they give that importance to coffee, and how they do such incredible pieces for their brand.

Endorsed by incredible professional experiences and outstanding education in design, Kwai Yuen Chan and Yi Hsuan Tsai founded CREMAISH, a brand whose concept of design is centered around the idea of diversity and inclusiveness. With the use of coffee as a representation of their attitude towards life and one’s inner aesthetic, the brand also aims to merge materiality with creativeness perfectly balanced, delivering both the beauty of simplicity and complexity at the same time. Centered around women’s bags as its main product, you are going to be mesmerized by the shapes, colors, and aesthetics of CREMAISH.

I see that both of the brand’s founders, Kwai Yuen Chan and Yi Hsuan Tsai, have a great education in fashion and an impressive résumé. How did you both benefit from all those experiences and what made you start your own brand? 

Kwai: Creating my own brand has long been my dream and it has unwittingly sneaked onto my bucket list. Since I returned home four years ago, I have been working on the development and design of bags, despite my background in fashion design. With the help of my three-year experience, I’ve established connections with many factories, and more importantly, I’ve learned a lot from failures. Growing from failures, I wanted to ensure a steady start for the brand with my resources and experience, so I decided to create the brand starting with bags.    

Yi Hsuan: My experiences after graduation dragged me from imagination to reality. In the world of stylists, efficiency and rigor are valued. My experience in this field improved my teamwork skills and professionalism. Later on, my experience in the design field helped me to understand the courage and wisdom needed to create a brand. We decided to create our brand when both of us were unsatisfied with our lives, and it was the realistic urgency that drove us to take action for our dream.  

The name of your brand is really interesting. Could you tell me what led you to put this name on your brand? Why the reference to coffee? 

Kwai: Crema means the layer of foam on a cup of coffee, and the thickness of crema determines the quality. It is a concept. Crema represents coffee. Drinking good coffee is what we need every day, and it is an indispensable part of our lives, a pursuit, and a yearning for beauty. We love art and design, and we want to put our love and aesthetic visions into our products. In addition, ish is a suffix in English meaning “it seems to be something” or “like something”. It perfectly integrates what we want to express. If I’m asked to explain it in one sentence, I’d like to say that Cremaish is a concept that the founders are incredibly obsessed with, and it is also what they aspire to do through their products.  

Yi Hsuan: It is a part of our daily routine to make ourselves a cup of coffee, which is a beautiful moment in our daily cycle.  The name Cremaish is the brand’s aspiration to make what “people probably yearn to be like that” and to make our customers feel good, just as soothing as our morning coffee. We hope that our brand can provide an environment where we can share what we consider good with people who empathize with us.

How do you translate that love of yours for coffee and what it represents to you into the pieces you design? 

Kwai: I can’t answer this question in a literal way because the coffee we refer to is an embodiment of what we love and what we are longing for. Therefore, we cannot directly draw inspiration from our love for coffee. What we do is design our products based on the concept of our brand name. To be more specific, our products can be combinations of keywords such as pragmatism, minimalism, modern and independent women, and all art forms we love, as well as fragments of other references.    

Yi Hsuan: The deep meaning of coffee is that we want our designs to be close to combinations of wonderful things in our daily lives. We hope to create products in such a pure mood and with our unique aesthetic tastes, and these products can also make us comfortable.

Your brand focuses on diversity and inclusiveness, and it merges materiality with creativeness, creating a sense of balance, and delivering both the beauty of simplicity and complexity at the same time. What’s your creative process and how do you mix simplicity and complexity? 

Kwai: Before designing the first season of products, we carried out a social survey and found that in the Chinese market nowadays, many bag brands are competing to use exaggerated colors of leather and eye-catching metal accessories, which are indeed strong competitive edges. However, if the majority is scrambling for such a style, maybe it is another way for us to stand out in the competition to do exactly the opposite. We highlight less is more.  

Good products are designed to serve people in need. In particular, in an era with a wobbling economy, high-quality and practical products that are low-profile and a little bit special are likely to attract those who stay true to themselves rather than going with the flow. The trickiest thing for us is how to add novelty to the simple appearances of the products. Maybe our brand cannot solve a huge social problem in this giant social system or make a remarkable contribution, but we are determined to serve those independent and unique groups of people who are devoted to themselves rather than following the herd.   

Yi Hsuan: I want the design to be essentially simple. The complexity I define is not the superficial complexity, but the complexity in terms of the conveyance of content, be it the diversity of character, the independence, and richness of thinking, or the subtlety and complexity of emotion.

The Lava and Baguette silhouettes from your Fall-Winter 2022 collection named A Date With Mark really surprised me with their uniqueness. Why did you decide to design these bags in this specific shape? Do they have a functional and/or aesthetic purpose? 

Kwai: Our bags are just like women, with different personalities and different aesthetic tastes. They may not be perfect, but they are special for sure. We’ve successfully used these characteristics in the development of our second season, focusing more on the notion of personalities of women from the inside out while designing our products.    

Yi Hsuan: Women’s thinking is regarded as the core of our design. Mark is Mark Rothko, an abstract expressionist artist and also one of our favorite artists. We’ve created a series of works that pay homage to Mark Rothko in our own artistic style to establish a vibe of her being immersed in the gallery and looking at Mark’s paintings, an independent woman’s pursuit and enjoyment of the life that she longs for, and her desire for the good things.  

How do you see the future of your brand? What can we expect from your future collections? 

Kwai: I have faith in the future of CREMAISH. We want to present the CREMAISH aesthetics to those who like us and share with them what we love and what we are obsessed with. We’d like to use a special visual presentation that focuses not only on the products but also on the storytelling behind them. Our focus is placed on bags at the moment, and we hope to launch more categories of products and eventually get into the global market.  

Yi Hsuan: Through this brand, we provide our customers with an environment where they can access beautiful things that can be extended to all aspects of their lives and boost their sense of happiness. We want to encourage our customers to do shopping in a more conscious way, filter their definitions of aesthetics, and make choices from things suitable for them. We sincerely hope that one day, they know what they want, stop buying things because of others, and don’t let their lives affect their mood for appreciating beauty. They know to be themselves, they are true to be themselves, and they are joy to be themselves.