Grace Ko

INFO

Name	Grace Ko (she/her)
Also known as	柯馨媛, Grace Hsyin-Yuan Ko
Country of Birth	Aotearoa
Place of Residence	London
Ethnicities	Taiwanese-Chinese
Artform	Design, Fashion, Visual arts
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Grace Ko is an entrepreneur based in London, best known for her jewellery business, Baobei 宝贝 and hearing protection company, Sets. As a multi-disciplinary artist, her practice has included fashion design, modelling, writing, painting, dancing and hosting community events. Her instinct is to use multiple creative outlets to share one idea.

Although Ko was born in Tāmaki Makaurau, she grew up in Pōneke and went to school in Suihua, China for under a year during her Year 4. She attributes her work ethic to the childhood routine of going to private tutoring after a school day until she’d fall asleep at her desk. In Porirua, her immigrant parents ran a shop called Da Deals for over 20 years. The shop retailed goods for Pacific Island communities such as lavalava, fabric and flowers. Ko grew up seeing her parents run the shop and doing flea markets, which instilled an entrepreneurial spirit in her:

We lived upstairs in the shop, sharing one room between me, my mum and dad and my grandparents. We’d play cards all night and watched shows on what would now be considered an antique TV. By day, we’d all migrate to the shop floor. I’d watch my parents restock clothes, cut fabric, make beaded necklaces.

Baobei 宝贝 came about at the start of the Covid pandemic in late 2019. To keep busy during isolation, Ko threaded deadstock beads from her parents’ shop to make jewellery for the Pacific Island community, who were the main customers of Da Deals, and later for her friends. While doing so, she learned to reclaim love for her culture and upbringing. She says that because of the racism and violence that happened on the shop floor, she was “never proud” of her parents’ work. “Baobei began as a way for me to honour my heritage, and it’s now grown into something much more, a way for me to connect to my community,” she told Apparel Magazine.

The same year Baobei started, she graduated from the University of Auckland with a Bachelor of Commerce and a Bachelor of Arts. She says working in both the robotics and creative fields has encouraged her to express the spectrum of her personality, moving in and out of the corporate world.

Baobei grew into a fashion label with “signature hot pinks, scatterings of bows and [a] healthy stock of baby tees printed (or bedazzled) with self-affirming phrases”. She describes it as “superficial and very bimbo-core” and an ironic way to reclaim the male gaze. The brand embodies Ko’s passion for enabling people to be their authentic selves and nods to her Chinese culture through materials such as the red string on her iconic LOVE U pendants.

In 2021, two years after starting Baobei, Ko and her best friend, Emily Janus, co-founded Sets — a clubbing solutions company — after stuffing toilet paper in their ears at a concert because the music was too loud. Their vision was to create a premium hearing protection solution that was comfortable, reusable, and reduced noise evenly at all frequencies while campaigning on sound safety. Since then, Sets has been sold at events such as Filth and Nympho in New Zealand and Margins United in London, and its products include other merchandise designed for clubbing and concerts.

Ko is also an artist and producer. In 2021, she co-hosted THE THERAPY OF DANCE in Auckland with Jordan Malthus. The initiative provided weekly dance classes in Tāmaki Makaurau, which would usually be preceded by intimate conversations around mental health. Ko was later part of the group exhibition, sailing lanterns, at Toi Pōneke, with a piece composed of blonde wigs and Chinese calligraphy. It wasn’t until being in this exhibition that she considered herself an artist.

When Ko quit her corporate job in 2023, she began focusing on growing Sets and leading community connections through Baobei. She worked with other Asian woman-led businesses such as Fankery, Moustache, Zangria, Loclaire, Thea Matcha, Bare Beauty, Esse The Label and Evil Twins to hold events for Asian women in business to connect and share their stories. Part of Ko’s community-building style is sharing personal, vulnerable stories on cultural identity, gender, and love. She was featured in Re:News’ Dating While Asian, speaking about her experience of heartbreak, and has written about her mummy issues in Ensemble after hosting a ‘mommy issues’ workshop with Creative Creatures in 2023 for young Asian women in Tāmaki Makaurau. In Te Papa’s Unravelling threads: Asian mental health zine (2022), she wrote:

Having a split cultural identity used to confuse me. I felt like I was one person at school and another at home. By 9am I was pretending like I would never eat chicken feet. By 2pm I was slacking in stats, relying on the teacher to over-explain ratios. By 4pm I was on the phone to the IRD sorting my parents’ taxes. By 7pm I’m translating Chinese to English in an email to the council.

At the end of 2023, she left Aotearoa for London, working as a business analyst for the BBC and an AI analyst for Ciklum while continuing to develop Baobei and Sets. In 2025, Ko closed Baobei to make time and space for herself. During this time, Ko studied acting at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama.