Jessie Wong

INFO

Name	Jessie Wong (she/her)
Also known as	Jessica Yu Mei Wong
Born	1993
Country of Birth	Aotearoa
Place of Residence	Pōneke Wellington
Ethnicities	Chinese (Cantonese), Pākehā
Artform	Design, Fashion
Decades Active	2010s, 2020s

ABOUT

Jessie Wong is the Pōneke-based designer and founder of Yu Mei, a luxury leather handbag brand known for simplicity, functionality and focus on sustainability. The label's name draws on Wong’s middle name, which roughly translates to ‘young and beautiful’.

Launched in 2015 when she was 21, Yu Mei was a response to the fact that Wong “couldn’t find [a bag] that would carry everything she needed in a day, discovering that most were based on a blueprint of women’s role in society 100 years ago.” Her first bag, the Braidy Bag, was designed to be big enough to fit a phone, laptop, lunchbox and an A3 visual diary. “I made bags on a trestle table in south Dunedin,” she has said, speaking about the beginnings of the company. “And at one particularly chaotic stage, [I] stayed up for four days and three nights to finish production on one of our first collections.”

In approaching a new design, Wong starts with a particular artwork or colour palette inspired by a particular artist. “Because everything has been done before,” she explains. “Just not by you. And you have to understand history to create something new in the future.” She also draws on real-life people with real-life needs. “We always come back down to, ‘Who does this actually serve?’” To honour this, each bag is named after the person whose needs have inspired the design. In addition to this, Wong regularly collaborates with local artists, who have included Elisabeth Pointon, Kirsty Lillico, and Nikau Hindin.

Yu Mei uses sustainable materials in their ambition to minimise their environmental footprint, drawing primarily on locally sourced deer nappa (a by-product of the venison industry in Aotearoa that would otherwise be waste) and, more recently, Econyl (“a regenerated nylon woven from discarded fishing nets and old carpets”). Bags are manufactured at a factory in Dongguan, China, “close to Wong’s family village.”

Wong is a third-generation Chinese New Zealander who grew up in Island Bay, in Pōneke Wellington. She started sewing when she was 11, later taking classes at Inverlochy Art House in Te Aro — “I remember what I made in my first class… A super funky black and white striped cowl neck top, terrible in hindsight but my Mum was impressed!” — and graduated with a Bachelor of Fashion Design from Otago Polytechnic in 2014.