This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Jenny Jing Zhu, 51, New Jersey-based founder and CEO of Lush Decor, a digital home decor company. She shared with Business Insider the challenges of starting a business in an uncertain time and how she overcame it. BI has verfied her company information.
When I started Lush Decor in 2008, I was quietly going through the toughest time in my life.
The economy was collapsing. I was on the brink of divorce. I was learning how to be a parent to my then-1-year-old son. And I was an immigrant in New York still speaking broken English.
But I had already survived a lot of hard things in my life and I think those experiences eventually helped me succeed in business.
I grew up in a tiny, rural village in China. I didn’t have electricity until I was in second grade. I was the only girl in my village who went to high school.
In my last year of school, I read a story about a young woman with a similar background to mine who left her village for the big city in China to become a factory worker. She later started her own business.
That moment changed my life. She unknowingly gave me permission to dream.
So, I left my village and went to Beijing. I started as a hotel maid, and later ran a small dry cleaning business.
I immigrated to the US when I was 26.
I didn’t speak much English at the time. My ex-husband wanted to come to the country for law school. I didn’t really have a choice. I remember when I first got here, I turned on the TV and I felt like I was on Mars.
During that time, as I was learning English, I became inspired by Asian fashion designer Vera Wang. I applied to the Fashion Institute of Technology’s fashion design program, but the major was very competitive. The school told me to wait another year and apply again. But I was 28 and I didn’t feel like I had another year to wait.
So, I ended up applying to and being accepted to the home fashion and home textile surfaces major.
Growing up in my village, we planted and picked cotton and my grandma would put it into yarn on her big, wooden loom. We would bring the fabric to the market, and that’s what inspired my love for textiles.
After I graduated, I worked at a home fashion company for four years. But I always had that entrepreneurial dream, so after learning the business, I felt like I could do better. I saw a blank space in the market for beautiful and stylish designs that were also accessible and affordable.
When I started the company, there were just a couple of people working with me. My job was focused mostly on design and product development.
I was working 24 hours a day at that time. I would design during the day and talk to the manufacturers at night because we had a 12-hour time difference.
But in 2008 and 2009, all the big box retailers started freezing their buying because of the financial crisis. They didn’t want to take any chances on new vendors.
At the time, e-commerce was still new in the home fashion space. Everyone told me that I couldn’t ship comforters or bedding to one customer at a time. They said it would be too expensive and people wouldn’t buy our products.
But I really had no choice, because I couldn’t do traditional business deals given the economic challenges and my own limited business relationships.
We had this very small warehouse behind our office and at the end of each day, I would go slap UPS and FedEx labels on the boxes one-by-one in my high heels. Not very many people were doing it that way in those days. There was no road map. I just learned on the job.
Our designs were unique in a boring market. Our first collection was inspired by Vera Wang wedding dresses. The bedding had hundreds of little bows on it and it sold out. I also used unique fabrics. I went back to China once and found crocodile skin. I put it on a bag and we sold so many of them.
We differentiated ourselves with unique designs, and that put us ahead in the e-commerce business. Very quickly, we became the major brand on the e-commerce market, selling millions of products to customers.
It was scary starting a business in that economic environment.
I knew that only a small percentage of businesses survive the first three years. I felt so much pressure in those early days because I was all on my own.
I had no built-in customer base when I started. No mentor or support community around me. I had no safety net to fall back on. I had such bad imposter syndrome.
I didn’t have an MBA or finance background but I’m very good at numbers. When I met with investors, I told them, I’m not only interested in designing beautiful products; I also design beautiful margins.
All I had was passion and persistence, and that helped me build resilience along the way.
At every point in my life — whether it was growing up in the village or being a hotel maid or nanny — I always found the creativity to make it work. I think that’s in the DNA of entrepreneurs.
I was scared to death, too, but you have to take that first step.
We first saw a profit in 2012.
I still remember seeing that number going up and up. I just thought “Oh my god, that’s the right direction!”
In 2018, I partially sold to private equity. I stayed on as CEO for another three years and then as a board member. In 2021, the company surpassed more than $100 million in revenue for the first time.
The new management, however, didn’t end up working out, so I stepped back into the company fully last year.
The recent tariffs have hit a lot of businesses like ours really hard. Trying to start a business at a time like this is even harder. The 2008 economic crisis was like 1.0; the pandemic was 2.0, and these current times are like 3.0.
We source overseas, and this has definitely reminded entrepreneurs that we need to diversify our supply chains. But even so, there’s not a lot you can do to diversify overnight. A lot of things that come from China, other countries can’t do as efficiently. The tariffs are not just raising the prices; they’re threatening an already fragile supply chain.
A lot of the business community is in really difficult situations right now. Times like these can force businesses to do something that they’re likely lagging to do, which is diversifying their supply chains. Yes, it’s very overwhelming, but you’re not alone. We’re all in the same boat.
Entrepreneurs need to understand and accept what they can and can’t control. Don’t panic. Don’t be angry, even though we are angry. Rely on your community, rely on your resources. Every time you go through things that could break you, you are building more resilience and confidence.
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