H.
Hi, I'm Stella
I love designing beautiful things and building things people love. I believe in elevating the value of creativity, being radically honest and not following “a set path”.
O.
Once, there was this kid...
…who was born in a small town in Southern China (which she affectionately dubbed “a big, rooster-shaped country with 1.4 billion people”) to a mechanical engineer father and an archivist mother. Sometime between 1990-1995, she developed an obsession of doodling by vandalizing all of the books in her grandfather’s study.
E.
Early signs showed that the kid was peculiar...
…because she didn’t really want to play with other kids. She would rather hang out with the toy trucks, motorcycles and model airplanes her grandfather bought her. She had never owned a barbie doll until the age of eleven, when she wondered what the fuzz was all about the blonde miniature humans. When she finally got one, she was unimpressed.
At the age of seven, she bugged her mother to sign her up for music lessons after a local music entrepreneur showed up at her school introducing an instrument to all the kids. She said: “I want to be a well-rounded kid,” much to her mother’s astonishment.
She went on to play the pipa (a 4-string, pear-shaped Chinese lute) for 15 years and became a regular soloist at local festivals and events.
G.
Growing up, she was obsessed with...
…a lot of things. At the age of eleven, she heard a classmate raved about a book called Harry Potter. Once she got her hands on the book, she couldn’t put it down, so much so she became the president of her school’s Harry Potter fan club (and she started the club). That’s how she learned English.
At the age of fourteen, she became obsessed with Korean TV shows (a.k.a. K-drama) and subsequently taught herself to be fluent in Korean because she couldn’t stand reading subtitles.
While she is currently fluent in English, Korean, Mandarin Chinese and Cantonese (a dialect in China), she has been disappointing her mother since she started speaking full sentences at 15 months old. Her mother expected her to be fluent in a lot more languages, namely Japanese, French, Spanish and Italian, all of which she had attempted to learn but got distracted by other things.
中文
한국어
Eng
T.
The small town girl took the midnight flight...
At the age of seventeen, she decided to move to America by herself and found the name “Stella” in a dictionary (yes the paper one). A few years later, someone would yell “STELLA!!!” at her face, referencing Marlon Brando in A Street Car Named Desire, but it wouldn’t be some time later until she finally watched the movie and realized they were not being crazy yelling at her out of nowhere. She later hung a framed poster of the movie in her bedroom.
When she turned eighteen, she flew across the Pacific Ocean for the first time and landed in Philadelphia 16 hours after taking off from Hong Kong International Airport. She got the ultimate American welcome by being pulled over by the cops only 20 minutes later because her driver had run a red light with an expired license.
In the City of Brotherly Love, she worked hard towards her dream of becoming a television producer while successfully avoiding being mugged 4 years in a row.
However, her TV fantasy was shattered shortly after she graduated magna cum laude from La Salle University. The reality of the industry became clear after her initial job experience. So now what? (And if you didn’t like her Journey lyrics reference, she said her Open Arms are not for you. )
T.
Then it dawned on her...
…that while she clearly sucked at writing, having failed at spitting out 5,000 words a day at her TV job, maybe she’s good at something else. Meanwhile, those poor books she destroyed previously in her life came back to haunt her dreams, where she discovered her love of design. A year of school at Pratt Institute and a couple of jobs all over town in New York later, she started to collect some accolades for her work.
After years of living in constant fear of getting kicked out of the U.S. changing from one work visa to another, she finally received the EB1 “Aliens of Extraordinary Abilities” green card from the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) thanks to her work achievements.
W.
When it's late at night ...
… she is one of those people who loves collecting cheesy quotes.
Where there is love, nothing is too much trouble, and there is always time.
You can't be convenient and special at the same time.
(Question: What would you be doing if you didn't become an actor?) Unemployed.
Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won't so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people won't.
When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.
I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.
I'm too young not to set my life on fire. I'm too old not to spend time with someone I admire.
Don't say you can't afford it. Ask how you can afford it.
B.
Breaking free of corporate life
…sounds like a risky move to many, but after a decade in Corporate America that felt increasingly suffocating, it was the best decision of her life shortly before the global pandemic of 2020. After years of moonlighting as a design teacher, she founded Path Unbound, a design school bridging the gap between outdated and expensive traditional 4-year degree programs and fast-food assembly line-esque bootcamps.
T.
Traveling and living across the world as a digital nomad
…sounds completely deranged to some while others dream of doing so, but to the once peculiar kid who has always been blazing fast in idea execution, this decision came accidentally after repeated failures with real estate choices. After getting herself in a live/work space filled with toxic air, she ran out in the middle of the night gasping for breath. After a 2-week stay in this toxic environment, she decided to pack up her essentials within an hour and took off to travel the world.
By this time, she had already been building her remote company for 3 years. Although not planned, jetting off to faraway land as a newly-minted digital nomad was a happy accident that turns out to be yet another best decision of her life.
She didn’t feel like she belonged anywhere fully her entire life – and now as a digital nomad living across the world, she is finally feeling immensely fulfilled and blissfully happy.
D.
Dancing around the world
After experiencing life’s ups and downs, she found true joy that comes from within in dancing – specifically bachata. It all came from random discoveries from YouTube where she found more and more videos of bachata dancing that she grew to admire. After 2 years of watching these videos thinking she can never do it, a friend convinced her to give it a try because she has had no life other than working 24/7 during the pandemic.
Dancing and nomadic life has afforded her with the incredible opportunity of connecting with like-minded individual while building communities around the world.
S.
Stay In Touch
Have a work related inquiry? Interested in booking Stella to speak? She’d love to hear from you and promise to respond as humanly fast as possible.
stella@stellaguan.com
