Gantri’s CEO on the importance of excellence and why POC designers still struggle to be heard

For Gantri Founder and CEO Ian Yang, the path to building a trendy, sustainability-focused lighting brand hasn’t been straightforward.

Yang jumped from studying philosophy, politics, and economics in college to considering a career in finance and even learning how to code after moving to San Francisco. A stint in design school ultimately shifted his focus, sparking a curiosity about how products are made and the hardware behind them. A few years later, Gantri, a design-forward lighting brand that partners with established and emerging designers, was born.

To mark Gantri’s 10th anniversary, Yang opted for a major milestone: a physical store. Enter The Shop, the brand’s first ever brick-and-mortar location, which opened January 27 in San Francisco’s SoMa district.

The conceptual space functions as a gallery for Gantri’s digitally manufactured lighting products, alongside a curated selection of bestsellers available for purchase. It also serves as a “collaborative studio for design customization,” according to the company, and a hub for Gantri’s local creative community.

Fresh off the store opening, Yang spoke with Retail Brew about Gantri’s evolution, the challenges facing POC designers, and the advice he’d give to the next generation.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

How has Gantri changed in the last 10 years?

We have changed a lot of things with the way that we work our brand, but our vision and mission has always stayed the same today versus 10 years ago, and that is to develop technologies that enable amazing ideas to be realized that weren’t previously possible.

Over the course of the 10-year period, we’ve worked with some of the most amazing designers and design studios and artists, helping them realize their product using our technologies, manufacturing them in the Bay Area, which is a huge challenge from this brand new materials, what we call Gantri plant polymers. They’re like plastic, but made from sugar cane—the first time those materials have ever been used in consumer products. Creating that blend and testing it made sure that’s really good. It’s also been a challenge, but we’ve really been focused on this one mission and that’s where we are today.

What are the biggest challenges facing POC in design today?

Typically, a brand will license a design from a designer and artist, and they will produce it and sell it. Because of the way this whole system is structured, there are very few opportunities for independent voices. You see work made by well-known designers all the time, but it’s really challenging for really talented, emerging voices to be heard in the design world, or just in the home goods and furniture industry in general.

That creates a huge challenge for people who come from different cultural backgrounds, because you have to figure out your voice and what you stand for, how to feel confident and be proud of your perspective, and not always feeling like you’re good enough or your voice does not deserve to be heard. This is something that I personally went through, as an immigrant coming from a Chinese culture. A lot of it is about, “You gotta get your A’s, and if you don’t do that, it’s not good enough.” And as a gay man, there are a lot of “You don’t belong here. You’re doing the wrong thing,” kind of voices. That is a really big thing that I have to overcome.

I’m still overcoming today: how to feel proud, how to feel strongly about my view, about what I believe is right, about feeling confident that my voice should be heard because it’s better for the community, it’s better for the environment. That’s the biggest challenge that I see. It’s totally doable; it’s not an impossible path. But as a person of color, we have to constantly remind ourselves that this is a hurdle that we have to overcome in our career.

What advice do you have for young POC entrepreneurs?

Excellence is often spoken about, but it’s not a priority for a lot of people, because excellence takes patience and work and craft and trade-offs, which are very often difficult to let go of. But excellence is really what’s going to get your work to penetrate through the zeitgeist or the ether. It’s what’s going to make you a better designer or artist or design studio, whoever it is.

Speaking from personal experience, striving for excellence is incredibly difficult, but it's also probably the most worthwhile pursuit and focus for someone who’s starting out, and to do that, it requires a lot of discipline and saying no and pushing away things that don’t contribute towards that, which can sometimes feel very counterintuitive in this hustle culture.

You want to focus on your core, build your strength, and produce really high-quality work. If I can give advice to younger designers or entrepreneurs, just really strive for excellence.