We recently connected with Esther Cho and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Esther, appreciate you sitting with us today to share your wisdom with our readers. So, let’s start with resilience – where do you get your resilience from?
Living 6,234 miles away from relatives in South Korea, my immediate family has always been tight-knit, valuing hard work and selflessness over seemingly all else. My mom was seven years old when she moved to Paraguay and fourteen when she moved to the United States. Her parents were small business owners pivoting from shoe factories and dry cleaners; they were also staunch Christians who believed, quite faithfully, in misogyny. My mom moved often when they immigrated to the United States and she ultimately attended a total of six different high schools—I suppose it’s no wonder that she proved to be such a sympathetic figure following my own freshman year uprooting.
My dad came to the US as a foreign exchange student and met my mom in Virginia. They had my sister while they were still in school, forcing them to balance work, their education, and childcare. As a toddler, I’m told my sister loved grapes, an expensive delicacy to my parents at the time. So, it became a tradition. After buying a small cluster of grapes, they would sit across from her at the table and simply watch her happily devouring grapes in between long days at work and their night classes.
My mom shaped my toughness and adaptability. My dad taught me that patient selflessness is crucial to being a leader. And my sister, who still never shares her grapes, did share her entrepreneurial and ambitious mindset with me. I aspire to succeed for and because of them.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
A month after we launched our online stationery boutique, the George Floyd tragedy occurred and hate crimes towards Asians were drastically increasing amidst the racist pandemic blame game. I wanted to educate and empower through my creativity, so my sister and I created designs that spread our Asian culture and donated proceeds to the #StopAAPIHate campaign and the Asian Mental Health Project. We chose our best-selling product the “Oops Bag,” which was a few sheets of slightly miscut sticker sheets, and decided to dedicate half of the proceeds to different non-profit organizations each month.
We both felt there was a two-pronged lack of representation for Asian-Americans—both in western-based historical education and also in proliferating social equity movements—and wanted to spread our culture in a creative way that anybody could access. So, although our motto was “Bringing stationery serotonin to your door,” I wanted to not just limit it to stationery, but also representation and education. That was how Milky & Co. first connected to a number of other AAPI businesses who shared similar beliefs and goals.
We joined forces with Yu & Me Books, the first Asian-American inspired bookstore in New York City, to create a Chinatown-inspired sticker sheet celebrating all of the cultural beauties of the area. Located in the heart of Chinatown, Yu & Me Books focuses on the diverse stories of the community and uplifting the voices of the underrepresented groups within literature. It’s inspiring to fill in the gaps I myself had witnessed growing up as a female Asian-American entrepreneur and being a part of this continuous story fills me with drive to serve my community.
We are proud that our humble efforts are having an impact on representation, awareness, and communal spirit…and out of curiosity, would you be interested in purchasing one of our Oops Bags?
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
Three skills I view to be integral to my journey are persistence, cognizance, and adaptability.
When we first opened our Etsy shop, we were shocked with the crickets that defined the number of orders we received on launch day. We were met with an uphill climb to build our brand as we didn’t place as much focus on pre-marketing to raise awareness of our brand before launching, thus, we were met with slow business. Instead, if we had first built up rapport and presence, we could’ve had a much more receptive first day. However, despite this, we took the hard learnings into stride and remained steadfast and persistent in our journey. Paired with a constant eye on the market and our audience, we molded to our customers, allowing us to cater to more consumers and groups.
Do you think it’s better to go all in on our strengths or to try to be more well-rounded by investing effort on improving areas you aren’t as strong in?
For my freshman year, I attended Cab Calloway School of the Arts in Delaware, a breeding ground for activism and perpetual unsaid mutual acceptance. Going to Cab gave me the ultimate “whitewashed minority meets culture” experience, featuring a widespread drive for individuality and expression. Upon moving to Arizona, I braced myself for immense change beyond the 120 degree days and 90 degree nights, as I transferred to a charter school built on the pillars of classical education to “find the truth, goodness, and beauty of life.” In reality, it initially felt like that opening I discovered at Cab—a door to freedom of thought—was slamming itself closed.
In retrospect, I had mistakenly adopted a pseudo-mindset of Rousseau’s natural (wo)man. With our strict uniform, rigid scheduling, and relative homogeneity, I felt out of place and constantly cast as the dissenting voice when it came to discussing social welfare, sexism, government oversight, and race-related issues in labor. How in the world was I going to survive Humane Letters? I couldn’t even contextualize the works of Shakespeare, Rousseau, or Aeschylus; how could I muster any sort of contribution to our discussions? So I strode about like a nomad—wary of opposing thoughts.
Thankfully, the strange foundational allure of the classics roped me in and my passion for philosophical thinking grew with every seminar-based discussion. At home, I began putting more hours into annotating profusely and applying my mom’s logic of “When others read something once, read it three times.” I soon found myself adding controversial and intellectually jarring contributions, while also valuing and dissecting the insights of others. I developed a willingness to acknowledge oppositional thinking and then synthesize through a pragmatic lens, working toward something that resembles a collective freedom of thought—which I hope to further realize in my personal and professional journeys.
Contact Info:
- Website: milkyandcostudios.com
- Instagram: milkyandco.studios
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/esther-cho-43ba97242/
