Why Sarah Fung launched Hula, her preloved luxury store in Hong Kong – disenchanted with all the waste in fashion, she started an online marketplace and later added physical showrooms too

Aug 21 , 2023

Hong Kong-based Hula founder Sarah Fung launched her preloved luxury online marketplace after becoming disenchanted with all the waste in fashion. Photo: Handout

After studying at Central St Martins, Fung had her own lingerie brand in the UK, then spent 9 years at luxury retailer Lane Crawford before getting irritated with the wastefulness of fashion

The preloved fashion boutique, which sells brands like Chanel, Mugler, Celine and Pleats Please Issey Miyake, did a pop-up at Rosewood, and has a showroom in Quarry Bay’s Taikoo Place

If you were to step into Hula’s expansive showroom in Quarry Bay’s Taikoo Place – the same complex that is home to many of the Hong Kong offices of luxury powerhouse LVMH – you wouldn’t imagine how the brand started out as a second-hand marketplace with a fitful online-only presence.

The gist of that warts-and-all description comes from Hula’s founder, Sarah Fung, remembering the struggles of running the company when it first launched in 2017.

The Hula showroom in Hong Kong. Photo: Handout

The market for pre-owned wasn’t so much nascent as it was non-existent in Hong Kong, and though Fung and her friends had plenty of style to offload, the questions were where to sell and – most of all – who would buy it.

An early entrepreneur whose first post-uni gig was running her own lingerie brand in the UK, Fung was coming off a nine-year stint at luxury retailer Lane Crawford, through the heyday of fast fashion. “Suddenly it got on my nerves – the cycle of fashion,” she says. “I’d studied at Central St Martins and ran my own brand, so I always knew how to make things, and when you have the knowledge of where things come from, you respect them a bit more.”

There was the likes of Milan Station for well-kept bags and accessories, but for ready-to-wear there was a void, and one that few would dare broach, given the Chinese superstition that second-hand goods are considered unlucky. In the early days of Hula, Fung focused hard on shifting that mentality.

“We thought, if you can get bad luck from wearing someone’s clothes, then surely you can get good luck. So we featured some influencers selling some of their wardrobe with the connotation of, actually you can get lucky, because when you buy pre-owned and you pick up that piece that fits you and was a really good price and no one else has it – don’t you feel lucky? That’s a really great feeling and you don’t get that so much when you go to a shopping mall.”

Turning around generations of negative associations was not a one-man or one-brand job and alongside that necessary recalibration was another: the need to counter the constant consumption that so irked Fung.

As fashion giants raced to ape mantras of sustainability, washing (and wishing) themselves green, Hula continued to quietly build an understanding of quality and value, never pointing fingers, offering a shopping experience that equals or exceeds that in a luxury boutique, and pushing an agenda of circular fashion using taglines like the one emblazoned on the showroom wall today: “I shop therefore I sell. I sell therefore I shop.”

Transitioning from a web-only presence to having showrooms – first in Wong Chuk Hang and Central, and now in Taikoo Place – changed the game for Hula, since customers were already requesting to come into the office to touch and try products. Items that weren’t moving online suddenly began to sell. Then Covid-19 came along and people had plenty of time to clean their wardrobes and think about the planet.