HOW IT WAS BORN

Hi, I’m Eunhye, and EUNE is my baby. I want to tell you my story from the very beginning; it's going to get a bit personal.

Being an influencer is fun and stuff. When I started, I had no idea how this crazy fashion world works and so many goals I wanted to accomplish. As time went on I started to achieve some of them: I’ve worked with my dream brands, attended fashion shows all over the world, booked big campaigns and gotten prestigious press coverage. I love doing what I do. But at a certain point, I felt something changing in me… something was missing. I thought when I had it all I would be happy.

I have come to realize that what was missing in my career was something more meaningful. I was attending fashion weeks, changing 10 times per day, getting little to no sleep, no personal time, every day another flight. In and out, in and out. No routine, no home base. Don’t get me wrong, I love fashion and I love what I do. But I took it all too seriously. I realized I needed to do something more meaningful. Something that can actually have an impact.


I had played with the idea of creating my own brand that was fully honest and had the best possible sustainable approach but in my head it was impossible. What do I know about production? I work on the other side of fashion. But there were so many signs. I watched The True Cost. I remember sitting on my couch, barely able to breathe. I cried. It touched me. What we forget with all these clothes and all these collections (some that come out weekly) is that there’s a human cost. Everything we wear has been touched by real humans; humans with families, humans with their own set of dreams.


THE IDEA BEHIND EUNE

My number one belief is transparency. I think honesty, authenticity and being true to yourself are some of the most important values in today’s society. With that in mind, I will disclose the factories I use and why I use them. I’m working with small factories, most of which are family owned, and I have been inside each of them watching our pieces being produced. I have talked to the owners who have a proud history of production, sometimes stretching back multiple generations. I have seen the workers, the people who work hard so that we can have a new piece of clothing. It is touching and it means so much to me. There is a cost to clothing, so it shouldn’t be something we wear once and throw away. I will be 100% transparent about pricing. You will know what you’re paying for: the material cost, the labor cost, the transportation cost. You will see the margin that we get.

MATERIALS

Did you know that almost no brand discloses the origin of the yarn? We use mills from KOREA. It is a shame that the word ‘Sustainable’ is thrown around so loosely as a buzzword. Brands use it as a marketing tool.

In fact, many brands invest more money in marketing the perception of sustainability than in actually making efforts to be sustainable. Scary, right? The problem is there is no real definition of sustainability. Financially, a brand is sustainable if it makes enough money to survive the business year. For some, sustainability means using recycled materials. For others sustainability means being CO2-neutral. Here is my personal definition of sustainability, defined by doing a lot of research and deciding what aligns most with my values and what’s most important to me.

DESIGN

When I began researching sustainable clothing, I couldn’t find a brand that married full transparency, affordability, and great design. Sometimes I liked a piece but something was off: the quality, the length, the feel. Or sometimes pieces were great but they looked cheap. Working in high fashion has taught me so much about quality and fit. I have very particular taste and I want people to feel how I want to feel in my clothes — powerful and comfortable.