"London is the most competitive place, and only the best can make their name in fashion here. I knew that I wanted my brand to be positioned at the luxury end of the market in terms of workmanship, prices and marketing.
I want it to be positioned next to Alaia and Lanvin. Harvey Nichols in London picked up my first collection for spring-summer 2014, buying 80 per cent of the designs, and we are positioned on the first floor with the big designer names. In the first month, we did £17,000 (HK$221,800) of business, which, for a new label, is very good.
Joseph Wan [the former CEO of Harvey Nichols] has been very generous to me; he liked my designs from the beginning and advised me to focus on marketing and how to get into a top-end department store.
I want this brand to be solid: to talk the talk. I am competing with labels that are anything from five to 100 years older than mine, and have more marketing power than me, which makes it a very competitive environment. But I have to follow my heart.
I was born in Zhengzhou in Henan province and by the time I was five I was doing Chinese pen-and-ink drawings and oil paintings, and had a good eye for colour. So my mother got me a private tutor. He said I had talent and she encouraged me. She wasn't a Chinese tiger mother: she is a free spirit and speaks her mind, and she never insisted I got good results at school.
I left when I was 16 to study fashion at Donghua University. My father found me a job at the university when I left, but I knew I wanted to come to England, to the city that produced talent like Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. I was offered a place in 2003 for an MA at the London College of Fashion, but I had to do a six-month English-language course, which I didn't fancy.