Rihanna and Bella Hadid love his sunglasses – now Chinese designer Min Shi wants to make Haze Collection a fully fledged lifestyle brand
- Guangzhou-born, Los Angeles-based designer co-founded eyewear brand Haze Collection in 2013. Jewellery and perfume collections are next up
- China is Haze’s biggest market, with pop stars Cheney Chen and Yoga Lin fans
Min Shi has occasionally been asked by some of the fashion labels he has worked with to create some spectacularly impractical sunglasses.
“I listen to what they want and never shut down their ideas, but when they say, ‘let’s put a live goldfish on the side of the lens’, I tell them it’s crazy,” says Shi.
The Guangzhou-born, Los Angeles-based designer co-founded eyewear brand Haze Collection in 2013 with his childhood friend and former investment banker Erin Zheng. Its sleek and sophisticated styles, which are priced in the US$250 to US$300 range, have been worn by the likes of Rihanna, Bella Hadid and Olivia Munn, and can be picked up at prestigious stores worldwide such as Galeries Lafayette in the Middle East and Lane Crawford in Hong Kong.
The soft-spoken and unassuming Shi agrees it’s all a bit of a marvel given he never set out to design sunglasses to begin with.
“In the beginning, I didn’t find it interesting,” says Shi over coffee in Sherman Oaks, just outside Los Angeles. He was a student at the Rochester Institute of Technology in upstate New York before stumbling into the trade.