Independent Designer Ma Kai: Exploring Contemporary Chinese Aesthetics And Life Style

People can't always do the right thing or valuable things in life. You can only do what you are good at.

No matter what you do, it is always right to do well first.

Ma Kai independent designer, founder of M essential brand

Because mother is a tailor, Ma Kai has been loved by her mother since her childhood, and studied art and design in a natural way.

After graduation, he went into the exception of a designer who had worked for 5 years, all of which seemed smooth. But he chose to quit his job in London to study, and set up his own brand M essential after returning home. This is not easy for Ma Kai, but everything is worth it.

"Nearly 5 years of exercise in commercial channels have a certain understanding of the whole industry, but this also forms the so-called bottleneck. I want to see some Western practices and other types of design thinking, so I quit."

Compared with commercial designer, independent designer is more difficult. "Transforming from a simple designer to design management or even brand management is undoubtedly a qualitative improvement. However, the original intention of founding M essential has never changed. That is to explore contemporary Chinese aesthetics and lifestyle."

Independent designer is a new word in China. In recent years, it has been gradually mentioned and paid attention to, so the difficulties faced by this generation of independent designers are more obvious.

"Many difficulties come from the mismatch of resources. For example, fabric development and minimum order quantity is a difficulty, but the industry is also changing and getting better and better."

For independent designers, design is only part of all work. From creation to final clothing, publicity and sales, designers are almost involved in every detail.

Design alone is probably the dream of every designer. However, choosing an independent designer has chosen a road with multiple posts.

In Ma Kai's view, "design needs only feelings and expression skills, sensibility is greater than reason, but more operations need rational planning and analysis, and more people are dealing with people."