Yifeng Tao

The maker behind à la luck — solo, in a studio in China, with strong opinions about handmade and a quiet philosophy borrowed from the river of energy.

I left marketing to make things

For five years before I knotted my first cord, I worked in overseas marketing.

I tuned campaigns for other people's brands — read funnels, wrote copy, watched dashboards, followed clicks into purchases. The work taught me how attention becomes commerce. It also left me with a question I couldn't answer from inside a team: when a campaign succeeded, was it because we executed well, or because the brand had already earned enough trust to carry it? When it failed, was the issue upstream in acquisition, or downstream in conversion?

I wanted to know for myself. End to end. Sourcing, making, photographing, writing, listing, shipping, replying to every email — every link of the chain in my own hands.

So I left.

The shorter version is that I was tired of being a small piece in a large machine, optimizing for someone else's quarter. I wanted to build something I could own all the way through, and use the building of it to find out what I was actually capable of on my own. à la luck is what I've learned so far.

I have a problem with "handmade" that isn't

I chose jewelry because I love handmade things, and because once I started looking closely at what's sold as "handmade," I found a problem.

Most of it is factory-strung. Round beads cut by machine, drilled by machine, polished into anonymity, then assembled by hand for ninety seconds at the end of a long industrial chain. The listing still says "handmade." The price stays low. The customer goes home thinking she bought craftsmanship when what she actually bought is supply chain.

I'm not impressed by it. I make pieces I'd want to buy.

That's not a generic taste preference. It's specific. I think people who care about jewelry deserve pieces that actually earn the word crafted — knotted slowly, sourced selectively, designed once. The round-bead industrial bracelet stacked twenty deep on every "spiritual" Instagram store doesn't earn that word. It's frictionless to produce and frictionless to forget.

If I sound opinionated about this, I am. Five years of marketing taught me how the supply-chain magic trick works from the inside. I'd rather show you the real thing than help anyone get better at the trick.

The aha: bazi, and the river of energy

This is the part of the story most people don't expect from a jewelry founder.

After I quit my job, I went through a stretch of not knowing what came next. When you're in that stretch, you become curious about destiny — your own, specifically. So I had my bazi (八字, the Chinese eight-character birth chart) read. The reading said I'm Yi-wood (乙木) — the second of the ten Heavenly Stems, classified as the soft, vital wood-element personality. The reader gave me a long list of favorables and unfavorables — colors, directions, materials to pursue or avoid.

For a while I followed the list. The chart said I was earth-heavy and that earth restrains wood, so I steered away from khaki and warm cream. I tried to live by the rules.

Two things broke that.

First: khaki and warm cream are the exact colors I love. Following the rules was making me a person I didn't recognize.

Second: many people in the world share my bazi. If the chart literally determined our lives, all those people would live identical ones. They don't.

So I went deeper.

What I found is that bazi isn't a prediction system. It's a description of how energy tends to flow through a person at a given moment. Not "this thing will happen to you," but "this is the natural tendency of your field right now."

The five elements don't simply destroy and generate each other in some flat binary. Wood generates fire doesn't mean wood burns — it means a vital force, taken to its peak, blooms into something brilliant. Metal restrains wood doesn't mean an axe felling a tree — it means a refining, contracting force shapes a growing one. The energies move and balance. Being restrained isn't bad. Being generated isn't good. There are right moments to ride each.

Once I understood that, I stopped fighting my own chart and started reading it as a weather report. Life is a long drift on a river of energy — high water, low water, headwind, tailwind. None of it is personal, and none of it is fundamentally bad. You learn to steer.

That same framework is what lets Chinese cosmology name a fifth season the Western calendar skips — Long Summer (长夏), the late-August ripening window. Wu Xing isn't four seasons forced to fit five. It's a system that always counted five.

A line I keep close, from the Chinese writer Shi Tiesheng:

"I have often thought that the plain woman makes the beauty; that the fool brings forth the sage; that the coward illuminates the hero; that sentient beings deliver the Buddha."
— Shi Tiesheng (史铁生)

Every "thing" in the world depends on the thing it appears to oppose. Nothing happens in isolation, and nothing is purely bad. That's the philosophy underneath every piece I knot. The brand I'm building runs on it.

What I make when I'm not knotting

The knotting is the part you see. It's not all I make.

In the same studio, on the same table, I sculpt with stone clay. I paint. I write characters in small seal script (小篆). I wire metal. I build small models. I felt wool. I sew handmade dolls. I throw cup mats from clay — the small ceramic disc you see in product photos, the one each piece rests on for the studio shot, is something I made for that purpose.

I'm a person who makes things. Talismans are the line I sell. The rest is the field around them.

I mention it here because the pieces don't come from a brand strategy. They come from a habit. The habit of choosing to make a thing instead of buy it.

How I source

Every stone in every piece is one I picked.

To get there I wore out every supplier platform I could find. I joined dozens of live-streaming sourcing rooms — the kind where Tibetan and Himalayan suppliers walk a camera past trays of stones for hours at a time — and watched until I could tell, from across the screen, which stones were ordinary and which were unusual. I added supplier contacts until my address book stopped accepting new ones.

What you find, once you've looked at enough stones, is what people actually mean when they say quality. Color saturation that isn't dyed. Inclusions that read as terrain, not flaw. Faces that take light differently. Surfaces not tumbled into anonymity.

Two source families I return to: old goods circulating back (老货回流 — pieces once collected, returned to the market as collections dissolve) and traditional Himalayan and Tibetan adornments sourced from families where the workmanship was the work, before marketing existed as a concept.

I'm not interested in playing the collector-circle game. I've watched what that looks like — what tier of dzi someone owns, who they bought it from, which lineage. It exhausts me. Stones are beautiful because they're beautiful. Provenance is interesting context, not status.

What's rare is expensive because it's rare. That's an honest description, not a marketing line.

Why honest labels matter to me

The strictest rule in this studio: if a stone is Magnesite, I say Magnesite. Not "white turquoise." Not "howlite" — they're different minerals.

The reason this is a rule is personal.

I've been the customer who looked at a piece years after buying it and realized the seller hadn't told her what she was wearing. There's a specific feeling in that moment — half foolishness, half "well, lesson learned." Most people who love stones go through some version of it.

I don't want anyone to have that moment about a piece of mine.

What I want, when someone opens a drawer ten years from now and pulls out the talisman they bought in 2026, is for the thought to be: that was a good one. I should see if she's still making. I want my pieces to be kept, not pushed to the bottom of a jewelry box during a tidy-up.

For that to be true, the labels have to be true. The price has to be true to the material. The promise of "edition of one" has to be true to the fact of one. None of this works if any of those tilt.

It's not a marketing position. It's how I want to be remembered as a maker.

What I hope you take from this

I've written more here than I usually do.

If you've read this far, I hope a few things landed: that there is a real person behind these pieces, that the standards are mine and held on purpose, and that the philosophy underneath the brand is something I lived into rather than borrowed for a tagline.

I'm not a guru. I'd be uncomfortable being treated as one. What I'd like instead is simpler — that you find a piece here that feels like yours, that you wear it for years, and that when you tell someone where you got it, the sentence ends with my name and not with "some Instagram brand I forgot."

That would mean I built something.

— Yifeng

Find me on Instagram @a.la.luck or write directly to hello@alaluck.com. I reply to every message personally, usually within 48 hours.