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Founder & maker · Yifeng Tao
à la luck is a one-person studio in Qingdao. Yifeng chooses the materials, designs and knots each piece, photographs it, packs it, writes the words, and reads the replies.
The beginning
For five years before I knotted my first cord, I worked in overseas marketing. I learned how attention becomes commerce, then left because I wanted to understand the whole chain for myself—from sourcing and making to writing, shipping, and every reply.
à la luck is what I have learned so far: one studio, one maker, and no distance between the name on the page and the hands at the bench.
The standard
A final hand-assembly step can hide a long industrial chain. I wanted pieces that earn the word crafted: selected slowly, knotted deliberately, designed once, and described by the actual construction.
The philosophy
A bazi reading first gave me strict lists of favorable and unfavorable things. Looking deeper—including the seasonal rhythm described in Long Summer and Wu Xing—taught me to read the Five Elements as movement and tendency, not a prediction, diagnosis, or instruction to become someone I did not recognize.
The habit
I sculpt with stone clay, paint, write small seal script, work with wire and wool, sew dolls, and make the ceramic discs used in product photographs. The pieces come from that habit of making, not from a borrowed brand pose.
The material
Small dealer lots, older goods returning to circulation, and Himalayan or Tibetan adornment channels can each carry useful context. None of that gives permission to turn a supplier story into a certainty the record cannot support.
Why honest labels matter
“I want the labels to be true, the price to be true to the material, and the promise of edition of one to be true to the fact of one.”
I am not a guru. I would rather you find a piece that feels like yours, wear it for years, and remember the name of the person who made it.
— Yifeng