Rising Stars: Meet Yundi Wendy Zhang

Today we’d like to introduce you to Yundi Wendy Zhang.

Hi Yundi Wendy, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I work in creative direction, building experiential campaigns for brands. Having my headspace occupied by Bloomberg, Airbnb, and Pinterest recently, I also find time to write codes, fine-tune AI models, and make clothes for my personal fashion projects.

I began my career in architecture in Hong Kong while still studying in Upstate New York. I joined a traditional architecture firm and was very lucky to work on a landmark project, the Hong Kong West Kowloon Station, at my first job. As my career developed, I started to seek opportunities to leverage my spatial sensibilities and passion for experiential storytelling in different fields and industries beyond traditional architecture. But at the core of that remained an interest in spatial design, which is both human-centered and narrative-driven.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
Although it took a few years to land myself in a creative direction for experiential marketing, the journey has been quite organic. Moving outside my comfort zone has allowed me to grow, both personally and career-wise.

When the pandemic first hit, I found myself moving back to my parents’ place in Hong Kong, reaching out to all the architecture firms and design studios. I tapped every connection I could to get some meetings in place and eventually started an internship at a fashion x tech startup founded by a female ex-architect. Working with a young business was truly enriching – I learned to think entrepreneurially and interact with clients. Those are values I took with me into the future.

On the creative front, I dived into designing with emerging technologies and came to LA to pursue this undertaking in a post-graduate program. Later, I launched my passion project Future Couture – an AI fashion collection co-designed by me and N/N23, an AI designer I had programmed.

Designing with codes and AI is tricky. But pitching it to decision-makers turned out to be the real hurdle. Whenever face-to-face opportunities arose, I had seconds to sell the vision and to impress. The pitching process is demanding in totally different ways from refining design details, yet super rewarding creatively. Always needing to convey ideas compellingly honed the vision of my projects and improved my creative decision-making.

As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
When I first met Jeavon Smith, CCO of our agency Amplify, he was restructuring the creative department post-pandemic – launching an ‘Innovation’ team and rebranding ‘Design’ as ‘Craft’. With my background working hands-on in technology, architecture, and fashion, our creative vibes clicked instantly. I was super honored when some of my work made it into the company vision deck. It’s been so validating finding a place that embraces my multidisciplinary skills.

I have worked to bring ideas to life, always fuelled by the thought that innovation flows when rolling up sleeves. After manually sourcing 10,000 image posts to train a generative AI model, an early concept of a social-media-driven fashion project emerged. Time and time again, I found that creative insights have sparked when I have taken my various skills into new contexts. Future Couture – a real fashion collection co-designed with AI, grew from an instance when I was experimenting with the integration of a hat pattern and a sleeve pattern using an architecture panellisation approach.

Furthermore, being able to take the project from inception to delivery – from the initial AI prototyping to actually launching the collection – gave me a holistic understanding of the creative process.

Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
I truly believed I would become a pilot after watching the Hong Kong TVB drama ‘Triumph in the Skies’ one summer. While yelling ‘I wanna fly’ at home every day (one of the lines from the TV show), I never thought I would work in creative direction 20 years later.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://yundiwendyzhang.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/zwendyyd/

Image Credits
Worn by Omasan Ekah @omasan.e Photo by Madison Stonefield @hey.hotdog Huge thank you to the team.