She’s created a bikini brand for surfers, and she just raised seed funding

With just US$1,500 in her pocket in 2017, then 22-year-old Beckie Liu flew to the Indonesian island of Bali to chase her dream of starting a bikini brand.

“Having a business was the last thing on my mind,” she says. All she wanted to do was surf: she picked up the sport at 18 years old and instantly fell in love. Surfing – and the traveling that came along with it – was an antidote to the hustle and bustle of city life.

Beckie Liu / Photo credit: Haikini

Gradually, she started a community of female surfers in Singapore on Instagram and Facebook.

It all happened organically, she adds. “Over the years, I’ve built up a certain level of credibility in Singapore as the person to go to when you want to learn about surfing. I was just active on social media.”

So she has taken the natural next step. Liu hopes to build Haikini into a lifestyle brand for active women – think Lululemon for surfers. Besides designing and selling her own apparel, she’s organizing surf camps for women and ramping up her brand’s – and her own – social media presence.

She embodies her company. “I don’t see it as work. It’s just my passion. It’s fun. It’s good to know that I’m impacting and inspiring girls to go surfing when they’re still young,” she tells Tech in Asia.

Almost gave up

With limited starting capital – some of which came from her parents – Liu had to get creative. With the goal of selling just 60 units for her first collection, making them in China wasn’t economical.

She ultimately chose Bali because it’s “handmade, ethically sourced, and also on a smaller scale. You can also scale from there.”

Plus, she could surf and work at the same location.

Photo credit: Haikini

But finding a manufacturer was hard, largely because she was new and unknown. Producers want recurring business. They don’t want to work with someone who’d make one order and never return again.

She looked up 10 producers online, but none of them panned out. One manufacturer quoted her too high a price.

Seed funding