Drawing from both parents, Julian Yau brings a new brand of disciplined creativity to a visionary family business 

Upon our arrival at Puyi Optical’s head office, Julian Yau takes great delight in showing us slides. Not the usual corporate kind – more like a visual scrapbook of the last chapter, stitched to the next one. A brand anniversary celebration? Sure. A look back at the past 25 years? Absolutely. But the real focus is the future, which is framed by the youthful Brand Director not as “growth”, but as development of experience – vision, yes, but also meaning.

Gen Z Julian was born in 2000, a year before his father, Jeffery Yau, founded the now multi-city luxury eyewear retailer. “I was in Hong Kong until 14, then went to the US for high school at Choate and college at Wharton,” he recounts, like he is opening the first page of a storybook. He smiles, as if he can already see the ending.

“I’d been sitting in on meetings and hearing about the business since high school. I had a surface-level understanding, but it was clear I couldn’t play any real part in it unless I had a robust business foundation. I set out to study business [finance and management] at the University of Pennsylvania.

“[Afterwards] I saw that my skills – in branding, in storytelling, in connecting different moving parts – aligned naturally with what we were doing. There was work I could genuinely help with [and] that was the confirmation I needed.”

Eyewear as a Canvas

This ‘structure first, magic second’ philosophy runs through everything Yau does ¬– like a disciplined paintbrush. It’s also the reason he talks about his job as something active: fighting for room to create: “At work, a lot of what I do is fight for space – to give ourselves a canvas to work with – and fight to have the tools, the ‘paint’, to create things.”

“My mother [artist Margaret Yau] is an oil painter,” he reminds us, “and in a way I followed in her footsteps – I grew up drawing and building things to play with: paper cars, even paper time machines.”

A paper time machine. That detail lands like a quiet punchline because it explains how Yau thinks: you build, you test, you iterate, you wait, and then you learn. His upbringing also prepared him for a leadership world that doesn’t always reward imagination alone.

“Beyond discipline, patience and humility, my father emphasises character,” he shares fondly. “To him, success never really mattered unless I was able to internalise it properly. If I failed at something, I needed to know how to pick myself back up. If I succeeded, I couldn’t get full of myself. The benchmark was always yourself – did you do your best?”

For any young person imagining that a family business is an effortless inheritance, Yau the younger corrects that fantasy immediately. “He didn’t care much if my grades were good if he didn’t see me try. And if I lost a competition that I’d trained hard for, he’d genuinely recognise the effort. That taught me early on that results aren’t the whole story. The relationship you have with your own work is what matters.” In other words, you don’t get to outsource your integrity.

Firm Eye for Family

In the Gen Z era, young people no longer ‘join’ industries; they collect them. But despite being Puyi Optical’s heir apparent, Yau didn’t just fall into eyewear like fate; he framed it as a bridge. “I approached my career with an open mind,” he explains. “The family business was a legacy, but it only carried that weight and responsibility if I was the right person for the job. It’s hard to separate my interest from my family ties, but honestly, even setting that aside, I think I’d be drawn to eyewear.”

Then he delivers a line that feels like the mission statement hidden inside his career: “Beyond having poor eyesight myself and a desperate need for glasses, the thing that really stands out to me is that it’s a confluence of disciplines: healthcare, retail, fashion, design, craftsmanship.”

The word ‘confluence’ matters here. It’s why he sees a boutique not as a storefront, but as a cross-industry experience. “I’ve always thought of myself as a bridge – in fact, my Chinese name means ‘holy bridge’. I like to think of myself as a bridge between cultures and fields, and eyewear sits right at that intersection.”

Should the next generation feel obliged to further what their parents have built? “No,” says Yau plainly. “I think it’s about you as an individual.” Then he adds the accountability clause: “But you are obligated to be honest with yourself – to genuinely assess whether you’re the right person, and to make the best decision based on that. If you’re not, that’s fine. Bring in people who can help. A legacy is better served by someone who’s truly committed than by someone who’s there out of obligation.”

Seeing then Believing

Having interned in varied environments, Yau explored alternative paths rather than default to the expected one. He earned a master’s degree in data science and worked in that field for a while. “If I’d turned out to take a different path, I’m sure my parents would have been just as proud,” he notes. “The legacy influenced me, but it never dictated my choices.”

Then came the defining realisation. “When you grow up around something, you can take it for granted. But stepping away – being in New York, working in a different context – I recognised how rare Puyi actually is.”

Puyi Optical’s approach has always been personal: understanding each customer’s personality, interests and needs. That’s the brand’s DNA. Innovation is still part of the story, but Yau doesn’t treat it as a replacement for craft. “It’s more nuanced than tradition versus innovation,” he says. “A lot of the traditional things we do at the company actually have room for innovation built into them.”

He also believes that leadership isn’t just “contributing”, it’s earning trust in real time. And he admits the trap of overcorrecting. Which is the kind of vulnerability modern brands increasingly need – not glossy confidence, but responsible humility.

Lens on Life

Yau’s personal happiness is derived from friends, loved ones, family, “and having purpose”. He adds: “To be honest, happiness is one of the things that’s less directly tied to my work itself. Work is my platform – it’s about what I do with it and my relationship to it.”

As the interview wraps, he returns us to who he is – Gen Z in spirit, but not in clichés. The most eye-opening part of our encounter isn’t his education, his finance discipline, or his brand slides. It’s his patience. When our photographer arrives late, he treats it not as a challenge but as a process to respect, the way you respect the slow build of something that matters.

Because somewhere in his childhood – assembling paper cars and time machines – was the same principle: you don’t rush the craft. You build the frame. You align the lens. You let the story come into focus. And that’s why Julian Yau’s brand of Gen Z cannot be labelled loud, careless or performative. It’s creative but structured, and visionary but grounded.

Interview, Text & Art Direction: Joseff Musa     Photographer: Jack Law     Videographer: Iris Ventura