Daylily the Modern TCM Asian Beauty Ritual!
“Daylily is designed for the modern woman who strives to maintain internal constitution balance with fresh TCM herbs that taste good.”
When you hear the words try Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) you probably associate those words with an old Chinese myth. Or you are probably visualizing an alleyway street with different herbal smelling concoctions being mixed in the back of the store, people dressed in martial arts, kung fu attire and old Chinese men and women taking people’s pulses and talking about energy, qi and the yin and yang of balance in your body. Sound familiar? A practice that can be traced back centuries ago in China and has proven to do miracle healing ever wonder why in our modern world with marketing and the love of rebranding of products we haven’t seen this ancient tradition go mainstream yet? Meet Daylily a TCM-inspired brand focused on the ancient formulas for Asian women’s health and beauty repackaged for the modern woman. Founded by Eri Wang, a second-generation Taiwanese TCM family business in Taipei and her Japanese business partners Moe Kobayashi and Takeshi Kawano in 2018. I am delighted to have discovered Daylily and spoke to Eri to find out why she chose to create this line and make TCM more appealing and approachable for the modern consumer!
Born and raised in Taiwan, Eri Wang grew up in a family business that ran a TCM shop in Taipei. She studied music, majoring in the clarinet at National Taiwan Normal University, and thought she was going to pursue a music teaching career. While she did teach music to middle and high school students straight out of college, she quickly discovered that this was not the path she wanted to be on. Instead of purely teaching music, Eri felt that she could take her music talents into the business world to try to find a way to integrate the two together. Upon a friend's recommendation, she entered a master’s program in media design, at Keio University in Japan. As Eri completed her first year at Keio working on a music project in which she realized that the innovation involved with music and business did not have as much potential career growth as she had thought prior to entering the program. While conversing with her advisor about which direction she should take, the idea of looking at how TCM is becoming a popular form of modern medicine in Japan soon became the seed that would be planted as her final thesis project at school.
The master’s thesis was simply taking what Eri knew from her family business and TCM and repackage it with a focus on women’s health for the Japanese and global marketplace. Even though Eri graduated from Keio University in 2016 with a completed business plan for the TCM for modern Asian women in place she didn’t go straight into starting her business. Instead, she decided to work for a digital ad agency, Hakuhodo, and a design firm before really considering starting Daylily in 2018 through the encouragement of her graduate school classmate Moe Kobayashi.
Daylily was created with the idea that the day lily flower is orange and in some Asian cultures, the flower represents fertility. The branding philosophy behind Daylily is that women of all ages go through a female rebirthing process. As females, we are born, go through puberty, menstrual cycles, childbirth, menopause, and other hormonal changes throughout our lifetime. With that in mind and as a long-standing philosophy of using TCM to complement the balance within an individual's health to maintain a healthy internal cycle. The founding principles of Daylily is to help Asian women going through hormonal changes in life. Daylily is designed for the modern woman who strives to maintain internal constitution balance with fresh TCM herbs that taste good (since often times TCM medicine does not have a pleasant taste when consumed). Eri and her team focused on products that were geared towards women’s menstrual cycle, addressing the issues of cramps and mood swings, hormonal imbalances and recovery of our energy “qi” post menstruation. From the success of the initial product line they then expanded to offer more remedies focused on other areas like skincare, postnatal care to name a few. In order to create a product line that is suitable for non-Asian women’s constitution so they too can benefit from these remedies, Daylily says they will work on creating a product line that can be beneficial for different ethnicities.
When asked about why Daylily chose to start their market presence in Japan first instead of Chinese speaking market that has an understanding of TCM, Eri says that her parents were the ones that gave her the idea of selling abroad then circling back to the Taiwanese market. If Daylily can become a household brand in which other cultures can see TCM as another form of supplement that is beneficial to women’s health then it can reach a wider audience and eventually come back home to Taiwan where for generations TCM is something we are familiar with growing up. But having said that, Eri informs us that in Chinese speaking communities where TCM comes from, it is often seen as a traditional, old school way of healing that takes too long for those who live in the cities living a fast-paced life that requires quick fixes. The younger generation is also not as interested in TCM as the generation before and it requires a lot of knowledge-based education to reintroduce these ancient practices, theories and know-how back to the consumers. Hence, why we don’t see many TCM businesses rebranding themselves to target this group of consumers, it requires a lot of time and investment as the product is complex and is rather customized!
As a foreigner starting a business in Japan in the health industry field is not an easy task. Eri found that the Taiwanese and Japanese internal team communication was difficult to manage at first, due to language barriers. Concerns like how do we train our staff so they can be excited and motivated to represent your brand and sell your products and educate your customers is a tricky task! But as Eri’s business partners and advisors informed her earlier on, Japan is beginning to ride the wave of the benefits of TCM as they see it as an alternative way to stay healthy using natural remedies. As Daylily found their investors within a year of launching their brand they now have 2 stores in Tokyo, 1 in Osaka, and will open up their 3rd location in Tokyo this winter!
Like many businesses Covid definitely affected Daylily at the beginning of the year since they had to shut down their stores, however, because people wanted to boost their immune systems and were looking into health-related products, their online sales increased during this pandemic. Eri and her partners hope that as more consumers are becoming more health-conscious and looking for alternative ways to practice more self-care and maintain a healthy lifestyle, Daylily will be able to continue to produce more products geared for different female health issues and grow globally to have a presence in the European, Australian and US market! To learn more about Daylily, read their blogs and buy their products visit their website (primarily in Japanese and Chinese), and IG page, for non-Japanese consumers you can buy Daylily through their Pinkoi shop here.
First published on November 9, 2020
