The Bay Area has been home to several emerging brands, which have quickly gone from being stocked in local boutiques to being carried in stores around the world. For several years now we have covered the San Jose based label Elusive and identified their potential and growth from season to season. We caught up with founder Kiet Lé who describes the path of Elusive who describes his decision to open up his own flagship store and staying true to the brand. Read the entire discussion below.
SS: Tell us a little bit about yourself.
KL: My name is Kiet Lé, most know me as Skeet. I taught myself Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and web design when I was 10 around the boom of the internet. When graduating from high school, I knew my parents wouldn’t let me not go to college but I didn’t know what I wanted to study but I knew I wanted to keep doing Elusive. I already knew the basics of the graphic design programs and I wanted to round my skill set so I studied Industrial Design at San Francisco State. Now I run Elusive full time.
SS: How did you come up with the name Elusive?
SS: How did you decide that opening up your own store was the right move for the brand?
KL: We grew a demand for Elusive in San Jose and instead of selling out of my trunk I knew that having a storefront would be the next step in growing as far as visibility and feeding the hunger for the brand. I was also freshly graduated from college so I knew this would be the perfect opportunity to be able to finally work full time for the company.
I saw the potential of a growing presence of the Japantown block in San Jose and it was really a miraculous accident that I was even able to grab a storefront in the neighborhood. I was in the area and decided to swing by and talk to some of the guys on the block and what do you know, a lease was just about to be available so I jumped on it immediately.
SS: How have you been able to distinguish yourself from other brands?
KL: It’s really all a painstakingly planned experiment. As a person, I have a tendency to get bored or lose interest easily, and that may reflect in some of our work. I like to try a lot of different approaches to designs and the pieces that I work on. Our Spring/Summer 2015 line has some of those experiments evident in the collection. You really just have to be yourself and be true to your brand.
SS: Elusive hasn’t followed the trends or done anything because it is popular. How important is staying true to the brand?
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