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KAILU Silk
Rooted in Heritage, Redefined for the Way We Live Now
Overview
Date Established | 05/2018 |
Founder | LiLi Tan |
Headquarters | San Francisco |
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Beauty
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Health & Wellness
E-commerce & Retail
Sustainability
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|
Website | https://www.kailusilk.com |
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About
KAILU is a luxury Chinese-American bedding brand, featuring silk-filled bedding collections with contemporary designs and natural materials that honor centuries of artisan expertise. Designed in San Francisco and proudly handmade in the Yangtze River Delta, China, KAILU’s home furnishings are filled with fluffy silk that is hand stretched by local artisans for an indulgent night’s sleep and long-lasting comfort.
Meaning “Open Road” in Mandarin, KAILU’s mission is to open the road for those who desire high-quality, meaningful goods that benefit others and themselves. KAILU works closely with artisans whose families have passed down the sericulture tradition for generations, and live in charming ancient water towns in the Yangtze River Delta (start of the maritime Silk Road and favorite silk region of Qing Dynasty emperors).
KAILU hopes to benefit the sleeping and waking lives of its customers and artisans. Its silk is created with thousand-year-old techniques — being farmed by mom-and-pop farmers who hand-feed their silkworms organic mulberry leaves, and processed with low-waste methods, drawing limestone-enriched waters from the delta rather than using fresh water. All tips, minus taxes, are given to the artisans to continue the handcraft and encourage younger generations to move back to the fading silk villages. Plus, any returns and retired samples are donated to the Compassionate Healing Foundation, which supports cancer patients with skincare, spa and beauty therapies to help lessen side effects — including hot flashes and hair loss — due to chemotherapy.
Founding Story
Snuggled between the top shelf and ceiling of founder LiLi Tan's San Francisco closet is what started this journey. The outside is a white jacquard fabric decorated with what can only be described as ocean waves juxtaposed with sheep. (Yes, as in the baa baa variety.) And beneath the fabric is hand-stretched raw silk.
Tan bought her first silk-filled blanket during her first trip to China in 2008. She was 28 years old and working as an associate features editor at ELLE, when the magazine sent her to Beijing to write a story about the Olympics. During a sightseeing stop at Heng Yuan Xiang, a home goods brand founded in 1927, she watched as four women stood around a table for hours, tugging,
coaxing, and lengthening small pieces of raw silk into thin layers of fine filament that spanned the size of a bed. She was mesmerized. This was unlike any factory or anything, really, she had ever seen.
For the next 10 years, as she moved from New York to Beijing, to Hong Kong, and then to various U.S. cities working as a journalist, she brought that comforter with her, without ever giving a thought to turning it into a business. In 2018, she founded KAILU after an awful night’s sleep at a friend’s place in Los Angeles, under a synthetic comforter that made her wake up multiple times in a sweat. “Why don’t you have silk-filled blankets?” she asked, crankily. “Where can I get one?” her friend replied.
Tan began to look for silk-filled bedding in the United States, but when she did find the rare item, it was hard to determine where the silk was farmed, and the designs were more traditional. She also learned about the struggling silk villages of Yangtze River Delta (once the beginning of the maritime Silk Road and the favorite silk region of the Qing Dynasty emperors), which, in recent years, have been practically abandoned as younger generations left to work in megafactories to make cheap goods. She realized she needed to open the road between time-honored Chinese materials and western aesthetics, and saw the need for better representation and high-quality heritage products, to create a brand Asian-Americans could be proud of.
Starting KAILU was also a way for her to connect with her culture, though, for much of her born-and-raised-in-Wisconsin life, she was only able to participate from afar. It came as language, food, and duty. But this way, she could learn more about her heritage through artisan stories, raising the profile of high-quality Chinese handcrafts, and working to support and revitalize these charming silk villages.
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Team Bios
LiLi Tan is a 2x Emmy-award winning journalist who discovered the struggling silk towns of the Yangtze River Delta during her time in China, starting from the 2008 Olympics. She was formerly a field reporter for NBC Bay Area and a magazine editor at ELLE, Tatler, and People StyleWatch, where she tested and reviewed many luxury products. She now lives near San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park with her mini goldendoodle Marty (who only sleeps on silk).
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