Starting a Business Empowering Jing Gao to Regain His Name

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Jing Gao insists that passion is not something you are born with, but something you create through hard work. This is a theme reflected in the story of Fly By Jing: The brand started in 2016 as an underground dinner club before Gao launched its Sichuan sauce line two years later. But the theme also talks about Gao’s search for his identity, and how he finds a way to reclaim it by reconnecting to his roots.


Fly With Jing

On International Women’s Day, Gao sat together Businessman to talk about growing Fly By Jing, and how telling the story is key to making this business a success.

Developing inspiration

“Growing up, we moved a lot in countries where you couldn’t really find Chinese ingredients,” Gao said. Although born in Chengdu, China, his father’s job as a professor meant moving around.

“Going from Germany, to England, and then Austria, France, Italy – it’s kind of constant adaptation, code switching, trying to fit in,” Gao said. “So my mother, in a way, inspired me with how she adapted to cooking in countries where we use the limited resources and ingredients we have.”

However, Gao admits that he did not develop a passion for China’s rich culinary landscape until he returned to his early twenties. Seeing Chinese food in its complexity and variety “wake up” his palate, and he knew it was something he wanted others to see too.

Gao’s passion for sharing Chinese cuisine was first manifested in writing for his blog and various publications. But the more he studied, studied, and cooked to understand Chinese cuisine, the more he wanted to get involved with the world of food. In 2014, Gao used his passion to co-found the Shanghai-based restaurant Baoism. The restaurant is revolutionary in that it focuses on transparent, safe, and clean sourced ingredients at affordable prices — a concept Gao has likened to “Chipotle for China.”

She used her restaurant success to create Fly By Jing, an underground dinner club, in 2016. Gao travels the world hosting pop-up dinners in places like Hong Kong, Japan and Australia and running the business as a one-woman show, performing everything from cooking, to branding and interacting with guests.

However, Gao’s efforts teach him that while he loves working with food, his interest in cooking is not always in serving it.

“Operating a restaurant is not something I really want to do,” Gao said. “I really enjoyed it. I learned a lot. But the parts I loved most about the process were product creation, flavor creation, storytelling, and branding. And I also knew that I wanted to bring these flavors to a wider audience on a larger scale. I wanted to challenge existing ideas about what Chinese food should be or should be.”

Related: To Grow, These Founders Had To Kill The Part Of Their Company They Believed To Be Important

Launching Fly By Jing

Gao said Fly By Jing’s transition from a dinner club service to a chili oil product line was natural.

“I run this underground dinner club, and [Fly By Jing] unplanned. This whole trip was very organic,” he said. “But what I really didn’t realize at the time was that when I cooked all of these dinners, it was my consumer research. Instantly, I could see their response to the taste. So by the time I launch a product, I already know which ones resonate with people.”

Image credit: Fly By Jing

Gao left Shanghai and moved to the United States to pursue entrepreneurship. Although he had never lived in the US before, his experience writing for publications in that country encouraged him to build products there.

But even though he had ideas for food products, scaling his ideas was a different matter. In order to raise the appropriate capital to run the project, writer-turned-chef-turned-entrepreneur created a campaign on Kickstarter.

“I decided to launch Kickstarter first and test the US market and see the taste for what I was doing. So I made my video in Chengdu talking about taste, going to the spice market, talking about the importance of these ingredients and really showing that this is a new paradigm of Chinese food, and that it can be high quality food. food out there,” said Gao.

This story resonated with people, who saw the value of the product in introducing complex Sichuan flavors in a way that had never been done before. Gao initially set off with a goal of $35,000, but he ended up with the $120,000 promised on Kickstarter — more than three times his goal.

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Business lessons from travel

Fly By Jing now sells an array of sauces and condiments, such as Sichuan Chili Crisp, Zhong Sauce, and Mala Spice Mix, in-store and online. In November, the brand expanded to include a range of frozen dumpling products.

Image credit: Fly By Jing

Looking back, Gao sees how the desire to innovate and disrupt the monolith of Chinese cuisine has fueled businesses and their supporters. But it also inspired him to have his identity. For most of his life, Gao has accommodated people from other cultures using the more common “Jenny,” but reclaimed his name two years ago in a feat he says “feels like coming home.”

Reaching this point was no small journey, especially in a business sense. Gao attributes Fly By Jing’s success in part to the fellowship and community he has along the way, which he says have been “the lifeline of this often very lonely and difficult journey.”

“It’s really about alliances and community and helping each other. That has really helped me on my journey — just searching, finding mentors in women I admire who are a few steps ahead of me and then also those who are on the same level as me — and those who are a few steps behind.” Gao said, ” We all have insight and help we can give one another.”

Related: At 15 He Left His Home And Sleeps On A Train Platform. Today He Is Running A Business With Income INR 35 Crore

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