How An Accidental Entrepreneur Uncovered America’s Love For Asian Food

Alex Zhou says that he understands what his customers want, and that their needs resonate with him, because he is one of them.

And now the Chinese boss of America’s biggest Asian online marketplace is at the helm of a business which wants to bring Asian food, culture and lifestyle to the whole of America.

Zhou is the, perhaps unlikely, founder and CEO of Asian marketplace Yami. Not an Ivy League graduate with a global scale-up dream and multi-million-dollar funding, but simply a young man who had moved from China to the U.S. to attend Kansas State University and couldn’t find his favourite foods from home.

In fact, he recalls, he had to drive for hours to find Asian groceries and figuring that he could not be the only one inspired him to start the online Asian marketplace Yami.

So how do you go from nostalgia for Asian snacks to an appetite for taking on the ecommerce giants of mainstream America?

Zhou pointedly says he never coined the phrase “start-up” to describe what he began, instead Yami was just a business he created post-graduation.

Zhou had moved to Los Angeles and admits that in creating an ecommerce business to help American-based Asian consumers find familiar products, the fact that LA had a significant Asian population and was the gateway for much of the product arriving from China, Japan and Korea had not occurred to him.

“It’s also about timing,” says Zhou. “Not only was I in the right place but when I began the business in 2013 it coincided with a huge rise in the number of people coming from Asia to study in the U.S. And of course, like me, they missed the familiar food from home.”

Zhou Starts With Asian Snacks

Zhou established Yami – at the time as Yamibuy – and for the first three months was the company’s sole worker, before taking on his first employee. Today, the ecommerce retailer boasts over two million customers, with an estimated one in 10 Asian Americans using the platform, Yami reckons.

Starting with Asian snacks, the site now contains over 300,000 SKUs, including food, beauty and health products, home appliances, books and a growing roster “as our customers grow up and need new things for their homes and for their new families”.

The early years of the business were about servicing that traditional customer base but Yami in recent years has expanded beyond serving Asian consumers and in doing so has had to reexamine its strategy.

“We first realized that our products were appealing to a broader base when we noticed a lot of non-Asian names on the order forms, so we figured we better start investigating,” he says.

“But our Asian customers know what they are looking for and largely search by specific brand name. If you look at Asian websites, they tend to be packed with information and very busy. For a broader Western customer, searches are likely to be much vaguer, like ‘Chinese tea’ or ‘spicy noodles’, so the search and journey are completely different,” he says.

Zhou adds that new customers tend to be from one of three backgrounds: people with an enthusiasm for Asian cuisine, those who have lived in Asia and returned to the US, or those influenced by the rising appeal and influence of Asian pop and food culture.

To that end, Yami works with Asian chefs and restaurants to acquire Asian-food lovers but in starting to move beyond competing with other Asian marketplaces and facing rivals such as AmazonAMZN
, WalmartWMT
and TargetTGT
, the company also needed to start meeting the very high expectations those companies have created around delivery.

Yami Expands Distribution

Most recently, Yami has opened an East Coast warehouse, which will enable shipping times that rival Amazon Prime’s across the U.S. — an average of just 2.6 days, Zhou says. In some areas they can do same day or next day delivery.

“That’s why we opened our West Coast warehouse first, and now our East Coast warehouse and why we have to work with technology to provide the customer service and personalization we did ourselves when we were a small business.”

Indeed, around 95% of Yami’s products are imported from Asia and so data and AI have become a cornerstone of its strategy, enabling it to use technology to forecast demand and personalize marketing to customers.

Zhou recalls he “bootstrapped” the first four years of business, until the first round of investment in 2017, and confesses that he never imagined he would head a business that now has ambitions to grow not only in the U.S. but is also looking at Canada.

Yami is also expanding product categories although he is yet to crack fresh produce. Zhou says he would like to find a way to work with Asian supermarkets to supply fresh without Yami carrying inventory – but that’s currently on the ‘to do’ list.

But he does see potential in apparel, feels that the U.S. affection for Japanese products could be exploited further and feels Korean toys is another category that Yami could test soon.