In 2018, Felicia Hung launched In Common With, a Brooklyn-based design studio focused on lighting, with friend and former classmate Nick Ozemba. The brand holds collaboration—with artisans, with designs, with emerging voices—as a core value, a tenet taken directly from Hung’s furniture-design education.
And last year, the pair opened Quarters, a Manhattan space conceived as both a showroom for In Common With and a bar and gathering place for friends of the brand. Since then, the second-floor space has hosted countless guests, magazine shoots, and events for high-profile brands. Although it seems like—and might even qualify as—an overnight success, Hung had a long road to get to this point. In our latest installment of Doing the Work, Glamour caught up with the founder and thought leader to dive into her process.
Glamour: What time do you get up in the morning?
Felicia Hung: I usually get up around 7:30, 7:45. I would love to be an early riser, but I’m not.
What’s your general morning routine?
I have a dog who is very excited about everything and really cute. There’s a lot of excitement in the morning for her, so that helps me wake up a little bit. And [then] just the usual: Shower, put my face things on, and get out the door. I walk to work right now, which is really nice. My partner walks with me with our dog. It’s a nice little slowdown before going into a crazy day. I usually [get to the office] around 9. I don’t do too much, and I don’t eat breakfast. I’m not a breakfast person. If I eat breakfast, I get more hungry throughout the day. So I don’t, which is not good for me, but I’m not a morning person.
How do you take your coffee?
I take it with some oat milk and no sugar. I love tea, but I go through phases of only drinking matcha and then phases of going back to coffee, because coffee does give me that jolt that matcha doesn’t. But for my health, I try to have matcha. I love a hojicha latte, too, and then right now, I’ve been drinking iced espressos.
What was your first childhood dream job?
I think I wanted to be a teacher just because that’s the job I knew existed. I didn’t know I wanted to go into design or art until high school. I had an interest in it, but I grew up in the Bay Area, and it was very tech-focused and not very artistic. I don’t want to be a teacher at all now, but I think it was just like, Oh, this is what people do. This is an adult.
Did you have any teachers or mentors who encouraged your artistic side?
My parents are very open, which is lucky. Whatever you’re excited about, I’ll be excited about and figure it out for you. I had a nice balance of very chill and relaxed art teachers, and then my mom found this intense Chinese art teacher after-school program for me. He was like, I get all the kids into the best art school, and you need to stay here for eight hours a day during the weekends. He was a very traditionally Chinese art teacher, but he really taught me everything, and really pushed me to become more of an artist when I didn’t have the background in it.
I really liked it. I always really liked school as a kid, even though before I [said] I wanted to go to art school, I didn’t have like a particular subject I was intense about. I just liked learning. When I decided that I wanted to go down this path and started going to this teacher, it was exciting to me because I was able to focus my like energy onto something, instead of just doing everything the same amount. [Eventually] I actually taught kids at this teacher’s class—I taught elementary school kids how to do charcoal drawings, which was weird but fun.
What was your first job?
I worked for Workstead, a lighting and interior design studio, on the product design side. I was their first product design hire, instead of interior design, and so I really learned a lot there. They invested me in a lot of things, like how to run that side of their business, and that was right out of school.
Why lighting?
I studied furniture design. My business partner [Nick Ozemba] and I met in school studying furniture design. There was one lighting course, but the program was really focused on materials, understanding how a material would want to be used, and designing around it or pushing that boundary. I think that is in the core of In Common With. We often get really excited about a particular process and then design with that process in mind—like understanding how this glassblower will manipulate this glass to get what we want.
When we decided to start In Common With, we wanted to do everything: lighting and furniture and objects. But we were two people, and financially, that’s a lot to invest in spacewise. And so we chose lighting because it changes the room drastically without being the biggest piece in the space. It’s also something that we knew we could get to a more attainable price point in the design industry, and then have the range to [go] more artistic and boutique at a higher price point.
In Common With is a lot about collaboration, and our initial collection was with modular components so that we could work with the designer and collaborate on mixing and matching, almost like doing custom without fully doing custom. And with lighting, it’s a lightbulb and a power source. There’s a lot of in-between that you can play with. It just felt like it would express our intent for the business in the best way.
Have you experienced a moment in which you realized you’ve made it?
I feel like that happens, and then like two days later, I’m like, Oh my God, I can’t, this is too much. We don’t know what we’re doing. It’s just a roller coaster to have your own business, to be pushing something out there and having people judge it. Opening Quarters was a big moment for us. We’ve had a lot of successes before that, which also felt really big, but opening Quarters brought in a different audience for us and also created a different atmosphere for us to interact with people. Having that kind of connection was what we really wanted with the space, and it did feel very meaningful: Oh, we’re doing something right.
We’re trying to reach out past the arts and design world. With our events, we’re working to connect with people on the concept, the atmosphere of our world. That’s a language I feel like people understand without knowing it. Being able to physically have people in there, they get it. There’s another layer on top of what these people have seen in our photos. They look great, but being in the space, I think, has allowed us to communicate that to another level.
How do you deal with rejection?
There’s a lot of rejection in everyone’s career, and also as a business owner. I think it’s important not to take it too personally, to take it as a learning experience or a moment to step back and reflect. What could you do differently? Is it that it just wasn’t the right fit? It might have nothing to do with what we are putting out there, and it is just that we went out to the wrong person. Use it as a learning point instead of This is rejection.
Have you had a moment in your career when you felt someone didn’t take you seriously because of your gender, race, or ethnicity?
I think the way that I communicate with someone versus a man who works at the same level, or even, you know, one of my employees communicating with someone who’s a man—I think there's a different level of, I don’t want to say respect, but just confidence in what I’m saying versus what someone else is saying. We were talking to a Chinese manufacturer, and Nick and I went there to meet them. They were speaking English, but then sometimes they’d switch to Chinese because I understand Chinese, and it’s easier for them. One of the people there would speak in Chinese to Nick, and he was like, I don’t know what you’re talking about. She is my business partner. Please talk to her. That’s a very intense version of that, but I think that the underlying assumption people have is a little different.
What’s the best piece of career advice you’ve received?
A pretty recent one—I think a lot of people give this advice, but I’ve been trying to think about it more—is that the plan you make doesn’t have to be the final result. Be open to iterating on that plan, but still be confident in [following it]. There’s so much long-term planning you try to do as a business, and there’s a lot of I don’t know if this is real. But then you also have to be confident in This is what we’re going to hit. This is what we’re trying to do. Be confident, but also flexible in decision-making. It’s a hard thing, just as humans, to have that mindset.
Every day, it’s a constant back and forth. We make decisions, just me and my partner. Then we’ll bring them to our leadership team, we’ll make a decision again, make tweaks to it, and then that tweaks another decision, and then we bring it to the whole group of employees or we bring it to a collaborator—every day there are, like, 25 instances of this happening.
What advice would you give to somebody who’s just starting their own venture?
Be excited about what you’re doing, and don’t be afraid of showing that. If you’re really excited about this particular thing, there are likely other people who are also excited about it. Figuring out how to connect through the thing or the type of company that you’re trying to create, figuring out how to communicate what it is you’re offering to other people—it doesn’t have to be hard, it’s an important step to take. Especially for artists and designers, there’s a lot of solo work and being in your head. Like, This makes total sense to me. I’ve looked at this drawing for 50 hours, and why wouldn’t anyone understand? But I think [the key is] sharing your excitement and why it’s important.
What’s your favorite low-stakes treat to reward yourself after a productive or stressful day?
I have a backyard, which is really nice for New York, and I just love being out there. It’s not that big, and there’s not much to do out there, but I think just being able to be out there, water my plants, hang out—staying outside is very important.