Walking In The Family's Footsteps

The founder and CEO of luxury footwear brand Stella Luna, Stephen Chi, believes he wouldn’t be where he is today without formative years spent travelling and learning from the best in the biz – his family.

- Saskia Tillers

His childhood was spent traversing the world alongside his family – hungrily absorbing new cultures and ways of dressing, noting their respective points of difference. So it’s not surprising that Stephen Chi’s formative travels would prove to be the perfect training ground for his future career, where he would utilise all he’d learned from years crisscrossing the globe and transform that into his footwear brand, Stella Luna.

“Thanks to my family, I was given a very international upbringing,” he smiles. “I was born in Taiwan, but grew up in Hawaii and San Francisco. Growing up in Honolulu and Northern California meant that I was always surrounded, from a very young and impressionable age, by that unique West Coast, casual-chic way of confident dressing. Later, my engineering studies on the other side of the country made me aware that design must always be paired with intelligence.”

This love for new ways of thinking meant that when Stephen was beginning to develop the ideas that would later form the basis of Stella Luna, it was near impossible for him to create a brand without inherently global sensibilities.