Veronica Chou needed a break. It was 2014. She was fast approaching her 30s and had already achieved enormous success in fashion, the same industry conquered by her father, Silas Chou, and his father before him. Since founding her company in 2008, she had brought at least a dozen mainstream brands, like Ed Hardy, London Fog and Candie’s, to China during the blossoming of the nation’s middle class that drove enormous demand for western brands across the country.
“We opened up 1,000 stores, not so much in Beijing and Shanghai, but in the second-, third- and fourth-tier cities,” Chou says, recalling a breakneck pace of working that, in her family, seems to be hereditary. “But the experience there really was eye-opening: every time I stepped out of the plane and…
