‘We have complete freedom’: cult fashion marketplace Apoc Store co-founder

Her mother is a doctor from Shanghai, China, and her Hakka Chinese father is from Hong Kong. In the late 1980s they relocated to Manchester, where they opened the country’s third-ever Chinese medicine clinic.

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Suen, wanting to please her parents, studied Chinese medicine in Shanghai for a year after she turned 18. Realising it was not for her, she returned to the UK and enrolled in an art foundation course, before graduating from London’s Camberwell College of Arts with a degree in design.

After that, she worked for companies ranging from arts charities to architecture firms, and co-founded a London-based conceptual retail fashion boutique in 2018 with a business partner.

This soon ran into trouble – Suen felt as if she was the one doing all the work, while her partner would show up once a month with ideas that “made no sense”.

“He would never listen and kept pushing, and I felt like I was constantly fighting, even though I was the one who was there day to day, building it with our team. Eventually, I just got fed up and quit,” she says.

“It was quite traumatic, almost like Stockholm syndrome – I’d spent years working for other people, believing that was the only way I could exist and I wouldn’t survive in the outside world without it.”

Finally, she had enough and walked away from the venture and her business partner – and a few weeks after that, Covid-19 exploded in the UK. The pandemic did, however, have a silver lining – it gave Suen the time she needed to create Apoc Store.

“I’d always worked for white men, which I didn’t realise took such a toll on my mental health and confidence. Once I quit and started working for myself, I saw a change in my identity. It took time but it allowed me to grow.”

She adds: “That’s what Apoc is, essentially: the last 10-plus years of experience – every mistake I made, everything I learned – poured back into the store.”

Suen finally has free rein to do what she wants with Apoc Store, which she co-founded with Jules Volleberg, a former colleague who had made huge contributions to her previous retail fashion venture.

“Everything that I wanted to do in terms of branding, designers and the type of work I would like to represent, I can do here. We have complete freedom [at] Apoc, and we really don’t let anyone interfere with our vision,” says Suen.

In 2022, she and Volleberg launched the Apoc Grants scheme to further support new and emerging talent, focusing on marginalised artists and designers who may belong to social groups “excluded due to race, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, physical ability, language or immigration status”.

With items from almost 300 creatives from around the globe, Apoc Store is values-driven, “with accessibility and autonomy being integral”.

Designers can choose how they work with Apoc. “There’s no minimum number,” Suen says. “They can work on pre-order, made-to-order and one-of-one. They can start with one product or a whole collection. It takes a lot of pressure off for them.

“With the current wholesale model that most retailers work with, designers are on the brink of bankruptcy at any point. It works for some, which is also the issue – the model only favours some brands.”

Suen brings in many designers of Asian descent, such as Yinglin, a sustainable avant-garde designer born and raised in Guangdong, China, and Sun Yining of Eeggnet, a China-based creative studio making ceramic sculptural jewellery and home decor. Both have benefited from Apoc Grants, which offers £1,000 (US$1,300), a spot on Apoc’s retail platform and a six-month mentorship programme.

As an East Asian woman in the UK, Suen is no stranger to Western racial prejudices. “There’re so many examples where I feel like they just perceive me as the young Asian woman. I’d be seated at an all-Asian table at a big fashion dinner, which felt strange.

“I was at an event once when this guy came over and talked about someone else’s work. I just kept looking at him like, ‘What do you mean?’ Then I realised who he thought I was. She was wearing a hat, was about eight years younger than me, and we look nothing alike apart from the fact we’re both Asian,” she says.

“People always comment on my work ethic, perhaps because I’m Chinese. ‘You’re just a really good doer.’ ‘You’re great at doing things and being supportive.’ At one point, I almost felt I would never [offer] more than just a supporting role in the background. But I can and have done more than that.”

It takes time for anyone to unlearn racial biases, especially those that they internalise. For Suen, her healing comes in connecting with other women and members of the LGBTQ community of similar heritage.

“In the past couple of years, something that has brought me lots of joy and relief is spending more time with my community, which is other East and Southeast Asian women and LGBTQ people who were brought up in the UK,” she says.

“I know this to be the same for many of us, as we have all been dispersed and integrated into white society for a long time, and it wasn’t until the rise in anti-Asian hate during Covid that we were brought together.

“Being able to confide and share my experiences with others that understand has been life-changing. I wish I had this sort of support sooner rather than later in life.”

At the same time, Suen is OK with being a fashion outsider and not feeling a part of the industry “because I’m trying to create something new”.

“We wanted to create a platform to support and nurture creative talent, one which gives back and is generative, rather than extracting from them,” she says.

“The type of designers we wanted to support are the most ‘edgy’ and forward-thinking, because they’re not the ones the big corporations will support. It’s all about creating space for the talents we love but can’t see in other places simply because they won’t take the risk.”