Creating DiamondHandBag a Digital-First Luxury Fashion Brand | Angel Pui, DiamondHandBag

Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another episode of Bits and Bites, Season 2. We are now on our second episode with a special guest, angel. And today we are going to be experimenting a little bit. So today we got a cold dish, a cold noodle dish, which is not very common since, you know, most of us would assume noodles come in, like, a hot broth or in a warmer temperature. But we. With the heat wave in Vancouver, we have decided to cool off a little bit with this pretty unique dish. So what we have here is called the makg Guksu. We'll post a photo of this for those of you that are watching. Essentially, makguksu is a Korean noodle dish that uses buckwheat noodles. And then it is used. Sorry, there is vegetables such as carrots, cabbage on lettuce, and then there's also some seaweed as well as sesame seeds and certain variations of it. And it is mixed together with a chili pepper sauce. Sometimes it does come in a colder broth, but usually this is served very chill, and it's a very refreshing summer dish that is really popular in Korea. Another fun fact about this, the word mak actually means anything. So in translation, it means anything noodles. Because the different variations, everyone likes to have their own type of uniqueness added to it. So some like to add in a different variety of vegetables. So we're just gonna give it a try here and give us our first impressions on this.

You don't eat spicy, do you?

I do not. And I remember telling my host.

I.

Thought this was a prank.

No, it's not a prank, but I thought we were gonna get hot soup for you because it's like 32 at the time of recording. It's actually 36 back home. How is.

Is not hitting me yet, but it's. Oh, it's about to.

So you don't eat any spicy.

No level of spice.

No level of spice.

Okay, well, we got a pitcher of water here.

Good thing I got some water here.

It's good, though. I don't eat vegetables, so we're even. Oh, yeah. It can get spicy. I can see.

Yeah, sorry.

Clearing my sinus.

That's another way to beat the heat.

And we do want to apologize because it's been. It's been a minute since we had. We had an episode. Actually.

We.

We had some. Some lots of different issues. I mean, I had Covid. You had Covid. Lots of different things have happened. We met each other on the east coast as well. There's a whole thing there. Maybe we'll get to talk a little bit about it during the show, but.

The east coast covet run.

Yeah, yeah. The NFT NYC variant, as I'm calling it. But how's your first couple bites? Have you had this type of food before?

I have not. I do like cold noodle, though, like the zaozoba.

Yeah.

And I think it is. Yeah, definitely good for summer.

Yeah, I know that. There's also like a variation with like buckwheat noodles that uses like an actual cold broth. They put ice in there. That was actually the original noodle dish I was looking for, but not many places have those.

Angel does not eat spicy.

Well, we've got to put you on a little bit on the hot seat here, so you'll be all right.

Sure. Doing good job.

Yeah. Awesome. So, yeah, I mean, personally, I love Korean food, being Korean myself, but this is a different type of noodle I've actually never had. I've always had the different buckwheat noodles called naengmyeon that comes in the soup or there's like a dry version with the thinner buckwheat noodles.

So I thought we were doing that.

Yeah, no, that's what I was saying. I was trying to get that one, but I don't know. Not many places deliver it, I'm assuming.

Because you need the ice bags, I think.

Yeah, yeah, the ice is really important for that.

Spicy, though.

I mean, you can have more, you can have less. We're gonna start talking. We'll gauge your. Your spice level. But I mean, we're still in the corner there. I mean, we're five minutes in. Why don't you just kind of introduce yourself to everybody?

Hi, everybody. I'm Angel. As you know by now, I have a very kid like palate when it comes to food. Yeah, I've always been in tech startup for the last 15 years. That aged me a little bit. And yeah, Okay.

I have a kid like palate. Yours is. You just don't do spicy food.

No, I actually, I like noodle. I like sugar, I like eggs. I eat the same thing as my kids. My husband actually said I have three girls. It's true.

Interesting, because I get all my food tips from my buddy who has a six year old and everything he suggests I like, Like. Ray was laughing at me earlier this week because I had jollibee's two days in a row. What I didn't tell him is I had Popeyes in between that.

Yeah. Sam's obsession with pre diabetic too.

Well, your husband's in health, so we'll get to that.

Yeah.

Awesome. Well, how about this?

Let's kind of start a little bit of water.

Yeah, of course. Take as many sips as you need here. Yeah, I mean, I just want to kind of start off because you mentioned that you were in tech for about 15 years. And so that's a very long journey so far. But I know that, you know, it started off in wanting to get into tech, but then I believe you made a really big pivot during after you graduated high school. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Yeah. As a kid, my dad engineering and entrepreneur. My family has been an entrepreneur. Like grandpa runs a factory in China, and then my dad was doing computer mechanical engineering and then is an engineer himself. So it's just something that I'm exposed to as a kid. I remember running around my grandpa's factory as a kid and seeing my dad and my uncle all work. And so as a kid, grade seven, I would be building these supercomputers with my dad and taking out, you know, the boards and, you know, writing scripts for macro for my Street Fighter. And we actually developed this programmable joystick for Street Fighter. And then my dad took it and, you know, sell it to Logitech and Alienware. So I was one of those kid, you know, I would run scripting when I was playing my MUD game and did C, Ms. DOS and Computer Science when I was in high school. I was doing really well in school, even AP physics and all that, until I hung out with the wrong crowd. A bunch of girls who said, oh, you don't want to be in computer science, do you? That's for. That's for boys. So peer pressure or the right kind. Right. Like you should follow your dream, which was, you know, I also draw and I was super creative as well. They encouraged me to drop my computer science nerdiness and said, why don't you go to art? You know, like, you love drawing, let's develop that. So I took a hard left and went to fashion design rather than my scholarship to computer science.

And I'm here being very impressed with myself for, you know, like the Zynga days, you know, when you can use. You can edit this animation.

She was. If Tony Stark went to fashion school.

Oh, that's amazing.

My parents were very disappointed. They didn't speak to me for years. But. But yeah.

And this was while.

But they're speaking to me now, so that's all I'm on it.

Right. You did high school in Vancouver, right?

I did high school, yeah. Churchill secondary.

Gotcha.

West side girl.

Are there Churchill fans out there? I was gonna make a fun of their school name, but I was like, I don't even know it. Suburban Boy. Yeah.

I mean, I feel like there's also an additional story that I'd love to get into maybe later on, about, you know, having your parents just decide, you know, going no contact because of a decision you made for your own personal future. Like, do you think that kind of, in a way, impacted, like, the direction that you decided to go after fashion school? Like, where did you go once you finished fashion school?

Once I finished fashion school, I had 60,000 student loan because I went to London, of all places, to do fashion. And it's obviously expensive for everybody.