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week later, Yo-Eco, Lee and I are standing in the Lee family garage on a rainy Friday night. The small space is cluttered with countless brown cardboard boxes filled with the brand’s shirts.
Lee, who is wearing one of the brand’s crochet cardigans (“It’s some Asian grandma shit,” he says with a laugh), is in a phenomenal mood. He and Yo-Eco haven’t seen each other in some time due to his rigorous MMA training schedule, and the two friends are elated.
They originally met in high school. Yo-Eco recalls how shortly after he started the brand in 2017 — “At the time, just words screen-printed on a T-shirt,” both concur — Lee would make the hour-and-a-half drive from Daly City to San Jose and back to pick up the T-shirts that Yo-Eco would then sell to his high school classmates out of the trunk of his car.
“It was mutual brotherly love,” says Lee. “It didn’t have to be T-shirts — it could’ve been anything. He could’ve opened a donut business, I would’ve gone to get dough or oil for him.”
In 2019, once the two graduated high school, Yo-Eco asked Lee — who knew how to build websites — to come on board as a co-owner of the brand and launch an online store. The two differ in many ways: Yo-Eco is reserved; Lee is extroverted. Yo-Eco is creative; Lee is more business-minded. They say that’s precisely what makes their partnership so fruitful.
“I’ll do the emails, file with the state, the financial stuff. But he’ll do the creative work, like the photoshoot at Lucky Three Seven or the designing, and I can train full time,” says Lee. “That’s why it works so well.”
One commonality the two do share, though: the small butterfly tattoo that they both have on their middle finger. The two decided to get the matching tattoos on one of their many trips to LA when they’d drive down every two weeks with the intent of trying to get their clothes into the hands of rappers.
“The whole thing about butterflies starting as cocoons,” says Yo-Eco, referencing the tattoo. “We always had dreams that other people thought we were crazy for having. But we never doubted. We always knew we just had to stick to the script.”
This shared blind faith — or “delusion” in the words of Yo-Eco and Lee — is what they both ultimately attribute their success to.
“I feel like even if we didn’t do Enter Nostalgia, we would’ve at the end been at the same place with anything else because of our mindset,” says Lee.
“It’s the same with anything in life,” agrees Yo-Eco. “To get somewhere, you have to be delusional about it.”
Enter Nostalgia’s next collection comes out in 2024, and will be announced on Instagram.
