It’s an unconventional arrangement, but you could say that Yoon and Lee are unlikely business partners to begin with.
Yoon, who formerly worked at the Ministry of Education (MOE), became fast friends with Lee while frequenting her KTV pub. While the former had always walked the line as prescribed by her stable, upper-middle class upbringing, Lee’s backstory is far more tempestuous.
As a rebellious adolescent, she went off the rails and experimented with drugs, then flew the coop at the age of 19. Introduced to sleeping pills by her first husband, she spiralled into alcoholism and drug use, before resolving to get clean following an overdose in her thirties. She is now 54.
Determined to pay it forward, she went on to run a beauty school for delinquent girls, then served as executive director of a Christian halfway house The Turning Point. Along the way, she became homeless after a failed second marriage, and moved in with Yoon and her mother.
The pair had long bonded over making Teochew kueh, with Yoon running a side hustle selling the glistening traditional delicacies.
It was Lee who floated the idea of launching a kueh-making studio, after witnessing their success conducting a one-off workshop for Teochew philanthropic organisation Ngee Ann Kongsi in 2019.
