By Nina Huang
Northwest Asian Weekly
Founder and CEO of Seattle-based start-up, Tokki, Jane Park, could’ve had a really different life had a random act of kindness allowed her to take her SAT test in high school.
Park went to take the SAT test but she didn’t have any money because she didn’t know she had to pay.
“I almost couldn’t have this life. The parent behind me was surprised and they paid for my SAT and said, hey, here’s our address, send us a check,” Park shared.
Park’s parents ended up mailing the kind stranger a check. She wishes she had kept the address because she would’ve wanted to let them know that a random act of kindness ended up being so significant.
Jane Park
Impressive career journey
Park didn’t know what she wanted to be.
She left Toronto to attend college at Princeton University and graduated from the School of Public Policy and International Affairs and Yale Law School.
“I was going to go to India to work at a women’s cooperative after graduation. I applied to law school as a ruse to tell my parents that I’d come back and go to law school because going to India would freak them out. They cried and I’ve never seen them cry like that before. They talked about how important it was for me to finish education, and then I found myself enrolled. They said you can do whatever you want after; the ruse all of a sudden became the plan,” Park shared.
From working as a lawyer doing public sector work, to working at Boston Consulting Group and Starbucks, to starting two of her own businesses focused on a social mission, Park has had quite the career journey.
Park moved to Seattle in 2002 after being recruited for a job at Starbucks.
Her first startup, Julep, was born after realizing she wanted to create a clean, green social parlor experience for people to hang out, and create a better workplace for women in a nontoxic environment that also provided healthcare benefits.
The idea sparked when she wanted to take her best friend from law school to a spa to celebrate her upcoming wedding. However, when they got to one, it was busy, and they weren’t able to sit together and were also hushed and told to use their spa voices.
Similarly, when Park was at Starbucks, she often took women colleagues visiting from other cities to create a bonding business experience.
The idea of going to a spa and wearing a robe with a colleague was uncomfortable.
On the other hand, men have places like golf courses, sporting events, and Park wanted a similar social experience for women to discuss work or celebrate special occasions.
“That’s when I realized, where can women have social spaces to hang out?” Park said.
They expanded into an online beauty company with a subscription model. While growing Julep, Park raised more than $50 million for the cosmetic company from high-profile investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Madrona Venture Group and Jay-Z’s Roc Nation. Park then sold it as part of a $120M deal in 2016.
Newest venture, Tokki
Tokki, Park’s current company, also shares a social mission.
In 2019, when the greater Seattle area was battling the aftereffects of the wildfires, it was dangerous to go outside. That Christmas, Park and her family accumulated nine bags of garbage. She had to slowly get rid of the garbage over a couple of weeks.
She was inspired to do research about what wrapping paper could be recycled versus thrown in the trash. She had heard a lot about how harmful wrong recycling can be due to contamination.
Almost all of the recycling paper in her house wasn’t recyclable. Basically, anything that’s sparkly, fuzzy, too thin, or color saturated cannot be recycled. She mentioned the best recycling paper is cardboard, and the further we get from that, the less recyclable it is.
“It reminded me of my grandma who used to wrap our important gifts in these squares of silk, bojagi. A lot of that is made from scraps of clothes to be able to reuse over and over again,” Park explained.
That was the inspiration for Tokki bags. Tokki is Korean for rabbit symbolizing the ability for the gift bag to hop from one person to another. The gift bags are made with recyclable water bottles. Park shared that they were sold at Target stores last holiday season and they are continuing to grow distribution and find partners to enhance the gifting experience.
Last year, one of the top products was a gift card holder. All products have their own QR codes to make it more special.
Overcoming challenges as an Asian woman
Park shared that the biggest challenge she has encountered during her career has been raising money for startups. But she’s been able to raise a record-amount of funds as a woman of color.
“The idea is you can go out and get money to grow it, but it’s actually extraordinarily hard for women. I think figuring out ways we can unlock capital to support women-run businesses is going to be a decades long challenge. Sometimes it goes backwards and not forward. When the economy catches a cold, funding for women-run businesses catches pneumonia. It’s always more severe; whatever progress you make, you end up losing. When times are hard and tight, people revert back to the familiar territory,” Park said.
According to a research report, “Advancing Gender Equality in Venture Capital,” from the Harvard Kennedy School, data and research prove that “there is a significant gender gap in venture capital funding. Even though women are underrepresented as entrepreneurs to begin with, they receive a disproportionately small share of VC funding: 2.3% for all-female founding teams and 10%.4 for mixed-gender founding teams. These numbers have stagnated in the last three decades, as the 30-year average of all-female founders’ share of VC funding is 2.4%.
Generally, female founders receive approximately a quarter of the amount of funding they seek, while their male counterparts receive half, on average. Women are also underrepresented as participants in VC deals with only 5.9% of U.S. deals involving all-female founding teams or solo female founders and 15.2% involving mixed-gender founding teams. Despite all of these disadvantages, female-founded ventures perform as well as male-founded ones, controlling for relevant variables like sector, market, experience, and hours worked.”
Giving back to the community
Park is most proud of her mentorship to young women that she’s been able to work with.
One of Park’s biggest mantras is the opposite of what she learned from her family. There was a strong emphasis on performance and perfection.
“If I came home with a 99%, my mom would be like, what happened to that 1%?” she said.
“I love to give people failure goals when they work for me. I found this such an important way especially for Asian women to break up the idea that they have to be perfect,” Park shared.
One year, Park gave her interns the assignment to come back to her with three failures or rejections by the end of summer.
“It was what I needed them to do to be more bold. One of them asked the Smithsonian Museum to carry our products and another asked a huge social influencer to partner, these are things they were emboldened to do because they weren’t worried about being perfect and checking off the boxes,” she said.
Park shared that it can be hard to tell people that perfectionism is not harmful, but that one can give them other things to do to take the place of that. It gives them a mental framework for how one can be emboldened to make mistakes.
“I have had the privilege of seeing Jane and her impact on the community through the eyes of other local entrepreneurs. She has been a devoted mentor to local women and minority entrepreneurs, freely giving counsel and lifting them up as they do the hard work of building out and growing their businesses. In some of the regular meetings she hosts, the business owners expressed such gratitude for Jane’s wisdom, generosity and approachability. She makes herself available to all who seek her counsel, meeting with or taking calls as a priority each week, helping them as they navigate through obstacles. With few resources that can quickly impart this knowledge to local women entrepreneurs, Jane shines bright as an influential community entrepreneur that is deeply committed to lifting up other women business owners,” Angie Snyder, President of Tokki, wrote in an email.
Park also knows the importance of education. She’s a board member for the Washington State Opportunity Scholarship (WSOS). WSOS helps low- and middle-income Washington students earn degrees, certificates or apprenticeships in high-demand trade, health care or STEM fields and launch careers in Washington state.
Park’s mother went to the prestigious Ewha Women’s University in Seoul.
“She had to take a break for two years to save enough money for one semester of college. I’ve seen firsthand how hard people can struggle to achieve educational goals, so WSOS is super meaningful to me and one of my biggest commitments,” Park shared.
Appreciating the Pacific Northwest
Park’s also really gotten into hiking lately, now that both of her kids are in college.
“We live in such a great place in the world for it. It’s funny to have found my way back into it and I love the fact that it’s such a big part of Korean culture that I’ve explored in a new way here in the Pacific Northwest,” Park said.
Park asked her parents to move to Seattle from Toronto after she started Julep. They have also gotten into hiking, seaweed harvesting, and crabbing.
“My mom goes out in waders to find oysters, clams and seaweed. I never knew they knew how to do all of that,” Park laughed.
Nina can be reached at info@nwasianweekly.com.