We interviewed Wen Zhou, the cofounder, president, and CEO of 3.1 Phillip Lim. Wen was born in China, and moved with her parents to New York as a teenager. Wen lived on the Lower East Side and attended Brooklyn Tech High School. Wen spoke only mandarin, but where her parents worked in Chinatown, people only spoke Cantonese and she was in the ESL program at school. On top of that, she had to take on a job in a garment sweatshop alongside her mother and grandmother. Working in the factory exposed her to the world of fashion, and she was fascinated by it. She ended up going to FIT, and worked as a fabric deliverer. In this job, she got to see the other end of fashion, the big name designers, models, and shows. Soon she realized that a man with less experience was getting paid more for the job. She asked her boss why, and he said that it was because this man had a family and needed the money more than Wen. She realized that this was not a valid reason, and that her boss was purely paying the man more because he was a man, and finally got her boss to raise her salary. After that job, she started her own fabrics company that she still has, which supplies high fashion labels at just 21. Many people doubted her abilities to run her own company. Soon after she teamed up with Phillip Lim, a designer she had supplied fabrics to, to form 3.1 Phillip Lim. Now she has two kids, who she spends a lot of time with, although it is always a challenge to balance herself. Wen’s story was really interesting because it shows how she used her work ethic and determination to break into a very exclusive industry and be super successful.