This weekend I posted something I'd been putting off for months — a five-minute reel about the twelve years behind LITOOC. Yes, five minutes. Nobody does five-minute reels.
I planned it on my flight to Latvia in June. Since then I edited it again and again, scrapped it, dragged it for weeks. I'm a perfectionist — it's in my blood. Then one day I just let it go, because I finally understood it was never going to be perfect. The story itself isn't.
If you'd rather read than watch — here's the whole thing, written down properly for the first time.
It started in 2014. I started a business with Gensen — after three months of dating. Out of love, right? We rented a small showroom to sell office furniture. No clients, no experience. Super wise business decision. Three months in — zero sales.
So we pivoted to wooden furniture, then custom-made. And honestly? Those were the brokest years. I was still living with my family, and there were many days I couldn't afford to eat. That was the skinniest time of my life. We couldn't even afford a warehouse, so we'd be out repacking furniture in the alley at night.
But here's the thing about me. I don't come from money. Normal family, ordinary education. The only thing I have is this: you give me a problem, I will outwork it. Broke? Work harder. That was my answer to everything. And it worked. Every time.
Then clients kept asking us for the same thing, over and over — a solid wood extending table that actually fits Hong Kong homes. That was our angle. We designed our own, and bet everything we had on it — every dollar, our first 40-foot container.
And that table — the Extentable — changed everything. Design awards. Distributors in several countries. A 3,000-square-foot showroom in Wong Chuk Hang. That was the peak.
But behind the illusion, no batch from the factory was ever perfect. We inspected, we flew over, we switched factory after factory. It didn't matter. The making was never in our control.
And then Covid hit. Factories stopped, orders stuck, cash flow broke. We couldn't see any light at the end of the tunnel — everything just kept spiralling. We had to stop, and breathe. So we pressed pause on the business.
So what did I do? The only thing I know — work harder. Event helper, freelance producer, Fiverr gigs doing Google Ads audits. Whatever I could do, I squeezed everything in me, saving back up thousand by thousand. Because my principle is simple: if I make a promise, I keep it until the day I die. And I promised myself LITOOC would not die.
Around that time, we met Janis, and worked together for a year. We trusted each other deeply — work ethic, morals, craftsmanship. When he moved back to Latvia, we packed our machinery into a container and continued our dream together: our own workshop this time, in Latvia. After all those years of chasing factories, the universe finally opened the door we had been knocking on — our own place, our control. No more compromise.
And soon after, a client from our early days asked us to design his new home — that's how LITOOC stepped into interiors. All those years of quietly grinding, I could finally see where the path was leading.
And that's exactly when life came for the one thing hard work can't protect. My cat Boss — my son, who had been with me through the darkest times — was diagnosed with late-stage heart disease. All those years, I never broke down. Not once. Because broke can be fixed. Work harder, always. But this time, I finally had the money — and it couldn't buy or protect the one thing I actually wanted. For the first time in my life, hard work meant nothing. I was completely helpless. Gensen and my team held the company together while I fell apart.
I healed slowly — by reading. It took me out of reality, out of the pain. And I kept seeing 444, the angel number, everywhere. I chose to take it as Boss watching me from the rainbow bridge, telling me — Mom, it's time to get back in the game.
I came back different. Losing him taught me what all that grinding never did — life is too short, and too fragile, to spend it proving I can survive.
So this June, I flew to Latvia and stood inside our own workshop for the first time — up and running, full of people with good hearts and good souls. Making our furniture the way I always dreamed of. Perfect, in our own hands.
And one afternoon, Janis and I were just chatting, and he casually dropped a line like it was nothing: "I want to work here even when I'm 60."
That one sentence has weight in my heart. Because what he was really telling me is — I trust you with my next twenty years. And that's coming from an introvert, a man of few words.
That's when it all clicked. I have been broke, and I have been so-called rich. Building LITOOC was never about the money. It was this, all along: clients who paid deposits for a table that didn't exist yet. A client who came back after all those years to hand us his home. A team that trusts me with their future. You can't buy that. You earn it — one kept promise at a time. And that's the richest I have ever been.
That workshop? Twelve years. That's what it cost.
And my team wants to still be here at 60. Design for ageing with grace — we wrote that motto in 2014.
Turns out, we meant it.
PS: Since the reel went up, people have been writing to me privately — new clients, OG clients from our earliest days, and some who don't care about furniture at all. Honestly, that alone made the twelve years feel lighter.
Thank you for the five minutes. And the twelve years.
— Trazi
