Cover Letter  ·  Prepared for Soho House  ·  Membership Director, Asia

Villie
Tsang

Building lifestyle brands and creative communities — global vision, local soul.
3 July 2026
Membership Team
Soho House — Asia
Re: Membership Director, Asia

Dear Membership Team,

I started out as a junior graphic designer at Cartoon Network, then took my first management role as creative services manager for CNN International’s Asia headquarters in Hong Kong. The more I did it, the more I wanted to understand how design and creativity drive a business — which took me to a Master of Arts in Innovation Management at Central Saint Martins in London. My research there was on how design thinking and play unlock creativity in people, and how a culture where people feel they belong lets an organization grow. That, in essence, is the craft of building an engaged community.

That research took me to the Hong Kong Design Centre, where I curated Business of Design Week and Knowledge of Design Week, bringing global industry leaders to Hong Kong for cultural exchange. It also led me to KEF: the Centre’s then-Chairman — who chaired the Gold Peak Group that had acquired KEF Audio — asked me to help turn a respected speaker manufacturer into a direct-to-consumer lifestyle brand people wanted to belong to. I rose from digital to Head of Global Digital Strategy and then VP of Growth, building the ecosystem that made belonging tangible — Sound of Life, Sound Lab, Journey Through Sound and myKEF. Holding global brand governance across Asia-Pacific, Europe and as advisor to the Americas team, I invested in cultural research before each market, led KEF’s first global campaign, Listen and Believe, and opened KEF Music Galleries in four cities (London, Tokyo, Beijing and the Hong Kong relaunch) — training local teams so the standard held everywhere while people made it their own.

After a seven-year run I grew genuinely bored with corporate life, and founded The Boring Nation — a management consultancy that has become a collective for the bored, the curious and the creative. I launched The Artist Launchpad, an incubation platform for emerging artists in the new creative economy. The conviction behind it is simple: as AI makes images, sound and text effectively infinite and free, value returns to what a machine can’t manufacture — human authorship, provenance, taste, and the lived experience of being in a room with something real. The Boring Nation backs that authorship economy — developing artists, curating their work, and building the communities that gather around it, getting them from zero to one. I run it directly out of Soho Houses worldwide, as an All Houses member.

Which is why this feels less like a change of field than the next chapter of the same work. A House is people gathered around something they value, held to a standard and made to feel they belong — across many cities and cultures, through local teams you develop and trust. I’ve spent twenty years building exactly that, and I already know these rooms from the inside.

I’m Hong Kong-based and available from October 2026. I’d welcome the chance to tell you the rest in person.

With warm regards,
Villie Tsang