Founder / CEO / Material
Eunice Byun
She left a corner office in beauty to argue that the humble kitchen deserves fewer, better, more beautiful things.
She left a corner office in beauty to argue that the humble kitchen deserves fewer, better, more beautiful things.
During the pandemic, Eunice Byun watched her daughters gain confidence at the counter beside her - so she made them tools that actually fit their hands. A $20 mini whisk. A petite spatula. A kids set for $45. It is a small, specific thing, and it explains almost everything about the company she runs.
Byun is the co-founder and CEO of Material, the direct-to-consumer kitchenware brand she launched in the spring of 2018 with her co-founder, Dave Nguyen. Material sells a tight, deliberate lineup - knives, a coated pan, a cutting board, tableware - all built around a single, slightly stubborn conviction: that the objects you touch every single day should be beautiful, durable, and made to last a lifetime, not replaced every couple of years.
The brand grew the unglamorous way, on word of mouth and repeat customers rather than a firehose of ads. By its seventh year it had landed in Nordstrom stores nationwide and given away close to $200,000 to community food causes. Byun likes to point out that the company is, at its core, the same one she started - just louder, and with more people in the kitchen.
I feel the most 'me' as an entrepreneur.Eunice Byun
Before Material, Byun had the resume people frame. She started at Goldman Sachs, spent years in intimate apparel, and rose to Vice President of Global Digital Marketing at Revlon. On paper, she had arrived. In practice, she kept opening her own kitchen drawers and finding tools she did not love - a small daily irritation that turned into a business idea.
So she started Material on the side, moonlighting on it while still running digital marketing for a public beauty company. The pivot came after her first daughter was born. Byun realized she no longer wanted to build capital in support of someone else's vision. At the end of 2017, she and Nguyen both resigned. The following spring, Material shipped.
Her instinct for the market was blunt and correct. Material, she has said, was simply "the business we felt was missing." A crucial early move was partnering with a supply-chain expert who carried two decades of manufacturing know-how and, more importantly, understood what they were trying to build.
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Byun grew up in San Diego in her family's Korean restaurant, surrounded by food and people. Cooking, in her house, was how affection got expressed.
Watching her father and grandfather run the place, she absorbed the fundamentals: care deeply about customers, and stretch every resource to its most useful end.
Nguyen, her co-founder, comes from an immigrant family too. That shared inheritance - work hard, make it mean something - runs through Material's manifesto.
One line from Material's manifesto: don't wait for success to give back. Byun took it literally.
Through an annual campaign called Kinder Kitchens, Material has raised close to $200,000 for organizations that use food to serve underrepresented communities - long-term partners like Heart of Dinner, Drive Change, and Star Route Farms. For a company of its size, the number is outsized, and that is the point.
In March 2021, as anti-Asian hate crimes spiked during the pandemic, Byun published a personal essay in Mother Magazine. She has been open about running the business with vulnerability and transparency rather than a polished corporate face.
Byun calls herself an introverted extrovert who guards her solitude and does most things on purpose. Her mornings are a ritual: 6 a.m. after a full eight hours, a check of the weather, a pour-over Chemex, and a gua sha facial massage before the day gets loud.
She walks to the New York office, blocks Wednesday mornings for Reformer Pilates, and ends the night reading to her daughters before a 10 p.m. lights-out. She met her husband, Daniel Lee, at Northwestern - they are both class of 2004. What she fears, she says, is sameness. What she does about it is make things.