UNA UNA creates thoughtfully designed objects for everyday life with dogs.
Before there was UNA UNA, there were simply the three of us: Yiyi, Xiaobai, and me.
This year marks fifteen years with Yiyi, and twelve with Xiaobai. Both were rescued from the streets of Beijing. By the time they entered my life, they were already adults, carrying histories of their own, fully formed personalities, and ways of being in the world that existed long before I became part of it.
Yiyi at The Orchid, Beijing, 2012
Xiaobai on the rooftop of a hutong house, Beijing, 2016
Very early on, I realised that my role was not to train them into becoming different dogs, but to learn who they already were.
That simple realisation shaped everything that followed.
Living together is not about control. It is about attention. About learning another being’s rhythms until, little by little, they become part of your own.
Long before UNA UNA existed, that was already the way we lived.
Life carried us from Beijing to London, then to Edinburgh, before eventually bringing us back to Shanghai to be closer to family.
Entering the UK for the first time, Harwich, 2018
Travelling internationally with two dogs was never simple. Every move demanded months of preparation—health certificates, airline regulations, customs documents, endless luggage, and countless uncertainties. None of it would have been possible without the generosity of family and friends who quietly made each journey possible.
Getting ready for the flight from London to Hong Kong, 2023
Those years taught me something unexpected.
Home is rarely a place.
More often, it is the possibility of remaining together.
Home in Shanghai, 2023
Time, inevitably, changed us all.
Today, Yiyi is sixteen and Xiaobai is fourteen.
Eighteen months ago, Yiyi became critically ill with a lung abscess. After a month at the vets, the illness and intensive treatment caused her chronic kidney disease to deteriorate rapidly. Almost overnight, I became not only her guardian, but also her nurse, researcher, cook, pharmacist and advocate.
Yiyi kept in at the vets for a month, Shanghai, 2024
Every day acquired its own careful rhythm.
Fluid therapy.
Medication at precise intervals.
Freshly prepared meals.
Gentle walks to preserve strength.
Constant observation.
Small adjustments.
Then doing it all again the following day.
I learned everything I could—veterinary knowledge, nursing techniques, the smallest signs of discomfort or improvement. Yet beneath every routine remained the same uncertainty: I never knew how much time we still had.
Then, slowly, something extraordinary happened.
After more than a year of intensive care, Yiyi’s kidney disease improved from Stage 4 back to Stage 2.
For over five hundred consecutive days, I have not taken a single day away from caring for her.
Yiyi on her fluid therapy mat at home, Shanghai, 2026
It never felt like a sacrifice.
It simply became our way of living.
Yiyi taught me something no university ever could.
Care rarely arrives as a single heroic act.
It is accumulated quietly, through ordinary gestures repeated over time.
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Life with dogs is made almost entirely of repetitions.
Every morning, Yiyi wakes the moment I do, waiting for our first walk of the day. Only after she returns home does Xiaobai begin waiting patiently by the door for his own.
They have always inhabited the world differently.
Yiyi prefers familiar streets, a handful of trusted people, and the reassurance of home.
Xiaobai remains endlessly curious. Every walk is an invitation to discover another smell, another conversation, another stranger willing to stop and say hello.
Across fifteen years and four cities, these differences never changed.
In Beijing, we wandered through the hutongs to neighbourhood cafés where I worked while they rested beneath the table.
Xiaobai enjoying a brunch party with humans in the mountains, Beijing, 2017
In London, long afternoons disappeared inside Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park.
Yiyi enjoying autumn in Kensington Gardens, London, 2018
Just chilling in Hyde Park, London, 2019
In Edinburgh, they discovered the sea at Portobello Beach, while Holyrood Park and Calton Hill became places we returned to again and again.
First time at the beach, Portobello Beach, Edinburgh, 2020
Walking towards Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh, 2020
Yiyi and I even developed an unexpected affection for wandering through old cemeteries, drawn less by history than by their quietness.
Yiyi taking a walk in New Calton Cemetery, Edinburgh, 2021
Looking back, I realise that memory rarely preserves the exceptional.
Instead, it holds on to repetition.
The familiar routes.
The changing seasons.
The leash picked up almost without thinking.
The ordinary evenings that seemed too ordinary to remember.
Only later do we understand that these unnoticed rituals have quietly become the architecture of a shared life.
Daily walk in West Queen Street Gardens, Edinburgh, 2022
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For many years, I believed that caring for dogs and studying design belonged to separate worlds.
One felt instinctive.
The other intellectual.
Only gradually did I realise that both were asking the same question.
How does care take form?
During my postgraduate studies at the Royal College of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum, I found myself returning to the relationship between objects and everyday life.
Not extraordinary objects.
Ordinary ones.
The ones we reach for so often that they eventually disappear from our attention.
Yiyi and Xiaobai with their favourite piggy toy, Edinburgh, 2022
Living with Yiyi and Xiaobai had already taught me what design theory was beginning to articulate.
Meaning is rarely designed into an object.
More often, it is accumulated through use.
A leash becomes precious because it has accompanied thousands of walks.
A bed becomes part of growing old together.
The significance of these objects lies not only in what they are, but in the lives they gradually come to hold.
That understanding became the beginning of UNA UNA.
Today, UNA UNA designs clothing, walking essentials and everyday objects for dogs.
One sentence continues to return to me:
Care becomes material.
Care exists in the environments we create for those who depend on us.
It exists in the routines we sustain.
It exists in the weight of a fabric, the comfort of a collar, the simplicity of a fastening held in one hand while the other holds a leash.
Design, at its best, is care made tangible.
Good design is not an expression of aesthetics.
It is a form of attention.
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Studying design also changed the way I think about making.
Every object carries more than its visible form.
It carries the accumulated knowledge of everyone who has shaped it before it reaches us.
The intelligence of materials.
The experience of skilled hands.
The patience of people whose names rarely appear, yet whose work determines what an object can become.
Haiyan, our garment technician, working on pattern cutting, Shanghai, 2026
Living between China and Europe made this increasingly clear.
Some of the world’s finest manufacturing is rarely visible. It exists quietly behind the objects we use everyday.
To reduce making to a country of origin is to overlook the much richer story of how contemporary objects come into being.
The materials we work with are themselves products of collaboration.
Technical textiles developed through European research and produced by highly skilled manufacturers in China.
Components made by specialist makers in Italy.
Knowledge travelling across borders, generations and disciplines before arriving in someone’s home.
This, to me, is contemporary craftsmanship.
Not something fixed to a geography, but something sustained through relationships.
Between designers and makers.
Between materials and techniques.
Between people who care enough to keep refining the same thing, year after year.
Colour books in our sample room, Shanghai, 2026
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UNA UNA was born from those relationships.
We do not aspire to make objects that constantly demand attention.
The objects that matter most eventually disappear into everyday life.
They become familiar enough to feel almost invisible.
Yet years later, they remain inseparable from the memories they helped create.
Perhaps that is all good design can hope to become.
Not an object we own.
But one we continue living with.
That, to us, is what it means for care to become material.
This thinking continues through everything we make.
Our first collection arrives in Winter 2026.