Whenever Estella Park Riahi failed a test, her mother had a favorite way of threatening her. “She’d tell me: ‘You’re going to have to work for the family business!’” said Riahi. “That used to scare me.”

Back then, making and selling hanbok – traditional Korean garments – alongside her immigrant mother, Laura Park, in Los Angeles’s Koreatown was the last thing Riahi wanted to do. “I attended a white all-girls school, and I wanted to fit in with everybody whose parents had ‘normal’ careers,” she said. “I had no interest in celebrating my Koreanness.”

Riahi wouldn't have guessed that today, at age 33, she would be working alongside her mother for her family’s hanbok business on the side of her full-time job as an attorney – and completely by choice. Over the last decade, she’s helped guide the transformation of Leehwa Wedding & Hanbok from a shop catering for local Koreans preparing for their weddings to a well established brand attracting customers from across the country, dressing for a variety of occasions. Clients have worn Leehwa designs to the Oscars and Emmys and, last spring, the entire San Diego Padres baseball team donned custom Leehwa hanbok to mark their first-ever game in Seoul, South Korea.

The family tradition of hanbok-making goes back five generations. “It was a trade passed down from woman to woman,” said Park, age 60, who immigrated to the US in the 1980s and opened her studio in 1993. (She designs all the clothing and still does the bulk of the sewing.) Park as a young working mother often brought Riahi and her brother to the studio, where they would entertain themselves playing with scraps of fabric. “Estella saw how hard my life was,” said Park. “I wanted more for her.”

Riahi hoped to land a job after graduating from UC San Diego in 2013. “My mom said, ‘Why don’t you work with me until you find something?’” said Riahi. That temporary stint turned into eight years working full-time with her mother, during which time she helped triple the studio’s revenue. Riahi created Leehwa’s social media accounts, launched its online commerce and encouraged her mother to diversify beyond her custom special occasion creations to create a line of Korean-inspired streetwear, which they call House of Leehwa. 

Riahi now lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where she works as an intellectual property associate at a law firm, but continues to support the family business in strategy, marketing and communications. “Sharing my Korean culture through our family business has still been the most meaningful work I’ve ever done,” she said.