Why JEMMA founder Joanna Lau wants women to bet on themselves

There’s a version of success that looks perfectly good on paper: a stable career, a respectable title and a salary that makes walking away increasingly difficult.

Joanna Lau had all of that. She had worked hard to build a career in finance in New York when an everyday frustration planted the seed for something entirely different.

Like many working women, Lau was carrying her laptop, heels and seemingly half her life around the city every day. Yet finding a work bag that was both polished and genuinely practical proved surprisingly difficult.

“I remember thinking, someone is going to build this, why shouldn’t it be me?” she recalls.

The problem? She knew nothing about making handbags. She had no manufacturing experience, no connections in fashion and no guarantee that her idea would work. What she did understand intimately, however, was the woman she was designing for because she was that woman.

Nearly a decade later, that leap has turned JEMMA into a multi-million-dollar business. But behind the success story is one that’s just as much about money, calculated risks and figuring things out as you go.

She was fearless, but not reckless

Leaving finance might sound like the ultimate “quit your job and follow your dreams” story, but Lau’s approach was considerably more calculated.

She launched JEMMA with her own savings and without outside investment, starting small and first trying to prove there was demand before committing more money to the business.

“Coming from finance, I was very aware of downside risk,” she says. “I may have been fearless enough to start JEMMA, but I wasn’t reckless with money.”

As the company grew, so did the financial stakes. Decisions were no longer simply about whether to produce another batch of bags. They became questions of whether to place larger inventory orders, hire employees, increase marketing spend or hold onto cash.

And because it was her money on the line, those decisions felt particularly personal.

“Bootstrapping sounds quite romantic once a company is successful,” Lau says. “The reality is repeatedly putting your own money back into something you believe in without knowing exactly when, or whether, you’ll see it again.”

There were times she questioned whether she had made the right financial decision. But bootstrapping also forced her to become a disciplined founder. Even now, she says she remains careful about where every dollar goes.

Success looks different when you build something yourself

In finance, Lau says success was relatively straightforward to quantify. There were titles, compensation and performance benchmarks, followed inevitably by the next goal to chase.

Today, revenue and growth still matter. She remains competitive with herself and wants JEMMA to become a truly global brand. But her definition of success has expanded beyond numbers.

It’s seeing a stranger walking down the street carrying a JEMMA bag. It’s hearing from a customer who bought an EMMA for her first major job, a promotion or another milestone. It’s creating jobs and building a company capable of existing beyond its founder.

And now that Lau is a mother, it’s also about creating something her children can one day be proud of.

“My ambition certainly hasn’t become smaller,” she says. “If anything, it has become much more purposeful.”

Sometimes, growth is the scary part

It would be easy to assume that reaching a certain level of success makes entrepreneurship less frightening. Lau has found the opposite can be true.

Some of her hardest periods came when JEMMA was growing the fastest. Bigger growth meant larger inventory orders, more money being reinvested and responsibility for a growing team.

There were periods when, despite the company looking successful from the outside, she would wake in the middle of the night wondering whether she had made the wrong call.

“That is probably one of the loneliest parts of being a founder,” she says. “You can ask everyone for advice, but ultimately there are decisions nobody can make for you.”

Her way through was to return to the numbers, trust her instincts and ask herself whether she still believed in what she was building.

The answer continued to be yes.

For Lau, resilience isn’t necessarily about feeling fearless. Sometimes, it simply means getting through a difficult day and waking up the next morning ready to solve the next problem.

Women are carrying more than what’s inside their bags

The original EMMA was born from a very literal problem: everything a working woman needed to carry through her day.

Nearly 10 years later, Lau sees that idea differently.

Women today, she says, often move between multiple roles at once, whether as executives, founders, mothers, daughters, partners or caregivers. Work itself has also become more fluid, with women moving between offices, homes, meetings, travel and family responsibilities.

“I think women increasingly want the things in their lives to work harder for them, rather than create more work,” she says.

That perspective has become even more personal since Lau became a mother to three-year-old twins while continuing to run JEMMA in New York, away from her family in Singapore.

She no longer sees balance as splitting herself evenly between work and family every day. Instead, some days the business requires more of her, while on others, her children do.

“Balance happens over time, not necessarily within every 24 hours,” she says.

It has also changed how she thinks about the women JEMMA designs for.

“I think women are remarkably good at making carrying a lot look effortless,” she says. “We show up, get things done and keep moving, often while carrying a hundred invisible things in our heads that nobody else sees.”

Her advice to women? Bet on yourself

If Lau could speak to the younger version of herself sitting in finance and wondering whether she should leave behind everything she had worked for, her advice would be simple: “Bet on yourself.”

That doesn’t mean ignoring financial realities. Lau is quick to emphasise the importance of saving, understanding the downside and giving yourself enough runway.

But she also believes there is another risk we don’t discuss nearly enough: staying somewhere simply because it feels safe.

Leaving finance, after all, didn’t erase the years Lau had invested in that career. The discipline, resilience, comfort with numbers and ability to make decisions under pressure followed her into entrepreneurship and ultimately helped form the foundation of JEMMA.

“You don’t need to have everything figured out before you begin,” she says. “Sometimes you just have to take the leap and trust yourself to figure out the next step when you get there.”

Money, she acknowledges, can provide security and freedom. But building JEMMA taught her there’s another form of freedom too: knowing that you gave the life you actually wanted a chance.

“So take the risk,” she says. “You only get one life. Build something you’re proud of. Make it yours.”

Sometimes, the bigger gamble isn’t walking away from the safe option. It’s reaching the end and wondering what might have happened if you had.