Irene Fiol is no stranger to a busy lifestyle. She moved to Shanghai with her boyfriend (now husband) back in 2008 from Barcelona to pursue a career as an industrial engineer. Since then she has had two beautiful little girls (both born in Shanghai) and has taken a break from her consuming engineering career.
Not being able to sit still for long, the idea for a business came to her about a year ago after a visit from a friend and her daughter. Fiol explains, “I made a batch of yogurt for the girls to snack on. My friend's daughter would usually refuse yogurt at home, but she finished the whole jar that day. My friend also loved the yogurt and said I should sell it on Food From The Hood (FFTH). That was the first time I heard of that platform, and loved the concept of participating in a homemade food network, so I went for it.”
Soon after placing the yogurt on FFTH she started getting weekly orders from other moms around Shanghai via WeChat. Before she knew it, a whole community had grown around her product on the social media platform. Without the expat community, she feels that Irene’s Yogurt would not have come to fruition so quickly. Today, the WeChat group she started continues to grow rapidly on its own, but even so, she feels that the essence of the little iYo family that began a year ago is still the same.
Every yogurt is made in Fiol’s kitchen, produced in the same way she has always done for her own family, but now in much larger batches. After a year of the business taking over her kitchen, the production will soon be moving to a shared kitchen space off of Jiashan Lu, allowing her to expand the business and perhaps get some helping hands.
She is loving every second of this new turn in her career and feels that her engineering background has prepared her well for starting her own company. “It's such a rewarding experience to see a business grow. After years of working long hours in an office, traveling often and having short time to spend with family, now it feels great to work from home on my own project.”
> WeChat ID: iyoshanghai
