Meet Harry Yu | Miss Dessert

We had the good fortune of connecting with Harry Yu and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Harry, can you walk us through the thought-process of starting your business?
Back in 2012 when I was still an international student at Texas A&M University, I was really missing the taste of my hometown. But I couldn’t find the taste that I was missing anywhere in Houston. So I asked my parents to come to the U.S, and bring the authentic Hong Kong Dessert to Chinatown, Houston in 2013. That’s why we named our business Miss Dessert. And I would like to share one more story, that is why I decided to join my parents to rebuild Miss Dessert in Arizona in 2018. Back in 2018, when I was still building a tech company at an incubator, during a holiday weekend, I went to the original Miss Dessert to help my parents. I saw lots of international students drive 5 hours from Dallas to Chinatown Houston to find the taste that they were missing, just like myself. That’s the reason that I want to build Miss Dessert with my parents together.

What should our readers know about your business?
The motivation of starting Miss Dessert is to bring the authentic taste to Asian people who miss the taste of their hometown.

We are so lucky to come to the Valley. Since day one, we got a lot of support from the chinese students at ASU. And during the pandemic, most Chinese students were back in China, but we got tremendous support from the local Asian community, many Asian foodies help us to prompt our business on social media, so we can survive and even grow during the pandemic. So currently, our customers’ demographic have changed from mostly Chinese people to local Asians and local American.

Let’s say your best friend was visiting the area and you wanted to show them the best time ever. Where would you take them? Give us a little itinerary – say it was a week long trip, where would you eat, drink, visit, hang out, etc.
I like fishing a lot. So I definitely bring my friends to lake pleasant or salt river to fish.

I’ll bring them to Great Wall restaurant to get some dim sums for lunch. And Original Cuisine, an authentic Sichuan style Restruant, for dinner.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I do want to appreciate our customers. We got huge support form our customers during the pandemic. When the pandemic just begun, many customers they drive 20 or 40 mins come to support us and they left very good amount of tips to help us keep open.

Our target customers used to be the Chinese students from ASU. But when Covid-19 came, most Chinese students are gone, and we were struggling to change our customer segments. The local influencers helped us a lot for this transition. They came to our store and promote our business on social medias without charging us anything.

Website: www.missdesertus.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/missdessertus/