Jane Lu, the only child of Chinese migrants, was too terrified to tell her parents that she’d thrown in a perfectly good job at EY during the global financial crisis to join a friend at a pop-up store selling clothes.

She would get up in the morning, put on her conservative corporate suit and sit alongside her mother on the 442 or 441 bus as the pair headed from Sydney’s Balmain into the city for work. The only problem was Lu wasn’t going to the job her mother thought she was.