When Amanda Niu was setting up Eva’s Richmond House showroom, her to-do list included rolling out rugs, assembling furniture, wiping surfaces and vacuuming floors. Then she sold alongside the retail team. Being the co-founder didn’t exempt her from the unpacking or cleaning.
“Nobody is too good to help put furniture together,” she tells marie claire.
It’s a revealing picture of Niu, who still considers Eva a startup at heart. In 2017, she and Ken Lau, her partner and now husband, established the business with a premium mattress delivered in a box. It has since expanded into furniture and homewares, a trajectory she hadn’t imagined when they began.
Before Eva, Niu was pursuing a career in clinical neuropsychology, specialising in an area she loved: ageing and dementia. Her introduction to entrepreneurship came during an unexpected pause between completing her master’s degree and finding her first clinical role.
A registration backlog meant almost six months passed before she could even apply for a job. She spent the time networking, volunteering at a children’s hospital and starting Eva with Lau.
When her registration came through, she found work straight away. Eva became her after-hours job, with social media, customer service and marketing fitted around her clinical responsibilities. A year later, she reduced neuropsychology to part-time. Another year on, she left altogether.
“I’ve never looked back since.”
The pace of business drew her in. Research and clinical work had their own rhythms; Eva offered the opportunity to tackle a problem and act quickly. Each new challenge gave her something else to figure out.
“When we started, we were just focused on solving one problem at a time,” she says. “Ken and I could never have done this ourselves.”
Although Niu hadn’t planned to become a founder, she had grown up with a close view of entrepreneurial life. Her mother ran an accounting firm in New Zealand, owned a restaurant with Niu’s father during her primary-school years and started a children’s newspaper when she was in high school.
“I grew up watching that and I think, by osmosis, it transferred to me.”
She also recognises a connection between the work she trained for and the business she built. Neuropsychology appealed to her because it involved investigation: examining a pattern, asking questions and working towards an explanation. Building Eva required that same appetite for solving problems.
Her clinical training brought discipline, too. Niu is accustomed to interpretations being supported by evidence, a standard she carries into business decisions. An impressive statistic in a marketing campaign will prompt questions about the sample size, the variables measured and whether the conclusion holds up.
“This rigidity has made me almost allergic to marketing speak,” she says.
Her interest in people extends to the places they live. A sofa, bed or dining table is something we use in intimate moments: resting, sleeping, eating and spending time with those closest to us. The pieces we choose become woven into our routines.
“Home is where you go after a good day, a bad day, an average day, a tiring day, a busy day, a slow day,” she says. “Whatever the day was, it’s where we reset and feel most like ourselves.”
Home also offers a glimpse of us to others. The art we hang and the objects we collect tell visitors something about our tastes, experiences and priorities. For Niu, its private and social purposes help explain why it matters so much.
She has little interest in prescribing a perfect interior. Our backgrounds and upbringings shape what feels familiar and comfortable; there is no single room that will make everyone feel at home.
That understanding translates into practical questions at Eva. Can a piece be assembled and disassembled easily? Will it fit through the front door? If something goes wrong, will a customer be able to get help?
“People aren’t just buying a product, they’re buying certainty,” she says. “They want the anxiety of a big purchase to disappear the moment they’ve made it.”
The Everyday Sofa reflects that attention to daily life. First introduced in 2022, it has removable, washable covers and modules that can be rearranged as circumstances change. An expanded collection arriving at the end of the month adds six colours across three fabrics: Cocoa and Mist in Fine Chenille, Pistachio and Sand in Chunky Weave, and Cream and Sienna in Knotted Bouclé. More than 100 possible configurations give customers room to adapt the design to their space.
Understanding what people need has also become central to Niu’s leadership. As the team grew from seven to 15 to 30, she had to learn how to guide an organisation while remaining the hands-on founder she knew how to be.
Communication proved particularly important. Explaining something, she discovered, doesn’t necessarily mean it has been understood.
“What really matters is what people actually hear and remember,” she says. “If they haven’t got it, you haven’t repeated it enough.”
Trusting her judgement took time. Making decisions about marketing, product and creative pushed her into unfamiliar territory, and she often doubted whether she had the expertise.
“There was a real stretch of imposter syndrome in there,” she admits. “Over time I’ve learned to trust my own judgement more, though I’d be lying if I said that’s fully resolved.”
Today, she is pushing herself to become more comfortable telling Eva’s story. An introvert who prefers observing to speaking first, she finds talking about herself difficult. But she understands that sharing the business’s beginnings helps people connect with it.
Her ambitions also extend to Eva’s future. She wants to keep learning from the furniture and lighting makers whose designs and reputations have endured, with the hope that Eva might one day earn a place alongside them.
Meanwhile, she has built a working life with plenty to appreciate: passionate colleagues, beautiful design, a dog who comes to work and a husband she describes as her best friend.
Asked what her younger self would make of it, Niu’s answer is simple.
“I think she’d be pretty chuffed.”
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