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Chloe Loung

In a city obsessed with efficiency, stock tickers and a rigidly defined path to success, calling your company “Wasted Potentials Management” (WPM) is either an act of self-sabotage or a stroke of genius.
For founders Harry Leung, Venus Fan and Jasper Chung it is a tongue-in-cheek reclamation, turning their authenticity into a business model.
Founded in 2025, WPM is a youth-driven talent agency that connects Hong Kong’s young underground creatives – ranging from videographers and models to tattoo artists and DJs – with brands hunting for an edge. Its projects include collaborations with Drmers Club, Bape Japan and GQ Hong Kong.
WPM currently represents eight creators, with an average age of 22. Besides matchmaking, it also organises pop-ups and events, offers brand consulting and more.

The blueprint for the company can be traced to when Leung began to see his home city’s divided culture. Born and raised inside the Cantonese-speaking local school system, he had rarely spoken English in his daily life, let alone immersed himself in Western media or its creative codes.
“Growing up like that, it puts you in a box,” he says. “Asian culture kind of always encourages you to be part of the crowd. Be normal like everyone else. But what is normal? In these schools, they want everybody to look the same, act the same, and I was always a bad kid, but I also knew the system was bad for me. I wanted to escape.”
At a casual gathering around six years ago, a mutual friend introduced him to Yutaro Chirikiri, a Japan-born, Hong Kong-raised creative who would later become one of the agency’s first signed talents.
Until that night, Leung recalls, he had been living with only “half of the culture”, confined to familiar local networks and a world conducted almost wholly in Cantonese. Chirikiri and his circle gave him entry to a parallel Hong Kong – a space shaped by fashion, underground music and global aesthetics that his own upbringing had never exposed him to.

Merging local culture with international community
When Leung met Chung – freshly returned from a decade in the United Kingdom and already steeped in the world of international streetwear and marketing – and later Fan, who had spent a year and a half running her own one-woman digital marketing operation, the three realised they wanted to build something together.
Chung surveyed the loose network of stylish, like-minded friends they had inadvertently gathered and posed a question that would become the agency’s founding logic.
“Since all your friends are cool as well,” he remembers saying, “why don’t we just build an international community that also has the local culture in it, and kind of merge it together?”
It was an invitation to formalise what they were already doing: bridging two worlds and turning a scattered group of friends into a platform capable of reshaping Hong Kong’s creative economy.
For Fan, it made perfect sense. Though she had built everything at her own operation from the ground up – social media management, branding, design, website work – the constant juggling of freelance clients left no room for collaboration.
“It was always just me learning, keep learning and keep doing everything by myself,” she recalls. “There’s no getting inspired by someone else. I was good at the work, but it was lonely.”
At its core, the collective tries to push a sense of community. That comfort, they believe, is what allows creativity to flourish.
“In communities like this, you have other people with you,” Chirikiri says. “You’re connected, you have a community of good people. You’re never alone.”

Setting creativity free
The life of an influencer might seem like it would be the same whether posting from a flat in London, a studio in Seoul or a cafe in Hong Kong. The internet, after all, is meant to flatten geography. But the team at WPM insists that where you create fundamentally shapes how you create – and in Hong Kong, the conditions are starkly different from those abroad.
“Let’s take magazine shoots in the West,” explains Moosa Kalimullah, one of WPM’s talents and a student at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. “They’re a lot crazier, and they’re very bold with it. In Hong Kong, they’re very commercial and they have very strict guidelines.”
The team argues that the environment in Hong Kong is one that instinctively tightens the creative leash. The root of the difference, they say, lies in why people make things in the first place.
“They’re not creative for the sake of creation, they’re creative for the sake of monetisation,” Kalimullah says.
In cities like New York or Paris, they say, there is a societal romantic tolerance for the struggling artist, a cultural permission to experiment without an immediate pay cheque while breeding work that is confrontational and genuine.
The city’s infamous status anxiety is compounded by a high cost of living, and the pressure to project financial stability actively punishes the sort of risk-taking that produces bold, unconventional work.
“People are so concerned about how they are perceived to other people,” Chirikiri says.

Building a business
For WPM, that unforgiving climate translated into early indifference from brands.
“We just had to sacrifice a lot. We had to do everything for free,” Leung says. “But I think that’s how it works for anything. You have to show evidence that you’re actually able to create something and provide, then you can talk about money.”
Those early gigs representing brands and styling or filming shoots as mutual favours eventually built portfolio material that grew along with their company identity. Where the collective once scraped for attention, they now field calls from fashion labels, alcohol brands and lifestyle companies looking to tap into a youth market they can no longer afford to ignore.
“I was actually at a business meeting, and someone there approached me and told me her and her friends actually follow WPM stuff,” Chirikiri says. “That felt surreal – like, we’ve been doing this for so long, and to see it actually spreading, to have people recognise what we’re building, that part was really rewarding.”
Hong Kong brands, long fixated on traditional advertising, are beginning to recognise that a creator with a genuine community can move product with a credibility that a billboard never will, the team says. The plan is to continue dragging the city forward by showing that a Hong Kong-based creator can still build a sustainable career.
“We don’t really need validation from everyone,” Chung says. “We just have to keep making cool things, and that stubborn mindset in Hong Kong people will eventually change.”

‘You have to understand the system before you decide to leave it’
And yet, the team has a surprising piece of advice: try a nine-to-five job first.
“Everybody should work, like, at least get into a job to experience how it works before you even say you don’t want it,” Leung says. “You might like it. You never know. You should try everything.”
Kalimullah studies quantitative finance and risk management – a “respectable” path by Hong Kong standards – while simultaneously building a career in content creation. “Whichever you like, you can kind of choose,” he says.
Chung took a resolutely unglamorous route before co-founding the agency. Back in the UK, he worked in a Chinese restaurant. He resold trainers. He clocked in for retail shifts.
Leung had tried cryptocurrency, worked as a junior marketing executive at an alcohol distribution company, and pursued other odds and ends before he found the role he truly loved.
“I quit [other jobs] because I think you just can’t be creative like that,” he says. “When you’re a junior [in a company], you basically can’t have an opinion. Everything I said meant nothing. But that experience was important. You have to understand the system before you decide to leave it – and it’s the fastest way to find out who you actually are.
“At the end of the day, it’s about doing what you’re actually passionate about.”


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The founders of Wasted Potentials Management talk about growing their youth-driven talent agency and give one surprising piece of advice


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How Hong Kong Gen Z talent agency WPM aims to change city’s ‘stubborn’ creative mindset

.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}The founders of Wasted Potentials Management talk about growing their youth-driven talent agency and give one surprising piece of advice

The founders of Wasted Potentials Management talk about growing their youth-driven talent agency and give one surprising piece of advice