Growing Up Between Cultures, Finding Herself in Rugby
Sofie was born in Germany to a German father and a Chinese mother. She grew up in Shanghai and went to an American school, which is why people often ask about her accent.
She found rugby in a culture that didn't see the sport as feminine, especially for Chinese women. Playing it changed her relationship with her own body: what it was supposed to look like, versus what it could actually do.
Sofie has always had a lot of ideas and a habit of turning them into projects. Nearly everything she's built since traces back to what rugby gave her: a mission to normalise strength and movement for women, especially across Asia, where beauty has long meant staying slim, small, and unobtrusive.
Girls Lift Girls: A Community Built Without a Business Plan
In May 2024, Sofie and a co-founder started Girls Lift Girls in Dubai. At the time, she was working full-time in gaming and esports marketing and training as a rugby player on the side.
It started small: dinners, coffees. Then it grew into group workouts, paddleboarding, and spikeball on the beach, with real conversations about body image and nutrition happening alongside the sweat.
It spread the way good community projects often do. Friends in Hong Kong saw what she was building and asked to start their own chapter. Friends in Australia did the same soon after. It was never planned as a business; it grew into one across three markets simply because people kept asking for it.
We celebrate our bodies for what they can do instead of only the way they look, because we live in a world that's so focused on aesthetics, especially for women.
The Dà Collection: Turning a Word Used Against Her Into a Brand
The same year, Sofie started a second passion project: The Dà Collection, a t-shirt brand built around the Chinese character for dà (大, meaning "big" in Mandarin). Growing up as a dancer and a rugby player, she was often told her shoulders and legs were too dà: too muscular, too much.
She made the first shirt for herself, as a way to reclaim the word. Instead of "big" meaning too loud or taking up too much space, she wanted it to mean strong, healthy, and unafraid to dream big. Support from the women's rugby community, and from women in other sports who recognised the same story, pushed it into something bigger, eventually reaching friends in the United States and Hong Kong who wanted their own shirts. That demand is what pushed her to register it as a real business.
Turning it into a real brand meant learning things she hadn't needed before: setting up Shopify, and finding a fulfilment partner that could actually ship shirts to the US, Hong Kong, and wherever her community showed up next.
The holding company behind it, Haus of Li, has its own story. "House" is spelled the German way, Haus, in the style of fashion houses like Dior. " 力 ", she says, means strength in Chinese. The name nods to a story her father liked to tell: as a young child, before she understood languages as separate things, she'd mix German, English, and Chinese into a single sentence.
Why Hong Kong Made More Sense Than Dubai
Both businesses were first incorporated in Dubai in 2024. As her Dubai licence neared renewal, a few problems had piled up.
She'd nearly been fined for missing a corporate tax registration she didn't know applied to her; she'd assumed a revenue threshold meant she was exempt. On top of that, the currency and banking setup worked against her. Her supplier was in Hong Kong, her fulfilment partner was in Guangzhou, mainland China, but her company was tied to UAE Stripe and UAE Shopify because of where it was registered. That meant juggling Hong Kong dollars and UAE dirhams for a business that ran almost entirely on the former.
Hong Kong, by contrast, was already where her suppliers were, already the currency she worked in, and a place she returned to at least once a year. She made the decision to re-register there before she'd even decided to move back for good; the practical case stood on its own.
Finding Osome and Making the Switch
Sofie found Osome through online research and, she believes, a case study on Osome's website featuring a Hong Kong client, which she recognised. A mutual contact confirmed the experience had been good, which was enough to build trust before she signed up.
Since she wasn't living in Hong Kong yet, she needed a third party to act as her registered office and company secretary. She signed up for incorporation, accounting, and audit. What settled how many entities to register was a cashback deal through Osome's banking partner, Aspire; it made more sense to register one holding structure rather than three separate businesses.
I think the onboarding experience (with Osome) was really smooth, and there was also a cashback deal going on with Aspire.
Real People, Fast Answers
Before Osome, Sofie had registered in Dubai without this kind of dedicated support, and a missed tax requirement had almost cost her a fine. Hong Kong, with Osome handling the back office, felt different from the start.
Questions got answered quickly over chat. When a team member couldn't access files, Osome told her within the day that they needed to complete the Know Your Customer (KYC) verification first. And when she asked, as a content creator, to be connected with Osome's own marketing team, the introduction happened without friction, something she said doesn't usually happen this smoothly with other companies.
I just love the customer service (at Osome). Being able to chat to someone and have them reply, you feel like you're actually working with humans.
As an athlete, training takes up a non-negotiable part of every day, on top of running two businesses. For Sofie, that's exactly why putting a single number on her time feels reductive: every hour could go toward getting better at her sport, creating content, or emailing brands for partnerships, and each of those pulls her forward in a different way.
By her own admission, it's a rough estimate rather than an exact calculation, but Sofie puts a figure on what Osome has given back: without a third party, registering a company in Hong Kong in person would have taken her at least half a week; once accounting support is factored in, she puts it at around five days saved.
She's yet to set up the Osome app on her phone and has been managing everything from the dashboard on her laptop instead, including the business health dashboard, which she's found useful, especially while she and the accounting team work out how to reconcile income from several sources: product sales, brand partnerships and school workshops.
While browsing Osome's partnerships page, she came across one that caught her off guard: Notion, a tool she already relies on for everything. It was a small discovery, but one that reinforced how the tools founders already use tend to show up in useful places.
That trust has translated into referrals. Sofie has recommended Osome to entrepreneur friends in Amsterdam and other markets who've asked her whether it's worth registering a Hong Kong business alone or through a third party. Her answer is consistently the same: go through a third party, and specifically Osome, since it's the only one she has experience with. At least one friend has already signed up, and she's noted Osome's referral programme on the website as another reason to keep recommending it.
A Sprint at the Hong Kong Sevens
Osome's role became most visible during the Hong Kong Sevens rugby tournament, when Sofie ran an on-ground stall selling t-shirts and scrunchies. The scrunchies started as an experiment with cheongsam fabric (a traditional, fitted Chinese dress), chosen so she could bring a symbol of femininity onto the pitch. She later switched to a sweatproof, spandex-like material once the silk didn't hold up.
Her Dubai-registered Stripe account, the system that lets her take card payments, was due to expire just as the tournament started. Her new Aspire account in Hong Kong hadn't been approved yet either, which meant she had no way to accept card payments unless she found a stopgap fast. Airwallex, another platform Osome partners with, became that stopgap, letting her keep selling without a break in service.
Advice From an Athlete-Founder: Long-Term Vision, Short-Term Action
Sofie's advice to founders starts with permission to be small. If there's even a tiny idea, whether it's a friend's plan to sell homemade biltong or a t-shirt made just for yourself, test it informally on friends first before treating it like a business. She didn't register The Dà Collection until it had already shown it could become a real brand.
The phrase she keeps coming back to is long-term vision, short-term action: even one email a day still counts as movement in the right direction. She sees a direct line between the discipline of being an athlete and building a business, the highs, the lows, the pressure of crunch moments, and has told other athlete friends as much:
If you want something that feels like sport, that isn't sport, after you retire from sport, start a business.
As much of a rollercoaster as it's been, she says she could never go back to working for someone else now. At 26, with fewer responsibilities tying her down, she sees this as exactly the right age to be testing ideas and following through on them.
For Sofie, the mission hasn't changed since her first passion project: normalising strength for women. With incorporation, accounting, and audit handled in the background, the day-to-day admin no longer competes with that mission for her time.
