Jessie Zheng
  • February 10, 2026

  • At 24 years old, UC Irvine economics alumna (’23) and Merage master's student Jessie Zheng already has business cred under her belt

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As a junior in high school, Jessie Zheng started bullet journaling, a pen-and-paper practice for organizing one's thoughts in a creative, and often decorative, way. "I was buying stickers from a small business, and that kind of just gave me the idea like, 'Oh, I can do this,'" she recalls.

With a bit of art-class experience making button pins with artwork she drew on an iPad, Zheng got her hands on the cheapest supplies she could find — a label printer instead of sticker paper — and started making stickers at home. Then she started the real work.

"I would go to my classes and try to get all my classmates to spend one or two dollars on one sticker," she says, somewhat incredulously. "I can't believe I went around asking people. I even asked my own teacher. I still remember my Spanish teacher who supported me. I was on the tennis team in high school, and I would just be out there during seventh period, asking everyone." 

She estimates that she spent 95% of her free time hustling and working on the art, all of which she created herself initially. By 2019, she had officially launched the business: Paper Sutekka, an online company that sells stationery printed with Zheng's cheerful characters, such as rosy-cheeked sheep and frogs with fairy wings. Inspired by her daily life, she makes things like habit-tracking stickers for workouts, which can be stuck into journals. (They're printed, of course, with rotund capybaras.)

She's kept Paper Sutekka up and running throughout her higher education years. When the time came to go off to college, she wanted to remain close to her parents and older brother, from whom she's gotten much encouragement. "They've always supported me in pursuing my hobbies, like crafting, which eventually turned into a side-hustle and allowed me to earn money which was reinvested into the business," she says. Her family, the rest of whom are from China originally, now live where Zheng grew up, about an hour north of Irvine. "UCI was my top choice," she says. "I love Irvine." When she applied and was accepted, it was a no-brainer.

Although she entered in 2019 as a pharmaceutical sciences major, she quickly realized that it wasn't the path for her. She wanted to pursue something more relevant to the work she was doing with Paper Sutekka. So, with her family's blessing, she switched.

In the School of Social Sciences, she declared a new major: economics. She learned that she liked the micro side of econ, such as supply and demand dynamics, which was more directly applicable to her work with Paper Sutekka. She also decided to do a minor in management, through UCI's Paul Merage School of Business.

"I had good instructors," Zheng says. Faculty like social sciences lecturer Amjad Toukan as well as Travis Howell, a former assistant professor at Merage who taught an entrepreneurship class in Zheng's minor program, helped make her undergrad years at UCI enjoyable, even when much of her studies went online due to the pandemic.

She appreciated her time at UCI so much that after finishing her bachelor's degree in 2023, she decided to continue her education at Merage. After a two-year gap, during which she began working at the online aftermarket auto-parts vendor AeroFlow Dynamics, she began graduate studies at the business school this past fall.

"When I was first considering graduate programs, I wanted to do something related to innovation, entrepreneurship or marketing," she says. She had only looked at two or three other schools that offered something similar when she was accepted to Merage. "[It was an] easy decision for me."

She's currently a part-time student in the Master of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (MIE) program, a unique-in-the-UC-system program that provides immersive, practical experience. "I want to keep learning in the classroom while pursuing my entrepreneurial passions," she says. While some of the other tracks offered by Merage focus on starting a business, Zheng had checked that item off on her bucket list long ago. These days, she's focused on refining her business practices.

"I feel like I really need to go back to the roots again, because when my business started getting more popular during covid — it kind of went viral on TikTok — I honestly had trouble managing everything myself." Though she has help here and there with the art and especially for pop-up events, like the ASUCI Vendor Fair on campus, she wants to get better at delegating. "What I really want to learn is how to manage people. I think that's my biggest goal, because I'm doing everything myself right now. So if, when the time comes, I want to hire people, I want to know how. I want to have the skill to be able to manage and grow a team efficiently."

She's on schedule to finish her two-year program at Merage in 2027. (She opted not to do the 9-month track since she's still working at AeroFlow Dynamics.) In the meantime, she's also founded a flower-arrangement business, called Pixi Florals. That's in addition to Paper Sutekka, which she runs from Irvine. As far as the stationery business is concerned, Zheng is toying with ideas of how to expand. "I definitely don't want to lose the identity that the brand has," she says. "I want to keep creating products that my customers can use in their everyday life."

Delegation, it seems, is going to become a necessity in Zheng's growing business empire.

—Alison Van Houten for UCI Social Sciences

 

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