I love a clash print, love looking like a rainbow and pairing all that colour with a pair of chunky black boots and huge black earrings. 

What's the big deal you ask? 🤷🏻‍♀️

You see, I built a successful small brand over about 16 years with a pretty different aesthetic. It was much more contained and subtle. I love my old work, don’t get me wrong, but it doesn’t resonate as strongly anymore.

Any small business owner knows you have to love your products to sell them. In fashion, you have to be authentically excited to wear your stuff with pride in order to create hype, market well and make money from your art and most importantly feel like an integrated human.

Back at the end of 2020 I knew that I couldn’t do that anymore, what I was making didn’t light me up. I still loved it objectively but it wasn’t *me.*

So I decided to take a year off and learn to make my own fabric prints. And that’s when I discovered I am a total kook bag A huge bloody colourful weirdo

So I know you’re thinking, “yeah, cool…so just make that stuff now!” Well, see what happened next kind of crippled my ability to.

My ego imploded

I was so concerned that my new work was so different from my old work that I would completely isolate and befuddle my customers and therefore kneecap my ability to make a living.

Yep, that old chestnut. Making money to live…

Honestly though, while the money thing is real there’s more going on here. I think I used it as an excuse to hide

Hide from the comments, hide from judgement, hide from showing up as my authentic self.

I realised that actually there was a lot of safety in making things that weren’t *me.* Because if they didn’t sell, it’s way less personal and no reflection on me.

Making things I truly love puts me right in the path of potential rejection and I guess, at the time, I did not have the biological resources to cope with that. Hello, Perimenopause!

I had a bit of a go, aka the launch of the Metamorphosis jumpsuit, but by then my mental health was in no position to handle it.

Equal measures of fear of loss of income and equal measures very real biological changes had worn me down so much that my body and brain were too depleted to cope with the underwhelming reaction to the launch of this ‘straight from the heart’ piece.

I flipped out. Lost all perspective and considered it a flop. Sadly, my reaction was completely out of proportion to the situation and I should have realised then that I was not well.

Hey, but this ends up as a good news story…read part two for more 💖