Here is a more distilled, confident, and cohesive version that keeps your voice but sharpens the narrative arc, pacing, and emotional payoff.
From a young age, I had a quiet suspicion that I might one day work for myself. Whether that instinct came from a mild resistance to authority, a restless creative drive, or a tendency toward multi-disciplinary obsession is still up for debate. Likely all of the above.
Entrepreneurship, however, was never presented to me as a viable option. I grew up without entrepreneurial role models. With an academic and a public servant as parents, the idea of running a fashion business felt wildly implausible, if not entirely off the table. It was not until I moved from Rockhampton, Australia to London that I felt what people call the “entrepreneurial itch”. In my case, it was more of a fever.
Like many twenty-somethings in London, I cycled through various nine-to-five office jobs to cover rent and maintain the illusion of a glamorous early-twenties lifestyle. But beneath the surface, there was a persistent urge to quit everything and throw myself headfirst into fashion. London makes that almost inevitable. Every street corner is a lesson in personal style. The city breathes fashion.
At the time, my total fashion experience consisted of altering thrift store finds, styling them on my best friend, and shooting photos in my parents’ backyard. Understandably, my confidence was not exactly soaring as I tried to enter the London fashion scene.
After quite literal door-knocking, I landed an internship with a Shoreditch-based contemporary womenswear brand that was more than happy to accept free labor, regardless of my lack of experience. From there, I enrolled in a course at London College of Fashion, took on several more internships, otherwise known as glorified shit-kicking roles, and slowly began to find my footing in the exhilarating yet brutal world of London fashion.
Watching creatives around me launch brands through scrappy, old-school bootstrapping was intoxicating. I could see a version of that future for myself. The catch was that bootstrapping in London still requires a fairly sizeable bank account, something I did not have. A later move to Istanbul with my then-boyfriend, now-husband, changed everything.
In Istanbul, I swapped fashion weeks for factories, showrooms for fabric mills. It was there that I encountered a side of the fashion industry London could never fully reveal. A grounded, production-first reality. I credit Istanbul entirely for giving me the foundation to start my entrepreneurial journey. The openness, generosity, and guidance of the makers there shaped the most vital part of my brand: the product itself.
This is not to say that moving to Istanbul is a prerequisite for starting a business. What it taught me was that the most obvious, well-worn path to entrepreneurship is not always the right one.
That said, nothing about launching the label was smooth sailing. If anything, that is when things truly began to unravel. Failed trade shows. Eye-wateringly expensive sales agents who somehow managed to do everything except sell. Impostor syndrome at an all-time high. The first two years of entrepreneurship could very easily be renamed self-doubtship.
The real MVP of my journey has been persistence. Without it, I would have closed shop more times than I can count. It sounds painfully cliché, but allowing failures to become lessons, and using real-world experience to continually reassess and refine the business, is essential.
One ongoing challenge for me has been learning to celebrate successes with the same intensity that I dissect failures. Actively collecting small wins, adding them to my mental archive, and calling on them during moments of doubt is still a practice, not a perfected skill.
Now, five years in, I can say with confidence that we are a thriving small business. I am prouder than ever to have survived the toddler phase of entrepreneurship. The comparison is accurate. Like motherhood, the early years are something you endure, learn from, and emerge from exhausted, humbled, and far wiser.
For anyone embarking on their own entrepreneurial journey, or even just quietly considering it, I return to three mantras that continue to guide me:
- Persist through failure.
- Constantly revise and optimize.
- And stay in your own lane.