What this year has been teaching me...
A year of building, selling, and rethinking what my brand is becoming.
Okay, I need to share something with you.
This year is teaching me three things I keep coming back to.
about the brand,
how we sold,
and where this is all going next.
I have been sitting with them for a while, and I think it is time to just say them out loud.
The first one is about starting. I came in as a surface designer. Patterns, colour, print, work that lived flat on paper and canvas.
Textiles were always where I was headed, I just had not admitted it yet. And honestly, it took actually making one product to gain more clarity.
The direction was never unclear. I just kept waiting for certainty instead of taking the step.
The second is about visibility. We did not plan to go viral. What we had was an honest product, a platform we had been building slowly, and the holidays showing up at the right moment.
A TikTok reached the right people, people who felt the colour before they could explain why. That one moment showed me exactly who this brand was made for. You cannot manufacture that. But once you see it, you build everything else around it.
The third is the one I am still in the middle of.
For over five years, BLE was positioned around me, the artist, the maker, the person behind the work.
That was true. But I have been feeling the edges of it.
A personal brand can only stretch so far before it needs its own container. BLE has its own world now, its own story, its own reason to exist beyond me being in the room. My role is changing, from creator to creative director. And I am doing that work out loud, in public, right now.
If you have ever built something that started to outgrow the shape you put it in, I think you will find something here.
Stick around.
Oris