The ONE thing I ask myself each day.

“Pain pushes until vision pulls.” – Michael Bernard Beckwith

I’ve been curious about the concept of push, and pull energy and learning to experiment to harness pull energy after a lifetime of ‘pushing through’ everything until the next deadline. While it allowed me to get lots done it ultimately left me depleted, frustrated and burnt out.

How do you know you are on the right path? How do you know you’re harnessing pull energy?

What inspires you? What feels expansive? – That’s pull energy.

What feels draining and contracting? – That’s, you guessed it, is push energy.

Even though the vision of my work – empowering women and girls through fashion – is finally super clear, I still find myself veering off-track along with the many small steps I get to make towards the larger vision.

In my last newsletter, I wrote about starting to work with a boutique manufacturing facility in LA. I realized I was arguing with myself over that decision. So when a colleague asked me to tell them more about Koryphae and how excited it all must feel for me, I was surprised to feel deflated and flat in my answer.

For the next week, I started listening and witnessing my own thoughts:

“What’s the point of all this?”

“Why am I even doing this?”

I became curious as to why was I feeling this way when I have been so excited about the clarity, vision, and progress just a few weeks ago? I absolutely felt I had found my ‘WHY’!

Then I realized: I had fallen into the comfort of following a very well-known, comfortable process I was used to after 20 years of working in apparel: Line plan, designs, tech packs, specs, FOB calculations, timelines, go-to-market-calendar…..

To tell you the truth, it bored the hell out of me!

Worst of all, it felt completely out of alignment with my overarching vision: Changing the way we do fashion.

Digging deeper, I realized that the story I was telling myself is a crusty old pattern based on assumptions and societal agreements we’ve all been committed to (some of us more than others) for centuries:

First the work – then fun.

Work hard – play hard.

First, achieve/succeed and THEN you get to do what you actually want.

So the story I told myself in that particular instance was that until I had scaled sales and production to up to at least 300 pieces/style, I couldn’t really make an impact in women’s lives.

That felt exhausting, depleting, and not exciting at all!

I sat down and journaled about my actual vision: Working with artisans and craftsmen, using entrepreneurship to uplift and empower women, using traceable fibers, and let’s not forget, using organic and natural materials with high vibrational frequencies.

One morning, a few days after my journal entry, I roll out of bed and got on a zoom webinar hosted by a London based platform (kind of like a LinkedIn for ethical apparel brands and sustainable manufacturers) and the topic literally was “impact entrepreneurs”: Ethical manufacturers collaborating with young brands and small minimums.

For f….s sake, if that’s not a sign from the Universe?

So now, I’m super happy to say that we’ve been talking to multiple companies ranging from non-profits, women- or family-owned purpose-filled businesses with a mission to nurture local artisans’ communities and their artistry, committed to social issues, women’s empowerment, and sustainability.

So now, I can feel the ‘pull energy’ of excitement and flow and am happy to say that we have started the development process with four companies out of India and Cambodia.

We have a long way to go, but what seems now possible is providing farm-to-wardrobe clothing, knowing that each step of the creation process – from the farmer, spinner, weavers,, and sewers – has been done by humans who care, take pride in what they do, and it provides livelihoods in the process.

Talk about good vibe clothing, right?

I can’t wait to share more soon!

Until then,

All my Love,