Puddle

Things I'm only supposed to say in retrospect.

I was a puddle.

That’s the most accurate thing I can tell you about the days following my launch last week. Voice notes and texts from friends and customers, and me, unable to respond without crying. Not really sad crying. Just the release that occurs when something you’ve been bracing for materializes, and your body doesn’t know what to do with the sudden absence of adrenaline. To the outside, this didn’t look materially different from any other launch, save for the debut of a new logo. Yet for months, preparing for this launch had felt like holding our breath, waiting for a signal about whether hope was warranted.

Part one of the collection was well received. Better than I allowed myself to expect. I collapsed.

There’s a specific kind of depletion that follows a long rally. You don’t feel it while it’s happening — you’re too busy coordinating the shoot and the assets and the website and all the invisible machinery that goes into getting something over the finish line. You feel it the second it’s done. I shot this collection at my house, still recovering from a flu I’d caught the previous week traveling with a toddler, scrambling in the days before to find a local assistant with no luck. Still, it was a magical day with Judit. And then I ran out of gas so completely that the good news, when it came, hit me like grief.

My best friend Cloé has known me since I was couch-surfing and living off credit cards, back when Gil was just an idea. She sent me a voice note after the launch. She said she didn’t want to offend me, because she’d always loved the brand, but that something about this new direction felt more honest, more whole. Like it was growing up and growing into itself.

What it named — and what undid me — was the sense that the invisible work of these past years had somehow become visible. Not the struggle, but the transformation the struggle produced. The growth, not the growing pains.

Here’s what you couldn’t see.

This collection almost didn’t happen. There were months of real deliberation — me, mostly alone with this, because I don’t have a cofounder or CEO or investors — about whether we could afford to make it. Whether it might be our last one for a while. While we got it over the finish line, and I’m proud of that, I also want to be honest that it cost me.