I get asked a lot how I started my brand. I'm a fashion designer and brand owner, celebrating 12 years of my brand (established in 2014). Although it had always been my dream to become a fashion designer, my path has not been linear and that in itself is part of what I personally love about my story. As a business owner, I've also used warehouses and fulfilment centres in the UK, USA and across mainland Europe over the years as well, which means that I've never really shared how travel and life abroad has shaped my brand, including how I moved from England to a Bulgarian village as a teenager and how that has been a huge influence in my business life.
In this new blog series, I'm going to be sharing more about life in Bulgaria, how I manifested my dream business and life abroad, and how travel continues to shape my brand today.
I was born and grew up in a small town in England, the kind of place where the expected path is pretty clear: school, then a normal career, then a normal life a few miles from where you started. I never felt like that path belonged to me. From the time I was young, I knew I was meant for something else, somewhere else. I just didn't know yet what shape that would take.
My family had always dreamed of living abroad, and we found it in a country almost nobody we knew had heard of: Bulgaria. It wasn't overrun with information in English at the time. There weren't blogs or forums explaining what to expect. We just knew it was unspoiled, that you could live a slower village life and still be close enough to a city when you needed one, and that was exactly what we wanted.
So we drove there. The whole way, from England, through France, Luxembourg, Belgium, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Romania, and finally into Bulgaria. I still remember it almost entirely through the hotel breakfasts. The portion sizes kept shrinking the further east we went, especially the coffee. Big mugs in England, and as we crossed mainland Europe, tiny espresso cups. It sounds like a small thing to hold onto, but it's the detail that stuck. I love the cosmopolitan cafe life on mainland Europe, both in Eastern and Western Europe.
The weather told its own story too. Mild in England, cold in Austria and Germany, a little warmer in Hungary, and then Romania brought the first real snow. By the time we crossed into Bulgaria, it kept getting deeper, and when we finally arrived there was thick snow on the ground. Nobody had told us that. Everything we'd read online talked about sunny Christmas afternoons with a glass of wine in the garden, which turned out to be true, just not the whole picture. In Bulgaria you can have full sun and snow on the ground at the same time. I hadn't understood that yet.
My first crossing into the country, at the Vratsa border, looked like a snow globe. White everywhere. And even though I'd only been to Bulgaria once before, on a trip in 2007, I felt something I still can't fully explain. A pull. A warmth that felt familiar, even though nothing about it was. It felt, oddly, like coming home to a place I'd never lived.
That first night we stayed in a hotel, freezing outside and warm and cosy inside, and I remember thinking how clean and lovely it all was. I loved the food from the very first meal, the salads, the continental breakfasts, the little differences in how everything was prepared. I don't think I came across a single Bulgarian dish in those early weeks that I didn't like.
A week after we arrived, I turned sixteen in Veliko Tarnovo, at a restaurant overlooking the river Yantra. It was hard to get a table there, people travelled from all over the country for it, and ours was in the conservatory looking out over the water, lit up by the streetlights on a dark January night. I wore a blue swing coat. I'd always been into fashion, and with not much else to do at the time, planning my outfits for the week had become a kind of Sunday ritual, a way of giving myself structure and making use of everything I already owned. Most of my clothes were still somewhere on a removal truck crossing Europe behind us, so I was working with what fit in a suitcase, including a cape coat that was completely impractical for a Bulgarian winter and that I wore anyway.
Technically, we were still tourists that night. We were living in hotels, waiting for our house in the village to be ready. I had no idea what was coming next, only that it felt enormous, and that it was going to shape the rest of my life. And here's the strange part: I wasn't scared. I kept waiting for the fear to arrive, and it just didn't. It felt like the start of something, and I was ready for it.
