I always knew I was special. Just like each of you.

Sometimes exceptionally clever, sometimes exceptionally useless.

Sometimes exceptionally smart, sometimes exceptionally stupid.

Sometimes exceptionally nice and sometimes, quite exceptionally, exceptionally nasty.

But what are the right life adjectives?

(You can find the answer in the book The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. You're welcome!)

I always wanted to do something special. I wanted to be Steve Jobs. But then I found out he disowned his daughter, so I changed my mind. I wanted to be Steve Jobs, but with a human face. Something like socialism.

Some people figure out what's important in life pretty quickly, but it took me a long time. First I studied, then I studied, then I raised money, then I sold, then I drove, and then I drove agile for a while.

And then a wise person asked me: Is this really what you want to do?

And I knew it was Steve Jobs talking to me. And he was telling me: You've got to find what you love! (But it wasn't Steve Jobs, it was just a metaphor). And so I decided to do what I always wanted to do and start a fashion brand.

One that will be exceptionally good through and through.

One that will make both women and men happier.

One that will change the world for the better. At least a little bit.

I briefly remembered my age and the 30 under 30 category, and then I thought, hey, Dior wouldn't be included there either. So I set off to Portugal to find the manufacturer for my first collection. I planned my own girls' road trip. The plan was fantastic.

Plan:

1. Getting to Portugal
2. Rent a car and drive around Portugal
3. Find a manufacturer to produce my first collection

I flew to Porto, Portugal, and pulled up at the car rental office. Driver's license, please. I'm looking for a driver's license. I don't have a driver's license. As we women sometimes move our licenses and money and makeup into small evening bags, and then put them back into our large handbags, the journey back into our large handbags didn't go smoothly. And my driver's license was left at home on the kitchen counter. I know exactly where.

So there we are, me, the Portuguese lady from the rental car and my driver's license (which is sitting at home). So I told the lady (a little heartbreakingly) that I had to do something extraordinary. She gave me a Mini Cooper and said she had never seen me in her life.

So I traveled half of Portugal in a rented car without a driver's license and found the production of my first collection.

And then there was Covid.

I thought Covid was over. In Europe yes, in China no.

And like the Lorenz effect of butterfly wings, closed ports in China meant that global fashion chains had nowhere to manufacture and flocked to… Portugal.

And so there was no time in production for JUSTLOVE. And time passed, and I wondered, how are we going to produce the second fall collection if we don't have the first one yet?

I poked my finger into the map where, according to Wikipedia, Kashmiri goats live. If my second collection is to be cashmere, I need to find the cashmere, or rather the goat. When the plane landed in the middle of the Mongolian steppe and I couldn't see Ulaanbaatar anywhere, I became uncertain. But when the brother of my classmate from the Japanese university greeted me at the airport with a slight accent, "Hello," because he studied in Czechoslovakia in the 1980s, and put me in a beautiful Mongolian car, I was home again.

In the middle of the Mongolian steppes, I found my Kashmiri goat. She was beautiful, tiny, and I held her and thought to myself that I had accomplished something extraordinary.

And so I found the production of my second collection in Mongolia.

But I was wrong.

I had to travel halfway around the world to finally realize that achieving something extraordinary lies in completely ordinary things.

In that one does not go crazy,

will not collapse,

will not give up,

that he wakes up in the morning, drinks coffee and tells himself that he'll just do it somehow.

That uniqueness is in each of us, whatever the story.

This is mine.

My story about the cart and the goat.

Write to me what we can do better at JUSTLOVE. Or just write to me :) zm@just.love