Grab a coffee, this is going to be long.

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 obnoxious.
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 that he disowned his daughter, so I changed my mind.
I wanted to be Steve Jobs, but with a human face. Sort of like socialism.
Some people realize quite quickly what is important in life, it took me quite a while. 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 man asked me: Is this really what you want to do?
And I knew that Steve Jobs was talking to me.
And he tells me: You've got to find what you love!
(But it wasn't Steve Jobs, that's just a metaphor).
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 by a little bit.
I briefly remembered my age and the 30 under 30 column, and then I thought, hey, Dior wouldn't be included there either.
So I went to Portugal to find the manufacturer of my first collection.
I planned my girls' road trip like this.
The plan was fantastic.
Plan:
  1. Get to Portugal
  2. Rent a car and drive around Portugal
  3. Find a manufacturer to make my first collection
I flew to Porto, Portugal and took the handle of a car rental company. 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 IDs and money and make-up into small evening purses, and then return them back to large purses, the way back to large purses did not happen. And the driver's license was left at home on the kitchen counter. I know exactly where.
And so we sit there, me, the Portuguese lady from the rental company and the driver's license (he sits at home). So I told the lady (somewhat heartbreakingly) that I had to do something special. She gave me a Mini Cooper and said she had never seen me in her life.
And so I drove around 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 the covid had already stopped. In Europe yes, in China no.
And just like Lorenzo's butterfly effect, closed ports in China left global fashion chains with nowhere to manufacture and flocked to….Portugal.
And so there was no time in production for JUSTLOVE. And time passed, and I thought to myself, how are we going to make the second autumn collection if we don't have the first yet?
I poked my finger into the map where, according to Wikipedia, Kashmiri goats live. If my second collection is to be cashmere, we need to find the cashmere, or rather the goat. When the plane landed in the middle of the Mongolian steppe and there was no sight of Ulaanbaatar, I became confused. But when the brother of my classmate from the Japanese university greeted me at the airport with a slight accent, Good day, because he studied in Czechoslovakia in the eighties, and seated me in a beautiful Mongolian car, I was home again.
I found my Kashmiri goat in the middle of the Mongolian steppes. She was beautiful, tiny, and I held her and told myself that I had accomplished something special.
And so I found the production of my second collection in Mongolia.
But I was wrong.
I had to go halfway around the world to finally realize that achieving something extraordinary lies in completely ordinary things.
In that one does not go mad,
won't crash
won't give up
that he gets 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.