On Friday, I attended an afternoon tea event hosted by Nasrin from Mixed by Nasrin. She gathered thirty women from her community, customers, people she has featured, people who simply inspire her, for an afternoon of conversation and connection.
I was excited to go. I had been to one of her events before, and Nasrin has a way of attracting the warmest, most genuine people. Beyond the beautiful clothing she designs, this is one of her real gifts. Connection. Community. The kind that does not feel performative.
What struck me, sitting in that room, is how close her success feels even though she is miles ahead of me. I have spent years watching people who have made it from a distance, and there is usually a wall there. A sense of unreachability. But with Nasrin, I don't feel that way at all. Maybe it is because of how she carries it. She has been exactly where I am, and instead of putting distance between where she was and where she is now, she reaches back. She tells you what worked. She introduces you to people. She opens the door and holds it.
In my years in the fashion industry, I never saw anything like this. Typically, events like these were built for buzz, for image, and reserved for influencers and public figures. The illusion of community, manufactured for an audience. Nasrin's version was the opposite. She invited the people who actually make up her world. Her team. Her customers. The people who have shaped her.
Sitting there, I felt something I don't have a real model for. What does it look like to build a company that puts people and connection at the center, not as a marketing strategy, but as the actual point? As I don't have any examples from my career, I'm building my sense of what that looks like in real time, partly by watching Nasrin.
There is a version of me that feels behind when I think about where her business is compared to mine. She has been exactly where I am and moved to the next level in a relatively short amount of time. I don't have thirty women I could gather for an afternoon, or the bandwidth to host something like that. But I realized, while sipping tea, that I already do this on a much smaller scale. When people reach out asking how to get started, I get on calls with them. I share my contacts, the people who have helped me with marketing, with photography, with everything in between. I have a running spreadsheet of every pop-up I have ever done, and whenever someone asks how I find these markets, I send it over without a second thought.
It is not thirty women and high tea. It is a spreadsheet and a phone call. But maybe that is just an earlier draft of the same thing.
Maybe that is the real lesson from Friday. You do not have to wait until you have arrived to start building the kind of world you want to be part of. You just start where you are, with what you have, and the rest builds itself one generous afternoon, one shared spreadsheet, at a time.
With love,
Maria
Two founders, two journeys, one afternoon of tea.