Girls Girl Drop 01 Barrel Leg Sweatpants
Relaxed, heavyweight cotton sweatpants in our signature Gray Blue, finished with the Girls’ Girl crest. Made for coffee runs, slow mornings and life in good company.
People tell me I’m lucky all the time.
Lucky to own my own business. Lucky to make my own schedule. Lucky to do something creative for a living. Lucky to be able to build Duranté Studios and, apparently because I wasn’t busy enough, Girls’ Girl too.
From the outside, entrepreneurship can appear to be one long weekday coffee run with a laptop tucked under your arm. You make your own schedule. You answer to yourself. You get to build something that belongs to you.
That part is true.
What people don’t see is that you never completely leave work. There is no guaranteed paycheque, paid vacation or magical department waiting to solve the problem you just discovered at 10:47 p.m.
There is only you, staring at your laptop and wondering how one tiny website edit somehow broke an entirely unrelated page.
It would genuinely be easier for me to get a full-time job.
There. I said it.
A steady income would be easier. Benefits would be easier. Knowing exactly when I’m working and exactly what I’m being paid would be easier—especially while raising two very small children who do not care that I have a deadline.
There are days when I am planning a brand photography session, building a website, answering client emails, developing products and cutting someone’s grapes into increasingly specific shapes before 9:00 a.m.
They see the polished website, the visual branding, the client work, the photographs, the products and the announcement that makes everything appear as though it happened exactly as planned.
They don’t see how many times the plan changed.
They don’t see the ideas that didn’t work, the investments that made me nervous or the amount of time spent learning something because I couldn’t afford to hire someone else to do it yet.
They certainly don’t see me moving the same section of a website three pixels to the left and then back again like the future of the company depends on it.
They weren’t there when nothing was happening yet, when I was working without proof that any of it would eventually work.
Not the reckless kind. The useful kind.
The kind that lets you believe you can create something before there is any evidence that you can. The kind that convinces you to send the email, launch the website, book the space or invest in your business while part of your brain is quietly asking if you’ve completely lost it.
When I started Duranté Studios, I wasn’t handed a clear map for building a creative studio offering photography, visual branding and website design. I learned by doing it, changing it, occasionally doing it badly and then doing it better.
Girls’ Girl is being built the same way.
Not because I know exactly what every part of it will become, but because I know what I want it to stand for: women building meaningful things, supporting one another in tangible ways and creating businesses and lives that actually work for them.
That doesn’t require perfect certainty.
It requires enough belief to begin.
Mine has involved considerably more circling back.
I have made mistakes. I have rebuilt things. I have offered services that no longer make sense, undercharged, overthought and spent far too much time trying to make decisions feel perfect before making them.
But I stayed.
That is the part I think people underestimate.
You don’t always need to be the most talented, connected or confident person in the room. Sometimes you just need to be the one willing to remain in the room long enough to figure it out.
I am grateful for what I have built.
I know there are privileges, opportunities and people who have helped me along the way. I would never pretend I created any of this entirely alone.
But gratitude and luck are not the same thing.
Calling it luck removes the decisions, risks, late nights, uncomfortable investments and years of work that came before the part worth photographing.
So no, I don’t consider myself particularly lucky.
I consider myself stubborn.
I consider myself slightly delusional.
And when it would have been easier to stop, I didn’t.
Relaxed, heavyweight cotton sweatpants in our signature Gray Blue, finished with the Girls’ Girl crest. Made for coffee runs, slow mornings and life in good company.
A relaxed 100% cotton crewneck in our signature Gray Blue, finished with the Girls’ Girl crest. Made for slow mornings, coffee runs and life in good company.