Embrace Your Journey
The Vision
This is the story of a girl from Jamaica who never believed in limits. Who was handed a ceiling and treated it as a suggestion. Everything that follows actually happened — almost none of it planned. Here it is in her own words.
Chapter One
Origins
I was born in Kingston, Jamaica and moved to NYC when I was seven with my mother and my brother. It was hard for my mother to support our family as a single parent, and we ended up homeless for a few years before being placed in a NYC housing projects. I grew up in the U.S undocumented. That meant knowing early on that I’d have to work harder than everyone around me if I wanted to get out of the projects and succeed. My mother made us write a report on a different country every month, so I grew up motivated to one day travel and explore what life was like in other places around the world.
I majored in fashion design at the High School of Fashion Industries. Then on my first college application, I won a full scholarship to Claremont McKenna and flew to California — where my journey of self-discovery really began.
Chapter Two
Festival Magic
California is where I found festivals, and festivals introduced me to a whole new world.
Although I had studied fashion design in high school, I couldn’t see myself working in a competitive fashion industry that turned my enthusiasm into work. It wasn’t until I started making costumes for myself and friends that my passion was reignited. People began to stop me to ask where my outfit came from, and then asking me to make them one. What started out as a hobby with no plan attached grew into a side business.
Chapter Three
Burning Man
A World Of Imagination
"One sunrise, dancing on top of the Robot Heart bus, I made a wish: that I would feel this alive always. That this — the gratitude, the abundance — would be present in my life all the time, and not something I visited once a year."
My first Burning Man was in 2013 and I had my mind blown. It’s like visiting another planet. A whole city where creativity mattered more than profit. Where people used their talents to make strangers happy. Where abundance was the baseline rather than the prize. It was the first time I saw what we’d actually be like if we lived in connection. Each year I attended Burning Man I learned something that helped me to become a better person.
Chapter Four
Flow
It took two years for playa magic to reach my default-world life. I met my soulmate Gilles at a Burner costume party in New York in 2015. I had been drawn to his playa photography before I met him and we agreed to do an exchange. He would do the first photoshoot for my clothing designs and I would make his costumes for Burning Man that year. Gilles showed me what I was actually capable of and what we could build together. We decided to work together on building YOSHIZEN.
At the time I had a legal assistant job at a law firm. I started to build my fashion website at my desk when I had spare time at work. They found out and fired me. I was told I should have used the time to organise the filing cabinet instead.
I was actually really relieved. I’d been giving eight hours a day to work that felt mindless. My plan was to sell my designs during the summer festival season and then find another job after Burning Man — but that year Gilles and I shot the first real photoshoot for the brand, and my designs made more than the law firm had ever paid me. I was thrilled at this proof that I could make a living from creating instead of working a traditional job. I’ve never looked back since.
Three years later, Gilles and I celebrated our love by getting married at Burning Man.
Chapter Five
The Leap
In 2016 I left the United States for the first time in fifteen years. In six months, I visited five countries — France, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, Thailand — and the thing I couldn’t stop noticing was how much better life was outside the country I had spent my whole life trying to earn a place in.
New York was expensive, but I had a good deal on my apartment in the projects. Cheap enough to stay in forever, and that was exactly the problem. Nothing was going to grow there.
So I decided to leave for good, knowing what it cost. Once I left I wouldn’t be allowed back, and my family’s immigration status meant they couldn’t come to me either.
On New Year’s Eve 2018 Gilles and I left to be nomadic fashion designers — traveling for inspiration, selling our wearable art at festivals, and creating beautiful content in epic landscapes.
We went with no plan at all. That’s what taught me the thing I’ve built everything on since: follow what makes you feel alive, and everything else aligns.
Chapter Six
Expansion
"Abundance is overwhelming gratitude for the present moment. It fills every part of your body and lets you feel that anything is possible, that your potential has no limit. That's the feeling that goes into everything we make."
Then Bali, where COVID closed the world around us and every festival we’d planned to sell at that year disappeared. We had nowhere else to be, so we stayed. Bali is where I stopped travelling and started building.
Our own production team of three in Uluwatu now, alongside the Bangkok seamstresses we’ve worked with since the beginning. A home we designed and named Kalinda — sun, beauty, light over water — on a street that means the Peak of Wisdom. And a community that turned out to be soul family.
Chapter Seven
Surrender
What Happens Next
One chapter is ending and a new one is starting. I’m calling it Surrender.
Surrender is letting go of the illusion of control and leaning fully into the truth that everything is unfolding for your highest good. You release the tension that blocks your abundance. You stop forcing and start flowing.
Surrender will be the title of our next 2027 collection, and it’s also what I hope 2027 is for me — living in alignment, releasing the self-sabotage that keeps you small, and trusting that life has a way of working out. Keep moving forward with an open heart. Everything is aligning in ways you may not understand yet, but one day will.
Stay Connected
A map to the world you just got a taste of. Discover the people, places, and experiences that keep festival magic alive.