Founder Letter

I became a mother at 17. A single mother at 18.

For the first four years of my son’s childhood, we were homeless, couch surfing with family, slug-infested hostels, and then finally a council flat. I built everything in that flat with my own hands. I worked multiple jobs, sometimes day and night, while studying for my degree. My son still remembers falling asleep to the sound of me working, then waking up in the early hours and seeing I still hadn’t gone to bed.

I got myself out of poverty. I made something from nothing. I had a degree in Fashion, my father was a manufacturer, and that world was in my blood. But I had a mouth to feed. So I put that passion down and built a career in Tech instead. I thrived. And I kept going, not because I had some grand vision, but because something deep inside me said: this all has a purpose. You just can’t see it yet.

I carried that feeling for over twenty years. Through trauma. Through survival. Through building a career in technology that took me around the world. Through every moment I was told I was too much, too loud, too different, too Bengali at work, too British at home.

Everyone tried to put me in a box. Work. People. My old community. But I grew to realise, I don’t fit in one box. I never did. I tick too many. And that’s not a flaw. Identity isn’t one thing. It’s everything that makes you, you.

I kept going.

Then one day in 2025, I came back to my faith. I cried. I prayed. I asked for my purpose to be brought closer to me. I asked for it to help people, not just me, but others. I asked to be used as a vessel for good. I asked for it to be the kind of gift that keeps giving for anyone who becomes part of it.

And this is how all of this came about.

This community. This store. This movement. Every product, every piece of content, every conversation. It all grew from that moment. From roots I spent a lifetime disconnected from.

I still work a full-time job. I build this in every hour I can find. Not because it’s easy, but because I can’t not do it. I finally found the thing that makes all the other things make sense. All the skills I spent twenty years developing, the digital transformation, the platform thinking, the ability to build something from nothing, they were always leading here. Back to the roots. The storytelling? That was always mine. My mum says I’ve been telling stories since I was in nappies. And everything branches from them.

You know what a butterfly is a symbol of? Transformation. It has to go through painful growth inside a cocoon before it becomes something more beautiful than it was before. One small positive action can start a whole series of chain reactions. And everyone contributing to that chain reaction shares in the good that comes from it.

That’s why I call you all butterflies. 🦋

That’s what this is. And we are just getting started.

Dilara