There’s a particular kind of discomfort that comes with wearing something that wasn’t made for you.

Not painful, exactly. Not obviously wrong. Just… slightly off. Like you’re performing a version of yourself rather than just being her.

That’s what I see happening constantly with brand design, and I want to talk about it properly.

After two pregnancies in four years, my body fluctuated by about 65lbs up and then back down. Twice. And during both of those seasons, I’d see something like a limited run piece, a sale find, something I just knew was a long-game wardrobe item, and I’d buy it in my non-pregnant size. Future me’s size. The size I’d be again eventually.

I never hated my body during those seasons (or ever). That’s important. I felt great in the clothes that actually fit me. But that item hanging in my wardrobe, on its metaphorical pedestal? It made me feel like I was in lack somehow. Every single day I couldn’t wear it was a quiet little reminder that I wasn’t quite ‘there yet.’

The item was mine. I’d bought it with my own money. And it was still making me feel like I was falling short of something.

That’s what a brand built on aspiration does to you.

When you hand a designer a brief built around someone else’s aesthetic, because you love it, because it looks incredible on her, because you want that for yourself, they’ll create something beautiful. Genuinely beautiful. But there’s a very good chance it’ll sit in your wardrobe the same way that piece of clothing did.

You’ll look at it and feel like you need to catch up to it. Like it’s the authority and you’re the one trying to earn the right to wear it.

Because what you’ve done, without realising it, is hand your power to a visual identity.

You’ve put the future elevated version of yourself on a pedestal, made her the driver, and now your current self has to perform to meet her.

That’s where imposter syndrome inside your own brand comes from. Not from being underqualified. From outsourcing your authority to a mood board.

The brand that fits like a second skin gets built differently.

It starts with excavation, not inspiration. It asks: who are you right now? What’s the genius you carry? What are the values, the ethos, the specific way your brain works that nobody else can replicate? What do your best clients say you do that they couldn’t find anywhere else?

You build from that, and the design becomes the expression of something that already exists, not the blueprint for something you’re trying to grow into.

The difference in how it feels is everything. You stop performing the brand and start inhabiting it, driving it, expanding within it. You stop trying to fit and start just being.

You don’t need a rebrand to feel like that bitch. This ‘bitch’, that you are right now, deserves a brand built around exactly who she is. And when you build it that way, the confidence isn’t borrowed. It’s yours.

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If this landed, the work I do inside my Brand Expansion containers is built entirely on this premise. We start with who you actually are before anything else. Details here →

This post was originally shared on my Substack, Brand & Being. Subscribe here →