Do you have your coffee? No? Go ahead, I'll wait. Ready? Awesome, come sit with me for a minute. I am writing this from my couch with my three boys curled up in my lap and there is nowhere else I would rather be right now.
For a while now I have been thinking and looking for a way to share the things that go through my brain. What has shaped me. Where I am when I look at life and its future. Things I think about. My business, my boys, my family, my friends. Just all kinds of things. So I thought, why not try it here. While this doesn't directly have a lot to do with bags, all of these things have shaped who I am and that in turn has shaped the business I run, the bags I make, and the foundational things I feel are integral to Daylin Skye.
When I think back about how Daylin Skye was born, you all know it began with a bag. But what is behind this bag is something I just kind of want to share with you. I think there are things that had someone been able to share them with me would have been really helpful. So maybe there are bits and pieces here and there that you can find compatibility with, or that you can use, or that you can find comfort in.
One of the big things about where Daylin Skye came from is this. After I made that first bag and had friends asking me to make them one, I knew I wanted it to be individual to them. But where did this passion for individuality come from? When I take a deep dive into the recesses of my brain, interesting place that it is, I see that it came from the time after my father passed away and the grief that was swallowing me.
I know. How do bags and grief and individuality come together? But in the grief I found myself drowning, and the things that were supposed to help didn't. The platitudes being handed to me actually made me feel worse. Things like:
"what doesn't kill you makes you stronger"
"God must have needed another angel"
"he's in a better place."
Well meaning friends and people who loved me handed me these things with open hands and good hearts because they wanted to offer me comfort. But to my surprise, instead of comforting me they made me angry and frustrated.
Perhaps the hardest part in navigating grief was that some of the most spiritually foundational things I had been raised to believe were failing to reach me. My father was a minister. I had never known anything but a life rooted in faith. And yet when I tried to apply the things I had been taught, the silence, the pain, the anguish, and the drowning left me wondering if I was simply the one God did not want to help.
It was during these moments that I began to form the understanding that one size cannot possibly fit all. Not in life. Not in death. Not in grief. Not in living. Not in thinking. Not in simply being an individual on this earth.
So when I first started making bags I was extremely motivated by this. The idea that not one style fits every person, not one combination of fabrics, not one color. The thought that you should not have to stand in line to look like everybody else. That you should not reach for your bag and see it on a hundred other people. I knew I wanted to make something that was completely and specifically yours. And if two people happened to choose the same bag I still wanted there to be something that set them apart. That it was individually made for them, made with them in mind.
That is where this all started brewing inside of me. The thought, the belief, the certainty that one size cannot possibly fit all. And that we deserve to be expressly and totally ourselves.
But there is a whole interior life behind this business that does not always fit in a caption. The things I am learning. The things I am still figuring out. The people along the way who made me who I am. The moments that cracked something open in me and changed the way I see my work. The mornings where everything clicks and those where nothing does.
This is where I am going to write about those things. Whatever is on my heart. I will show up here when I feel like I have something I want to share and the subjects will be vast.
I cannot give you a specific subject that this blog will be about. I can just tell you it will be about life and business and growing and loving and being a good human.
I am really glad you are here. I hope that we can help each other along the way.
See you next time for coffee.
Amber
