I came of age in the nineties, which means I came of age in black. It was the uniform of the decade, black was sophisticated, black was serious, black was cool. Whole wardrobes, whole lives, in shades of disappearing. I wore black for years and called it taste.

I built a career inside other people’s rules, and here’s the unexpected part. I loved it. Corporate design taught me rhythm, consistency, formality, the discipline of a brand with fixed rules and little margin for error.

Then motherhood arrived, life got messier, and I held on to structure and consistency the way you do when the rest won’t cooperate.

A decade of designing homewares at the top end of the market taught me what quality is, what craftsmanship costs and why it’s worth it, what luxury means when it’s real. Pieces I designed ended up on the shelves at Fortnum & Mason and in the Royal Collection Trust shops, and that end of the market runs on one rule. The smallest flaw never reaches the shelf. I’ve never let go of that rule. I never intend to.

Somewhere in those years I found my way back to making art with my own hands, and I exhibited, several times. It is a strange and slightly disconcerting thing, knowing there are people who have a little bit of my creative soul hanging in their homes.

There’s an idea at the heart of These Good Days. We become what we repeat. I understood it the moment I heard it, because I’d been living the proof for twenty years. Repeat other people’s vision long enough and you become superb at it, superb at everything, in fact, except knowing your own. I could serve any brand’s rules faultlessly.

Ask me what I’d make with no rules but mine, and it would be harder to hear me.

When Sera came to me with These Good Days, the vision was already alive, the concept, the first designs, a conviction about bold colour and geometric confidence that matched something I’d carried privately since childhood. I grew up in Africa, and the prints and patterns and geometric boldness I grew up looking at were my first education in what beautiful means.

Sera was building something my eye already believed in, and she wanted what I have, a decade of knowing how to make things properly. Saying yes was easy.

There’s one more thing worth telling. A while into the project, Sera asked me, genuinely asked, whether we should reconsider the name. It’s deeply personal to her, and she wanted to be sure we were building something that belonged to both of us.

I took the question seriously, gave myself room to imagine the company called something else. I kept coming back to These Good Days. I believe in the promise of these words. We spend life looking for greener pastures instead of enjoying the view right in front of us. These Good Days makes me pause, hold my family closer, and live in the moment.

And here is what I didn’t expect to learn. After a career of executing alone inside other people’s rules, I’d assumed the answer was to own everything myself. It isn’t. Carrying a whole brand’s look alone is just a different weight.

What These Good Days gave me is better, a vision I believe in, refined between the two of us, sample by sample, in the kind of passionate back-and-forth that only stops when we’ve found the version that’s clearly right. My job is the thing I’m genuinely best at, holding the standard, knowing the craft, making it real, and being unable to let the smallest flaw through. The weight is shared. The work is better for it. So, it turns out, am I.

And somewhere in all this, the artist woke back up. I’m drawing again, for myself, my own hand, my own way of seeing, out of the drawer for the first time in years. The brand’s idea works on me too, the more I practise noticing what colour does, to a design, to a room, to my own mood, the better I get at feeling it. I used to think I was an introvert, and the black wardrobe matched. I’ve revised my assessment. I’m an antisocial extrovert, and to hell with drab colours.

What do I want to be? A designer making beautiful, colourful, functional things that bring joy, to us first, and then to everyone who appreciates them. It took me until now to find my point of view. I intend to use it.

x Sioux

These are the good days. I still love black, just not so much.