From Bermuda
to Brand.

When this project started I knew what I didn't want to make before I knew what I did want to make. I go to the gym and do Pilates regularly, and I'd spent a long time frustrated by activewear — most of it felt designed to be photographed rather than worn and moved in. I'd bought knock-offs from Shein and TikTok Shop and the quality was basically the same as the branded originals. If something can be copied without anyone noticing, it probably didn't have much identity to begin with.

I talked to classmates early on and a lot of them mentioned wanting a "pump cover" — something to wear over a sports bra at the gym without feeling exposed or scrutinised. That practical, human need stuck with me and ended up influencing one of the final designs. I also ran a survey at this stage. Looking back, I asked general questions and got general answers. It confirmed what I already thought rather than challenging it — I used the research to validate the brief rather than to interrogate it, which I think was a missed opportunity and something I would do differently next time.

The first prototypes weren't good enough. Some of the tops were not supportive or high-coverage enough — which directly contradicted the brand's stated aim of not sexualising women. That inconsistency was embarrassing. I had been thinking about the brand's values at the level of messaging rather than actually resolving them in the garment itself. It is easy to say you do not want to make something revealing and then not check whether what you have made is revealing. I also used moulded bras in a couple of designs, assuming they would look more structured and premium. They looked stiff and odd. I hadn't tested the assumption before committing to it, which is a fairly basic mistake in any design process.

The original name "Birds of Paradise" was flagged as derogatory — in a British context "birds" is a dismissive term for women, which is the opposite of what I was trying to do. An oversight I should have caught before presenting. More significantly, the designs were described as "islandy" but not specifically Bermudian. I hadn't really understood the difference before that feedback. Bermuda has a very specific visual and cultural identity — it is not just generic tropical. I had been treating it as a mood board when it needed to be an actual source of meaning. Sustainability also came up and I did not have a clear answer. The principle I eventually landed on was longevity — making things that last is more honest and more useful than a recycled materials label.

I scrapped most of what I had and started again. Every design had to be traceable to something specific about Bermuda, and every garment had to solve a functional problem. I renamed the brand Lili — after the Easter lily, Bermuda's national flower — which fixed the naming problem and gave the brand an identity rooted in the island. Below are the early bra iterations, before they became the final pieces.

The key shift was this: Bermudian references needed to be embedded in the design, not applied on top as decoration. A shell sewn onto a strap is still just a shell. A colour sourced from the sand has a reason behind it — one that holds up when you ask why.

By the end of week six each piece had a specific Bermudian reference and solved a functional problem. I do want to flag that the Gombey tradition is rooted in the history of enslaved people in Bermuda. I named the source clearly throughout, but whether it's fully appropriate to draw on that tradition commercially is a more complex question than this project could resolve.

Weeks seven and eight involved a formal presentation focused on the marketing plan — personas, micro-influencer strategy, the Kensington pop-up and overall brand positioning. I also presented a longtail stuffed animal scheme as a loyalty mechanic, which I thought was a distinctive idea at the time. The feedback made clear it wasn't.

The longtail feedback was the more straightforward of the two — it was an inconsistency I should have caught myself. The narrative feedback was more useful and harder to absorb. I had been thinking about the brand from the outside in: here is the design, here is the cultural reference, here is the market position. The feedback asked me to flip it — start with the person wearing the clothes and build the story out from there. What does she feel when she puts on the Seafoam Skort? What does she feel when she wears the Rhythm Cover Up to the gym? If I can't answer that clearly, the brand doesn't really have a message yet.

Looking back, this was probably the most genuinely useful single piece of feedback in the whole project. It changed how I thought about the brand's communication without changing any of the design decisions themselves. The clothes stayed the same — the way I was framing them changed.

The rest of the marketing strategy — micro-influencers, the Kensington pop-up, The Lili Letter — stayed intact. Whether any of it would translate into actual sales is something that can only be tested in practice. It's a reasonable plan, not a proven one.

Five percent of profits from every garment goes to the Bermuda Women's Resource Centre — a charity supporting women in Bermuda through counselling, legal advocacy and education since 1987. A brand positioning itself as being for women needed a tangible commitment, not just a stated value. Whether five percent is meaningful depends entirely on revenue the brand hasn't generated yet, which I think is worth being honest about rather than presenting as settled.

The work improved every time it was challenged rather than confirmed. The early weeks were the least productive because nothing was really testing my assumptions. The prototype phase was uncomfortable but it actually moved the project somewhere. The presentation feedback in weeks seven and eight — particularly the shift towards how the wearer feels rather than what the brand looks like — changed how I understood the entire brand proposition without changing any of the design work itself. That is probably the most significant single shift across the whole project.

Things I would do differently: test materials before committing to them in a prototype; ask more specific survey questions about spending behaviour and brand loyalty rather than general attitudes; define the brief positively from the start rather than by opposition. And the Gombey question remains genuinely unresolved for me — naming the source is necessary but I am not sure it is sufficient on its own.

I am from Bermuda. Growing up there shaped how I see colour, movement and beauty in a way that I didn't fully recognise until this project made me articulate it. I also care deeply about fitness — not in the way the activewear industry tends to care about it, not as a way of looking a certain way or performing an identity for other people, but as something personal and private. Going to the gym or a Pilates class is one of the few places I feel completely like myself. For a long time, the clothes I wore in those spaces felt completely disconnected from who I actually am. That disconnect is where Lili came from — not from a market gap analysis, but from the specific experience of being a woman from Bermuda who is serious about fitness and could not find a single piece of activewear that reflected either of those things.

The clothes are evidence of the story, not the story itself. The Pink Sand Set exists because Horseshoe Bay exists and I grew up knowing why the sand is pink — it is not a colour I chose from a trend report. The Rhythm Cover Up exists because the Gombey tradition is one of the most visually extraordinary things I have ever seen, and I wanted to carry that energy into a gym context without reducing it to a pattern or a print. The Seafoam Skort exists because I wanted the wrap skirt I originally designed to actually function for movement, and solving that problem made it better.

I care about individual confidence. I care about women feeling like themselves when they move — calm, considered, not edited into someone else's idea of what they should look like. The Bermuda references are how Lili gets there. But the feeling is the point. This is the first thing I have made that draws on things I actually know and care about, rather than things I researched in order to know. That difference matters, and I think it shows.

The thing I keep coming back to is the Bermuda story. I told part of it — the geological reason the sand is pink, the Gombey, the lily — but I told it through design decisions rather than through people. Bermuda is a small island with a specific community. There are people there who are passionate about fitness, wellness and their home. I know some of them. I never thought to bring their voices into this project, and that feels like the most significant missed opportunity — not a design decision, but a storytelling one.

Wellness culture tends to speak in abstractions — feeling calm, feeling aligned, feeling yourself. I am guilty of that in this project too. What would have made Lili more interesting and more honest is real stories behind it. A woman in Bermuda who goes to the beach every morning before work because that is how she manages her mental health. Someone who has been doing Pilates on the island for twenty years and has a specific relationship with movement and confidence shaped entirely by where they grew up. Those stories exist. I just did not look for them.

The narrative feedback pushed me in the right direction, but I think the reason I found it hard to fully execute is that I was still designing for a generalised wearer rather than a specific, real one. The most specific version of the Lili customer is not a persona I invented — it is a real person, probably from Bermuda or with a genuine connection to it, who understands the references in the collection because they are also their own references. Getting to that person would have required a different kind of research altogether — conversations rather than surveys, stories rather than data points. That is probably the main thing I would change about the whole project.