If you’ve ever wondered how someone ends up becoming a brand designer, the answer is usually less linear than Instagram makes it look. Before The Creative Moka, I started four different businesses. Some worked. Some didn’t. All of them taught me something that eventually shaped the brand studio I run today.

If you go looking for proof of my previous businesses, you won’t find any. No archived websites, no old Instagram accounts, no throwback posts. Every time I pivoted or built a new business, I deleted everything. The blog, the accounts, the course landing pages… alll gone. At the time I thought I was cleaning up. What I was actually doing was hiding. I was convinced I was a failure. And I didn’t want to be reminded of it every time I opened my phone.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then: I wasn’t failing. I was experimenting. I was gathering experience and ruling things out and slowly, messily, through several wrong turns, finding my way toward the thing that actually fits. That’s not failure with a tidy lesson attached at the end. That’s just how it works for some of us — and I’d argue it’s especially how it works when your brain is wired to chase what lights it up until it doesn’t anymore, and then need to find the next thing.

I wish I’d kept the evidence. I would love to see the evolution now. But since I can’t show you, I’ll tell you.

It started with candles, a lot of books, and a dangerous amount of lockdown optimism

It started, as many things did, during lockdown. I had time, I had a concept I genuinely loved, and I had the particular brand of pandemic energy that makes starting something feel not just possible but necessary.

The candles were inspired by books and films. Yes, I was absolutely that level of nerd about it, and I stand by it — it was a good concept. What it didn’t have was structure. I loved the creative side and had very little interest in the business side, which works fine as a hobby and falls apart quickly as a company. I also started studying code during this same period, convinced I was going to become a brand designer and eventually build a creative business around it. Not yet, anyway. That part comes later.)

What it taught me: loving a concept isn’t enough on its own. And learning to build the structure around the creative work is a skill you have to develop separately, on purpose.

Then I accidentally turned cooking into a job (and immediately regretted it)

Somewhere between the candles and the code, I built a food blog. I had a vegan cooking course. I learned how to film recipes, how to structure educational content, how to build and sell a course — which turned out to be genuinely useful knowledge, just not in the context I originally acquired it.

The problem was that filming recipes is exhausting in a specific way that gradually bleeds into the thing you were filming them about. Cooking was something I loved. Making content about cooking started turning it into work. And I realised, fairly quickly, that I didn’t want to lose my relationship with cooking just to have a business that involved it.

So I stopped.

What it taught me: your passions are worth protecting. Not everything you love needs to become a product. And knowing when to stop before you ruin something you actually care about is a form of self-awareness worth developing.

The business that worked… until I realised I was building the wrong thing

The next iteration was a social media management business, my first attempt at building a service-based business: content calendars, strategy, the whole thing. It was in Italian, targeting the Italian market, and it worked well enough that I didn’t close it so much as gradually realise it was pointing in the wrong direction.

Two things happened at once. The first was that I kept noticing the design side of things — designing content, building visual systems, the aesthetic logic of a brand — was the part I actually looked forward to. The insights and numbers, less so. The second was that I started feeling misaligned with the Italian business landscape in a way I couldn’t quite name at first.

Italian entrepreneurship, at least in the spaces I was moving through, had a particular energy: formal, hierarchical, appearance-focused in ways that felt performative, and not especially interested in the collaboration over competition thing I’d started to value. It felt, to use the most accurate description I have, very tech-bro coded. I didn’t fit there and I didn’t particularly want to.

So I made two decisions at once: pivot to design, and do it in English.

Finding my people in a completely different corner of the internet

Shutting down the Italian business and rebuilding in English was the scariest and most correct thing I’d done up to that point.

It meant starting over with no audience. It meant communicating in a language I’d learned from TV series — which explains why my early content occasionally spelled “colour” and “color” in the same post, because my brain absorbed both simultaneously and genuinely cannot tell them apart. It meant having an accent and translating everything in my head before I said it and occasionally feeling like I was performing fluency I didn’t fully have yet.

What it gave me was a community I actually belonged to. The English-speaking design world had the values I’d been looking for — collaboration, generosity, the genuine belief that there’s enough work for everyone. I found my people. Some of them, it turned out, were also Italian and had made the same move for the same reasons. We found each other through English because the Italian market hadn’t made space for us.

I’m thriving here. That’s not a word I use lightly.

Four businesses later, I became the thing eight-year-old me wanted to be

When I was small I wanted to be a Disney comic artist. Specifically character design, storytelling through illustration, bringing personalities to life visually. That was the dream before I understood that dreams needed to be practical, before life redirected me through candles and recipes and content calendars.

At The Creative Moka I love doing mascot design and character-based branding. I build personalities into visual systems. I create characters that carry the soul of a brand and make it immediately recognisable and emotionally legible.

Which is, if you tilt your head slightly, exactly what I wanted to do when I was eight.

I didn’t plan the full circle. I didn’t know that’s where I was heading when I was closing down the food blog or pivoting away from social media management. I was just following what lit me up and letting go of what didn’t. And eventually — through four businesses, one deleted archive, and more wrong turns than I originally wanted to admit — I landed somewhere that feels completely right.

The evidence of the journey is gone. But the journey is why I’m here, doing this, in a way that finally makes sense.