I'm Susie, the creator of Sincerely, Serendipity. I've had a passion for fashion for as long as I can remember. As a little girl, I'd sit with my granny going through her magazines, picking our favourite outfit on every page, until she finally taught me to make my first dress. I never settled into one style after that - cottagecore, minimalist, a little decade-inspired, eclectic and artsy, boho, even a day given over entirely to loungewear - borrowing a little from everywhere until it all became something only mine, a different look almost every day, always a little unexpected. I come alive putting pieces together that shouldn't work and somehow do - the kind of outfit that makes someone do a double take.

Life had other plans for a while, though. In my final year of school, I made the hard decision to stop studying fashion. I'd grown up the daughter of a single mum raising three of us, and I understood early how much it mattered to be able to support myself - so I chose the sciences instead, and a career that was meant to be stable.

Then came motherhood, and its own long road. A year of infertility, IVF that cost us thousands, and finally a postpartum stretch with the most beautiful boy, who to this day has never been much for sleep. It pushed me further than I knew I could go. I barely spent any money on clothes through any of it, not after everything IVF and prenatal care had already cost us - and somewhere in there, I stopped recognising myself in the mirror. It wasn't just the exhaustion. I'd genuinely lost track of who I was.

It was finding Depop, and slowly filling my wardrobe with beautiful pre-loved pieces again, that brought a small part of me back. A spark, quietly relit - the same one from the magazines, all those years ago.

I went back to work just after he turned one, two days a week, as a radiation therapist treating adults and children with cancer. I love caring for people - but caring for others on almost no sleep, then coming home to keep caring for my own family too, is a bigger ask than I expected it to be. It taught me something I hadn't understood before: I used to think feminism meant proving women could do everything men could, career and all, without missing a beat. Motherhood taught me something different: nobody actually does it all - not mothers, not fathers, not anyone. Something is always being carried, or something is always being set down. I thought my postpartum year would feel like a holiday from work. Instead it was the hardest year of my life, and the hardest work I have ever done - and somehow, in the middle of all that hard, it was exactly where I wanted to be, every single day.

Sincerely, Serendipity is what grew out of all of it. Not an attempt to supplement an income, or replace my career - something that lifts me up rather than weighs me down. Something entirely mine, separate from being a mother, a part of who I've always been, that I get to share with other women standing exactly where I am.

Sincerely,

Susie