15 years building this brand, and this is a moment I’ll never forget. My love for fashion and this need to create was the reason I started writing about my outfits on a $50 website I decided to call HappilyGrey.
It’s still the love I come back to, and somewhere in these fifteen years, this became less about the clothes and more about all of you. That’s the part of this I never take for granted.
"Shades of Grey" feels like such a full-circle title for this cover. Happily Grey was never actually about the color. It was always about the grey area, the in-between. Life isn't black and white, put-together or falling apart, and I wanted a space that was honest about that instead of pretending everything was perfect. I never imagined that starting point would lead to a moment like this.
When I hit publish for the first time, I was working out my own point of view in real time — literally posting outfits I wasn't sure worked yet. I didn't have a strategy. I had a website, a genuine love for fashion, and a need to create something that was mine. I called it Happily Grey, because that's what life actually felt like to me — not black and white, not perfectly polished, but the honest, uncertain, in-between of it all.
Fifteen years later, that same instinct is still the backbone of everything I've built. It's there in Happily Grey, and it's there in Nēmah too.
I'm not the same person I was back then. I'm a mother now. A wife. A founder. And everything I've built has grown up alongside me — which means it's changed, the way I have. Nēmah came from motherhood, from wanting something clean and honest for the moments in my own postpartum body that no one really prepares you for. Happily Grey has changed too — less about the outfit of the day, more about serving a community I care about.
Success doesn't mean what it used to mean to me. It's not a number on a screen anymore. It's my kids seeing their mom pursue something she loves. It's someone telling me a product changed the way they feel about their body. That's the stuff that actually matters — the stuff no metric can capture.
This next chapter, for both brands, is about protecting that. Choosing connection over posting for the sake of it. Choosing intention over noise. Being present for my family first, and letting everything else follow from there.
So when Modern Luxury asked to put me on their September cover, it didn't feel like a milestone about me — it felt like a chance to thank the people who made fifteen years possible. This one's for you.
Thank you, Modern Luxury, for trusting me with the September cover. ✨
Read the full article, HERE.
