This brand was born in Bali, the island of Gods, where I live part of the year. While I was reading “Thrive”, from Arianna Huffington, the idea for this brand, which has been warmly incubating in my mind for some time, just blossomed. Arianna believes we can only thrive in life and be happy if we get in touch with who we really are. Deep inside me, I have always believed the same but I'd never dared to say it out loud.

We can only thrive in life and be happy if we get in touch with who we really are.

As a teenager I used to finish the messages to my friends with the sentence: BE HAPPY BE FREE BE YOU. It was kind of my signature. But instead of living by it boldly and assertively, I lived by it in a shy and quiet way. I was almost ashamed of being who I was and thinking the way I did.

I have struggled with “being happy” all my life. Whenever I've asked myself the question: "what do you want to be?" The answer has always been the same: “happy”. I never wanted to be a singer, a doctor or a teacher; nor I wanted to have kids or get married. Nothing. All I wanted was to "be happy".

All I wanted was to "be happy".

I still don’t have the recipe for being happy, but I kind of move myself towards that goal, and although I am still struggling with that topic I came to a few conclusions that I decided to share with the world. I’ve found out that to be truly happy we have to be honest with ourselves, we have to speak the truth, we have to be courageous, we have to follow our heart instead of our ego, we have to be free and we have to be ourselves, not anyone else. We have to strip ourselves from all the layers of “how we should behave” that we let our family, friends, teachers, coworkers, society in general lay on us. We have to get rid of all the masks we put on, through our entire life, trying to fit in. We have to "get naked".

We have to "get naked". 

When I was a teenager I looked for happiness in the philosophers and the classics. Later on, I looked for happiness in my work, my friends, my family, and my traveling. None of these brought me true happiness. So I kept looking, this time searching the internet, Google knows it all, right? :) Then came meditation, and I kind of started having a glimpse of it. Not that it gave me happiness, but it gave me some leads to follow. One of them, being my true self, which I didn’t even know what it was. It is something that we all lose as we grow up.

We are born happy and free, with no worries, no knowledge of past or future, we just know the present and basic needs. As we grow up and our parents try their best to make us fit in our society, teaching us what we should say and do, what is wrong and right - things like boys can’t dance, that’s for girls; or girls can’t play football, that’s for boys - we begin our way into messy, frustrated, fake and unhappy adults. Some of us get it all right: the marriage, the kids, the job, the house, the car, the money; but still we are in pain, so we try to ease the pain with immediate pleasure: we drink, we smoke, we overeat, we look for sex, we buy a bigger car and a bigger house... the list goes on.

This brand was born to make us STOP and THINK! And DECIDE, and CHOOSE!

We have to STOP! STOP and THINK! What are we doing with our lives, and worse, with the lives of our kids? This is the reason why this brand was born. To make us STOP and THINK and DECIDE, and CHOOSE. We lost ourselves on our way to adulthood. We shut ourselves down to fit in. We don’t say what we think because we are afraid of rejection. We are raised to be good girls and strong boys, not authentic and kind human beings.

Girls are raised to be nice and to please others and boys are raised to be strong and successful. Yes, it's still true today! Unbelievable right? I truly believe that this has to change if we want a fair, balanced and better world. We should raise boys and girls in the same way. They should both be raised to be kind and compassionate towards others, to be courageous and assertive, to believe in themselves and be confident, to feel free to be who they are and to share their vision for their lives and the world they live in.

We want to inspire boys and girls, men and women to be themselves.

We believe in a world where each one of us can be our true selves and be loved by what we are; a world where men can dance and women can play football; a world where each of us can express ourselves without fear of being bullied; a world where each one of us can choose to say NO or YES; a world where each one of us can choose who to love. We want to inspire boys and girls, men and women to be themselves, not someone else; to be what they want to be not what someone thinks they should be.

With much love, gratitude, and respect.

Nair Taveira