As creatives, we have inspiration and ideas come to us all the time. However, due to procrastination, fear of failure, lack of patience we fail to execute these ideas and so it's a never ending cycle of doubting ourselves and our value.

Dive into the firsthand journey of leaving the 9-5 behind to embrace full-time entrepreneurship as a streetwear brand in New Zealand. Read the raw experiences, the mental challenges, and tips on how to prepare for such a transition as a small business owner.

Finding the balance as creative AND business owner is difficult. I've had to sacrifice a lot of creative time and space to maintain and run our company, which has caused some of our creative outputs to suffer. The journey to finding the sweet middle ground is an ongoing work in process, but here are some things that have helped me as a creative entrepreneur.

We failed... and it's not the last time we will either. The name of the game is failing forward and how to do that effectively. We worked on a pair of sweatpants and a crewneck a year and a half ago and it didn't quite do the way we planned! Read more about how it went wrong and what we could've done instead...

Lockdown in New Zealand has presented many with feelings of uncertainty and unease. For us, as creatives and business owners, we've been given a lot of down time to reflect, like how to improve on our processes or get out of creative ruts. Reading has helped improved both so we wanted to present our recommendations to those in a similar headspace.

We recently had the privilege of featuring on the 6th instalment of Better Sunday Club, a podcast run by photographer and a friend of Fade; Quinn Phelan. Better Sunday Club shares stories around bettering ourselves. We discuss our personal journey, our brand's ethos, challenges we’ve faced and our vision for Fade.

We had our first ever Fade pop-up store experience with our friends and vintage connoisseurs, Hunting Ground for their last day at their flagship store in New Market in Tāmaki Makaurau. We wanted to document the experience leading up to and after the event, our takeaways and thoughts. Above all, we left with our cups filled and our hearts full.

We never thought designing our own pair of shorts was ever going to be an easy process and we definitely proved ourselves right. Our first sample started with a local company in Wellington in March 2020. We made mistakes along the way and combined with our thirst for perfection, our shorts took over a year to complete. However, despite the many setbacks we faced, it was the conviction we had in our shorts that helped get us to the finish line.