We see this all the time: when the economy is suffering, consumers play it safe and they tend to go for clothing that feels safe. This is why elevated basics really thrive in a tough economy, but I feel like this has gone a little bit too far with Australian fashion.

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The first thing I will say when it comes to fashion is that i…

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I quickly ran over to Simone, who was running the event, to ask her, "Oh my goodness, did I miss the part where it said this was a black cocktail event?" She replied, "No, no, no, you're fine. I think everyone just happened to be wearing black." It kind of got me thinking: my goodness, this is so quintessentially Melbourne. What am I doing creating a brand that is so maximalist in a town that is so ingrained in wearing all black or grey and capsule wardrobes.

But then, as I reflected on this some more, I realised that's exactly why my brand does exist: to break the rules, to colour outside the lines, and to show people that fashion can be fun.

I've been flooded with looks from Copenhagen Fashion Week, and really, I just love how they play with their outfits and really show their personality with what they wear. They absolutely customise everything. I saw one creator sewing flowers onto her socks to complete the outfit, and that is what I love about fashion over there: people are really playful and daring, and they're not afraid to try things that look a little bit different. It’s almost like seeing who they are and their personality through what they wear and I love that.

That is what MAKU is about. We are so done with boring. We are so done with same as everyone else, and in this world of AI, this is how we celebrate being human and how we create connection.

And also just on the note of Copenhagen I may as well plug our brand. I sent Alana Hadid our upcoming denim set and she looks incredible in it! This collection is due to launch in September and it’s all about tattoos and art.

Copenhagen is honestly one of the places I look to for fashion inspiration ever time because it’s never boring. If our brand could debut anywhere in the world it would be here and I don’t think it’s hard to imagine why.

I really want to show people that when you wear colour it actually makes you feel different. It completely changes the way you feel about your day.

Yes I might be the only one in the room wearing colour (and probably the only one who also forgot to paint their nails and get their makeup done) but the amount of people who asked me about my outfits just proved my point even more that colour and print create connection.

I always take it back to that six-year-old girl wearing the two skirts. She felt so good wearing that one skirt, being told she looked pretty, that she decided to wear two. That is the feeling that I'm trying to create every single day when I create these garments: that feeling of pure and utter joy, that feeling of connecting with other people simply by what you're wearing.

So yes was it initially embarrassing to be the only one wearing colour - absolutely I wanted to run back home and change to black but I didn’t! And I’m so glad I didn’t because those moments create change in us too. I left feeling more confident and more sure of who I was.

Here’s to manifesting our brand making its debut at Copenhagen Fashion Week 2028.

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link to video here

I loved what she said, I thought it was funny the way she spoke about the English language and she also then went on to speak about how the Māori people of Aotearoa had had their language systematically beaten out of them and they had to fight in order to be able to have the rights to speak Te Reo Māori.

The reason I shared this was because this is also part of my story. Only the week prior, I had shared how I was so proud to be able to give my name to the brand and have a Māori name going out on every single name tag. Considering my nana was beaten for speaking Māori and, as a result, she didn't teach her children Te Reo, and as a result neither my dad or any of my siblings can speak Te Reo. I hate that I felt too ashamed to learn the language as a child because I was made to feel like it wasn’t acceptable. Now, to be able to give my brand a name that has so much significance to me feels really special.

A woman then DM'd me saying, "Love your brand but hate brands that share political posts."

I replied, "This is part of my story because I am Maori." She then replied, "Yeah, I get that, but I just don't appreciate brands that share political posts."

As someone who has grown up experiencing racism my whole life both first hand and second hand with my dad, this felt like another moment to silence the minority. Whilst she probably doesn’t feel that way and just thought oh I just don’t like the politics of it, it’s so much deeper than that for someone who has lived with this sort of oppression and racism.

We grew up next to next a man that would hurl racial slurs, he threw a hammer at us over the fence once, an awful awful man. And the common thread always was don’t speak, don’t give your opinion, don’t be Māori.

I couldn't understand how she could think that it was okay to ask somebody else not to share their opinion. At the end of the day, I'm an artist. You just happen to be able to wear my clothes, and artists have always played in the political space. They've always spoken up about injustices and I absolutely love that about artists. One of my favourite artist and one who really made a huge impact on me was Ai Weiwei - an artist who I saw at the NGV. His work is incredibly political and calls out the Chinese government and highlights the injustices people faced in his country.

Art is such an innately human thing: the human hands that create the art, the humans that appreciate the art. How can you not have an opinion and care about other people, about the planet, about nature, and be an artist? I just don't think that those things could ever be separate.

I also then thought about this expectation that customers don't want brands to have an opinion and don't want them to share their political beliefs, and I have to say I feel completely the opposite. I look for brands who share the same values as me. I want to know that a brand cares about the ethical rights of the people who make their clothes. I want to know that they care about the environment, that they care about how their clothes are made, that they care about the impact that the brand has on the world. Those things signal to me that we share the same values.

I love brands who participate in philanthropy, who donate and participate in charitable days and events. When I see brands that participate in things like that, like cleaning up the ocean, like breast cancer day, like ending domestic violence, then I know that those brands share the same values as me and I'm more likely to shop with them. I can't imagine how you would want to be completely ignorant to what a brand's values are.

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This whole interaction ended up actually being incredibly positive for me because I had so many people saying that they absolutely love the brand even more now that they knew what my standard is and now that they knew that I had an opinion. They value brands that do have an opinion.

Really, our brand is about making people feel good no matter who you are. How can our brand do that if we don't allow people to be who they are? If we silence people, if we silence women, if we silence minorities, how can we be an art-led brand that cares about making people feel good?

So I guess in a way I’m grateful to her for helping me clarify what our brand is and what we stand for, and it’s brought me closer to the community who hold the same values as I do.

At the end of the day I’m just a girl trying to figure this out as I go!

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But if you were to ask me about my experience of growing up as a Māori woman, there are many moments when I felt like I was treated differently. And moments where being Māori felt like anything but a privilege.

My two brothers and sister both have blue and green eyes and are fair-skinned, and I was the only brown one in the family. I recall many moments being treated differently than my sister because people didn't know that we were related. Being asked if I was adopted, and, of course, the story that most of you will know by now, where I was bullied for my Māori name in primary school. I don't actually know if I ever spoke about these things to my family because I think most of the time I just decided to hide it because I was either embarrassed or ashamed.

However, I know my sister will remember some of these moments because I remember distinctly me and my sister playing in Devonport, and a white woman came over to me and told me off, but not her. I'm fairly sure my sister said, "Don't bully her because she's brown,". I know my sister was often there when kids would ask if I was adopted and why I was brown and she was white.

There are other moments too that I recall, and these were not few and far between, where I would witness people being racist towards my dad. We had a neighbour growing up who told us ‘if I wanted to live next to people like you I would have brought a house in xxx city (I won’t mention the suburb but it was a well known area for commission style housing at the time). He terrorised our family for years because we were Māori.

As I got older, I feel like those little moments started to compound more and more. I felt more self-conscious of being Māori. I remember not wanting to learn the language, not wanting to be different, and not wanting to be brown. Looking back at those feelings now, I feel really ashamed that I felt that way. I feel guilty that I didn't learn the language, especially when we go back to our whānau in Waimana and they can speak fluent Māori and I can't. It makes me feel like I've let our people down.

Being able to give my brand this name feels like a really beautiful gift and a way to heal not only myself and my feelings about being a Māori woman, but also sort of gives me some feeling of reparation for the fact that I didn't learn Te Reo.

Now, as an adult, I feel such a strong connection to my people. I feel like my identity is very much tied to being a Māori woman, and I'm so proud of my culture and my heritage. I look back at those moments of being a young child, and it makes me feel sad that I was made to feel anything other than proud of being Māori. But at least I can feel that now and pass that down to my tamariki.

Art for me has always been the language I could speak and express who I am. I think that’s why as an artist when I moved to Melbourne I went back to painting Māori pieces. Feeling so much regret for hiding who I was I was able to paint pieces that felt like home. These pieces all sit in my home and I speak to my children about our people and our Iwi and I get to tell theM how lucky they are to be Māori.

This brand for me is permission to be who I always should have been. Permission to do the thing everyone told you couldn’t. Permission to be proud of all that you are even if someone told you you shouldn’t be.

Maku

I started painting some pieces and then had them printed with an online t-shirt company, just printing on blank AS Colour t-shirts. There was absolutely no intention of creating a brand, but I thought I've got nothing to lose. I'm not investing really anything, because we only pay for the t-shirts as they get printed.

To my absolute disbelief, I reached out to a few influencers, and they actually agreed to let me send them my little print-to-order t-shirts that were just printed on some random AS Colour t-shirt. I was so nervous that when they opened the package, they were going to see that it was just this unbranded t-shirt with no cool packaging and no swing tag. I thought they would be like, "What is this janky brand?" but they loved the t-shirts and they shared them, and our brand really started to take off from the moment that Sophie Pearce shared our brand.

This was in July or August, I think. I printed my first t-shirt. By September, Mia Friedman from Mama Mia Out Loud put in an order, and I saw her name straight away, so I threw in a couple of other t-shirts, hoping that maybe when she received them she would share them online and I could not believe it when she actually did. She even shared our brand on her podcast as well, and the brand absolutely took off at this point. I also should mention I wasn't referring to it as a brand by this point. It was still just me printing t-shirts on my art profile on Instagram and selling them on a website that I'd just put together on Squarespace that was so bad and definitely wouldn't have been a great user experience.

As you can imagine, I couldn't really believe that all of this was happening, and every single order that came through, I was still like, "Shock and awe." It got to a point where we couldn't keep up with the demand. Boxing Day of that year, we sold an insane amount of t-shirts. I remember thinking , ‘This can’t be real’. Is this really the moment that I could actually create a brand?" I was already starting to draw all of the clothes that I wanted to design that I'd been drawing since I was a little girl, but never thought I'd be able to do.

We just picked up our first major stockist who put in a massive order to every single one of their stores in Australia and New Zealand, and my husband and I were absolutely buzzing. We had our best month of the year in February 2025, when we decided to do a little bit of a clear out of some of her older t-shirts, and sales were just insane. I think neither of us could really believe that this was happening. We hit our first roadblock that same month because we had run out of stock of the blank t-shirts and we couldn't get any more from any other t-shirt company in Australia. We had literally sold them all out.

It was at this point that we decided to invest in our own stock. We also decided to quit our jobs at the same time, in about March of 2025. I would say this is probably my first thing that I wish I knew. I wish I knew anything about ordering stock and not ordering based on the incredible highs, because we had absolutely no data to tell us that this would continue the same way for the rest of the year. We put in a huge order of all of these t-shirts with yellow, pink, and ivory colours that we had absolutely no idea how we were going to use, but they were what we had been selling, so we just ordered the same things.

We were coming into winter, and a huge learning that we had at that point was that we cannot sell pink and yellow through the winter months in Melbourne. We were selling boxy crop pink and yellow t-shirts and sales absolutely plummeted. We didn't have enough winter options, and we hadn't been able to get our apparel in time, and we were absolutely scrambling to find out what to do.

Luckily, though, we had been building out our apparel, and we were able to launch some V-necks and pants in October, which was a really successful campaign for us. This really helped us to understand that the importance of dropping the right product at the right time is what can make or break a brand. This is one of the decisions that we'd made early on to make sure that we weren't just a t-shirt brand, and this is probably one of the best decisions that we'd made to date. One of the things that really saved us as a brand was making sure that we had categories other than just the Ts, especially if you're launching a product that is viral at the time and is having a really huge moment. If that's your only product, trends always finish and they always end. You want to make sure that you're really diversifying your products and your categories so that if that trend does finish, you're not so reliant on just one type of product to be able to see you through.

Coming into 2026 and now, I feel like our challenges really lie in managing cash flow. We no longer print our t-shirts to order at all. We've moved completely to holding stock, and we knew that we had to do this if we were going to ever be able to compete with other brands, because our time to get t-shirts to customers with the print-to-order model was just not cutting it. Some customers were waiting two weeks; some customers were even waiting a month. It was absolutely insane. We knew that if we wanted to really make this brand a serious brand, this was what we had to do, but again, we're moving into a business model that we have absolutely no experience in, and we are just truly trying to figure it out.

One of the things that I really wish I knew early on was about how to manage cash flow and how to really understand your profit margins. I think back to when we were absolutely raking it in those first few months that we had the brand live, and I think, my gosh, we just absolutely wasted our money on so many things. We didn't take notice of where it was going. We didn't try to save money on things that we probably could have, and it was very ignorant of us.

That's one of the things I would say: if you're getting into a business and if you're a business that goes viral and absolutely takes off initially, it does not mean that you can sleep on your financials and make sure that you protect your money and pay yourself enough and just use it wisely, I would say.

This year, I think, has been tough for a lot of brands. People are scared, consumer sentiment is low, and we're all just really trying our best to keep our customers engaged and interested in buying. I think this year, for the first year, is us as a brand really understaffed in understanding what business really looks like. The virality of those first six months has well and truly worn off, and we're now really having to make sure that we have the right products dropping at the right month, that we're not over-investing in stock that we're going to be stuck with, and that we know our profit margins.

Those are probably the three things that I wish I knew at the beginning, before I quit my job and before I just banked everything on this business, but now that I'm here, I'm absolutely never leaving. We know that this brand is something special, and we really can see it being a really powerhouse brand. I really say that with confidence, because I just know the product that we create is so special, where every single piece starts as hand-painted artwork. It's not like every other fashion brand. We are hustlers. I am a firm believer in really trying to do things differently than other fashion brands, not because I think I'm unique. I know that there's really no such thing as new in this day and age, but I just don't care about making things look perfect. I don't care about doing things the exact same way that every other fashion brand has done it, because I have always believed, and my mantra has always been, to not care about colouring inside the lines, because nothing interesting ever happened inside them.

When you used to do colouring competitions as a kid and everybody would put their colouring competitions up on the wall, they all look the same because everybody's coloured in the lines. Colour outside the lines. Do something different. Think differently. That's how I feel about this brand. I really want to do things differently.

I feel like, as long as we really lock in and understand those three major principles:

- understanding what stock to buy and when

- really understanding our profit margins

- absolutely protecting your money

then I think this is going to be a really special brand. I can't wait to take you guys on the journey and show you what I've got coming up for next year.

The T-shirt is based off the song by Taylor Swift the Lucky one in which she mentioned she chose the Rose Garden of Madison Square. This song has been posted all over social media as the hint to where she was going to get married so I knew this was the song I had to base this T-shirt off.

I chose the word Lucky and wove arose through it because I knew there would be some element of roses to mimic what she had at her engagement and then I changed it from the Lucky one to the lucky ones because now they are both lucky being both married. We were able to release this T-shirt on Sunday the day after the wedding.

I only just dropped the T-shirt on Instagram this morning and already we are seeing highest engagement we’ve had in months. This is one of the reasons why it’s so important for brands to be able to be agile and jump onto cultural moments because when they’re trending on Instagram being able to be part of that conversation is what keeps your brand relevant. One of the special things about our maid to audit T-shirts which we had actually moved away from in March is that we can participate in cultural moments like this in an instant. And although I did commit to moving away from printer order, I think moments like this influencing me to go back to that chaos model a little bit. Where I’m able to paint what I’m inspired by and that chaos is something that I think keeps the brand moving forward and I think I’ve decided to lean into that a little bit more and bring back some of those more impromptu moments.

Here is the tee if you want to see what we did. The Lucky Ones TeeThe lucky ones oversize tee

This week I wanted to explore the theory that AI is killing our creative soul.

My stance on this issue is firmly on the side of yes. Whilst I understand humans are still directing the tool and the prompts, I think one of the most beautiful parts about art is the time it takes it do it, the hard parts make it all the more valuable. The years of exploration, honing of skills to get to the painting that you make today is all part of the artworks story.

I often think of the fable of Pablo Picasso, that a woman see’s Picasso and asks him to draw something. He quickly draws something in a number of minutes and when he tells her the price she says ‘but it only took you five minutes?’

‘No, it took me forty years to draw this in 5minutes’

Those years of learning how to paint, of learning what your style is, of trying and failing and experimenting is all part of what makes buying art and appreciating art so special.

When we are relying on AI to come up with ideas, to get to the point faster, to experiment, we take that away from our own creative brain.

There is value in getting things wrong, and we learn the best from our mistakes, so if we apply that to AI and say ‘well its just taking away the things we dont like to do or we find hard’, then are we taking away the things that help us grow? The things that make us stop and think and look at things in a different perspective?

Going back to the value of time when it comes to art, some artists will spend months, years on a piece of artwork. Especially when it comes to oil panting or sculptures. It actually offends me that people can type a few words into AI and claim that as artwork when you have artists using their hands, using skills they have taken years to perfect producing real artwork. Can you tell this is a bit of a sensitive topic for me? Don’t even get me started on AI models.

Don’t get me wrong, I love AI and I don’t think its going anywhere but I do wonder about how the next generation will use it, and whether we are doing ourselves a disservice by defaulting to AI anytime something is hard. I said this in my last article this reliance on AI has made me feel dumb - I dont have to remember anything I dont even really know how to spell I can just speak into my app and it will do everything for me.

Is this what will happen with art?

In my opinion (And I will stand on business here), Art is human made.

Can I appreciate some of the cool things that come out of AI, yes, but it will never have the same value as human made art to me. I will never be as impressed with something AI produced as I will by people still doing it by hand.

The people still cutting out paper and doing real stop motions.

The people still shooting real models and producing cinematic videos.

The people still drawing by hand, painting by hand, writing on paper. That is art.

I stand by that. Hold me to it.

Maku.

I had become so reliant on AI doing any and all copy for me that I realized that I had forgotten how to write myself.

I actually used to love english in school it was one of my favourite subjects. And whilst being a writer was never in the cards for me, I did have. confidence in my skills and I actually loved writing essays. Cut to 20 years later and I can barely write an email without using claude. And don’t even get me started on my spelling.

I don’t know if you feel the same but I think back to those incredible stone masons and artisans of the past and the fact that we have lost so many of those of skilled people. So I have made a vow to write once a week on paper without the use of AI.

There is something that happens in the brain when you write on paper that helps your brain to remember things. If I am in a meeting and I just rely on AI notetaker, there is a 0.0% chance I am going to remember anything meaningful and an even smaller chance I will actually go back and read what AI wrote.

I always write my notes down on paper, whilst I doodle as well to help me take in whats being said, and thats what prompted me to do this little exercise.

In just one week of doing this so far I have found my love for words coming back. The ability to come up with ideas and actually write something meaningful is slowly creeping back in. I think I still have a really long way to go and this little article is proof. It’s certainly nothing to write home about.. mind the pun. But I think rituals like this matter.

I think we all need to remember to flex our brains and use our own ideas because otherwise we all become so reliant on technology we forget how to do anything ourselves.

So heres to writing without AI, every week, in the name of art and creativity.

Maku

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