Everything I have built has been about the same thing.

Ferryhill, County Durham. Coal in the ground, soot in the air, fractures in the families. A village that had already decided what a person was supposed to be before I got there.

I was gay and I was a big kid, so I spent the first seventeen years of my life keeping every person I knew at a distance. I believed I was a broken thing. That belief did not survive. What it left behind did, which is a permanent interest in people who don’t fit the shape they’re being asked to fit.

Keeping that distance taught me to watch closely instead, to learn a world before I trusted it. That habit never left. I still immerse myself in a world before I try to build its identity, which is why the brand work has always been less about taste and more about understanding how a world actually sees itself.

I started Studio Potts at twenty-one because I wasn’t willing to let anybody else decide how far my work could go. What followed kept enlarging the same idea. Identity for people being mistaken for their competitors. Then SheHeThey, so founders the mainstream skipped could sell without flattening themselves first. Then three years teaching a hundred founders, which taught me most people aren’t missing taste, they’re missing permission.

Then in December 2025 my Nana June was diagnosed, and by February she was gone, and the way we were asked to say goodbye was not worthy of her.