Finding Hooray Hayley
It’s 2014. Hayley is a wide-eyed fresh grad, brimming with creativity and dreams of making a living through art and design. She blogs, illustrates, paints, travels, shops, and posts on Instagram with Hefe or Amaro filters. She lands her first job as a junior designer and, in her spare time, runs a successful Etsy shop under the fun and playful moniker Hooray Hayley. She even illustrates for magazines and gets her 15 minutes of fame on Sunrise teaching a craft workshop in partnership with Etsy. In her first 1:1 with her creative director, she declares she wants to be an ‘Etsy mum.’ He reacted with all the enthusiasm of someone hearing about another ‘live, laugh, love’ sign. (Hi Fred, if you’re reading this.)
Fast forward 10 years, and “Hooray Hayley” has lost her way. She’s about to be a mum, but the Etsy dream has taken a backseat to a fast-paced corporate career. She’s worked with incredible global clients, worked in-house, in agency and started her own design studio, creating designs along the way that younger Hayley couldn’t have even imagined. Back then, she proudly called herself a "graphic designer by day, artist by night." And slowly but surely, ‘artist by night’ turned into ‘artist by...when was the last time I picked up a paintbrush? Oh, that time I painted the kitchen...
In the marketing world, it’s all about being audience-focused. What does the audience like? What do they care about? What’s valuable to them? After 10 years of working within brand parameters, I’ve realised I’ve lost a piece of my true creative self—the part that creates for the joy of it, not just to solve problems or follow design rules.
So here’s my new brief to myself: find ‘me’ again. The non-corporate, creative-for-fun version. The goal is to take off the professional hat (and dig out the beret) and create for myself more than I consume. I’m going to focus on sharing the things I love—fashion, art, food, travel, design, homewares, interiors, and of course, this next chapter of mum-life! It’s probably an ambitious time to start this on my maternity leave, but here’s to new chapters!
This journey is for me, not the algorithm. And who knows? Maybe I’ll have no readers, or maybe there’s a tribe of artsy, colour-loving mums or friends of mums out there. If that’s you, say hi! If not, feel free to silently lurk or go find a beige blog somewhere else.
Xoxo, Gemini girl
