I still have four marbles from my childhood

They live in a small brass tin with a C on the lid. I used to carry them in my pocket for no reason I could have explained at the time. They weren’t for playing with. They were just... mine. Small and perfect, and they felt special. Clear glass with a swirl inside. One red, one blue, one green, one yellow.

I found them again a few years ago in a box that had been sitting in my mother’s loft for decades. Wrapped in the particular silence of kept things.

And when I opened the tin and felt the weight of them again, I started to understand something I’ve always known but never really articulated.

I have always been someone who feels things through objects.

The right ones carry feelings that words alone can’t quite reach and when you find them, it’s less like a discovery and more like a recognition. As if they were already yours and you simply hadn’t met yet.

I suspect you know the feeling. The book you pick up and know immediately after reading the first sentence. The piece of clothing that makes you feel like the outside of you now matches the inside, the small trinket kept in a drawer with no practical reason, only the persistent sense that it matters. That feeling is not trivial.

And I have spent my whole life knowing how to find those objects. Knowing immediately when something is exactly right because of the spark of joy it brings. And knowing, just as immediately, when it isn’t.

I grew up making things.

Collages from photocopies of illuminated manuscripts and architectural blueprints I found in my local library. Layered pieces built from newsprint and old text and fragments of fabric, arranged until they felt resolved. In the nineties I was obsessed with an artist called Sarah J Lugg, who made collages on luggage tags, arranging them in rows by colour - the particular satisfaction of the right thing in exactly the right place. I collected her prints and many of them are still on my walls.

I made mood boards before I knew what mood boards were. I kept things that had no obvious use because they were beautiful or interesting or strangely right. A ribbon, a button, a piece of paper. A colour that felt like something I couldn’t name.

I was, in the language I would later articulate as a brand founder, a fragment keeper.

I have always loved cities.

Not for the grand things, though I love those too. For the details. The scent of a particular street in the morning, the font on a shopfront, the quality of light through an old window, the corner of a building that catches the eye and holds it. Breakfast at a pavement café where there is so much to notice that sitting still feels like travelling.

I am happiest when I am stimulated in this way and the world is offering snapshots faster than I can collect them.

I have also been a reader since I was small. Deeply, completely, sometimes inconveniently so! I love magic and urban fantasy and authors who build worlds that feel more real than the one you return to when you close the book. I have fallen in love with fictional characters and felt it viscerally, the specific grief of closing the book and remembering they don’t exist.

I understand that this is escapism, but it comes with the same instinct as for those marbles, because these worlds are part of the search for the thing that feels exactly right, even when it exists only in the imagination. Or especially when - am I the only one who has gone shopping for an item that doesn’t actually exist but it looks great in my head?

My professional life so far has been spent building brands structurally and visually for other people. I learned a great deal. I also spent a long time making things for other people that I wished I was making for myself.

But I couldn’t have started Slightly before now. Not really.

Being a mother has only deepened those moments of joy. It has also given me an acute sense of time passing, and with it, the conviction that the things you make and keep and choose should be worth the time they take.

I have lived in two hemispheres and belonged in both and stood slightly outside each. I have made peace, slowly and not always gracefully, with being from many worlds simultaneously. The English one and the Australian one, the motherhood one and the female one. The one built from all the books and cities and objects and experiences that have accumulated, quietly, over a lifetime of paying attention.

Psychologists call it third culture identity. When you live long enough between places and versions of yourself, you develop a layered self. More adaptable. More observant. More comfortable holding contradictions without needing to resolve them.

I have come to understand that as a gift rather than a complication.

Slightly could only have come from someone who has been all of these things. It required everything I learned and everywhere I’ve been and everyone I’ve become along the way.

So there wasn’t a single moment when Slightly arrived.

It was a lifetime of moments. And then one day the idea of combining all of it just made sense.

Paper and words and colour and shape and fabric and embellishment. The bookworm and the stylist and the crafter and the fragment keeper. The woman who is contrary and unapologetic and deeply, quietly joyful when something is exactly right.

I looked for a world where those things existed together. Where the literary and the sartorial spoke the same language. Where an object could be beautiful and useful and worth keeping. Where almost was never quite enough.

I couldn’t quite find it in one place, so I began designing it.

All of which leads here, to Slightly Contrary, which is where I think out loud about all of it.

The objects and the clothes and the books and the cities. The details that most people walk past and I cannot, that feeling when something is exactly right and the very different feeling when it is almost. The art of noticing and what a life built around noticing actually looks like, from the inside.

It is, I suppose, the long version of everything Slightly is. The thinking behind the making, the essay behind the object.

I am slightly contrary. I am always considered. I have strong opinions about paper and fabric and the typography on a restaurant menu and the particular weight of a well-made object in a hand.

And I have always known, without quite knowing how, what is worth keeping.

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