NZ fashion designer Juliette Hogan on business, ageing, and the value of tramping

Fashion designer Juliette Hogan on how childhood tramps shaped her resilience and career. Photo / Guy Coombes

In the second of a four-part series where well-known New Zealanders write a letter to their younger selves, Kiwi fashion designer Juliette Hogan reflects on the family memories that helped build her business success.

Dear Juliette,

Our family tramps with Mum and Dad on the Great Walks of New Zealand will play an integral role in laying the foundations for your future success, developing within you a deep appreciation for the natural world that will serve as a constant creative inspiration throughout your career, and ingraining the idea that you just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and you’ll get to where you need to go.

You don’t need to get there first. You don’t need to get there in a certain time limit. As long as you keep moving forward at your own pace, you will get to the destination that you need to get to.

This learned resilience will serve you well. You are capable of so much more than you think.

Be brave, lean in, say yes to opportunities and ask for help when you need it.

You will end up in places that you never would have imagined – studying at Parsons School of Design in New York City, working for one of the most recognisable designers New Zealand has produced (Rebecca Taylor), setting up your eponymous label, opening your own Juliette Hogan retail stores, producing countless fashion shows, shooting campaigns on the streets of NYC, designing clothes for some of NZ’s most influential women, leading a team of 40, taking them on an overnight tramp, winning the best of the best award for Auckland businesses and bringing joy to countless customers through your designs, etc.

Juliette Hogan's family tramps on New Zealand's Great Walks inspired her love for nature and resilience in business.

Trust your instincts in both business and design. There will be times when it is hard, there will be times when you question if this is the path you should be on, there will be times when you ask yourself, ‘Have I made the right decisions?’ Know that you have. Know that you make the best decisions possible with the information you have at hand.

You are a good businessperson. You learned early on to just keep moving forward to get to where you need to go, and this has served you well.

You will celebrate 20 wonderful years in business. You will learn that wisdom comes with age and you will deeply appreciate that age can be a wonderful thing. You will become surer of yourself. You will be more confident; you will find the things that really matter to you, and you will give these the attention that they deserve.

You will recognise in yourself that you have weaknesses, and this in itself is a strength. You will surround yourself with people who fill those gaps with their knowledge and experience. This is a powerful thing.

You will come to understand all that you encounter will contribute to who you are. You will prioritise time for those people that matter the most.

So, to my younger self, I have some advice.

Don’t be too hard on yourself; don’t let others define you; treat people with respect.

You are stronger and braver than you’ll ever know. Explore, learn, love, and stay true to your values no matter what you’re going through.

Be kind. You never know what other people are carrying on their shoulders and if you can bring kindness into their world for a moment or a day or a week, then it could make a real difference.

Be curious, not judgmental.

Don’t be afraid to be vulnerable and never stop learning.

You’ll fall, but you will get back up again, these times do not define you. Be kind to yourself. Treat yourself with the same compassion you would a friend. Cherish connections. Believe in yourself. You are your own best advocate.

Most importantly, on your next family tramp, take a moment to appreciate it. Soon enough you will be a mother of two precious children and you will be taking them out into the wilderness to instil in them the same learnings that your parents instilled in you. You will teach them to put one foot in front of the other and teach them that as long as they keep moving forward, any destination is possible.

Oceania Healthcare donated $1000 to the National Foundation for Deaf and Hard of Hearing on behalf of Juliette Hogan to say thanks for sharing her story