Craig and I met in 2011, a day after my 27th birthday. He was 10 years older than me, so I was immediately intimidated and equally flattered when he showed interest in me. I knew of him; of course I did - an ex-AFL footballer, who'd founded a very cool t-shirt label after his footy days. He was quite the Melbourne socialite, and I instantly recognised him the night I met him at a girlfriend's birthday party in Prahran, the night after my own 27th birthday. In fact, I'd openly voiced many years prior, many times over, that I'd end up with a very tall, dark, handsome man one day - a man who had played professional football but worked in fashion. An odd combination for back in the early 2000s, and one I felt seemed like a dream come true if it manifested! In years to come, I wondered if I'd indeed dreamed up this man to come into my life. On reflection, I wish I'd manifested less material attributes, not striving for someone as professionally and personally accomplished, as a lot about this dream man wasn't quite what my young self was ready for.
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Craig pursued me strongly after that night, in a way I'd never been pursued before, calling me the day after we met, with a cute recollection of the pony hair mini skirt I was wearing that first night, and arranging our first date for that coming Tuesday. I was absolutely under his spell. Our first date was a few days after our initial meeting. I caught the train into the city, as living pay cheque to pay cheque didn't lend itself kindly to a taxi ride. It was this first date that set the tone for all to come, and it is a date I can recall with every fibre of my being.
I fell instantly for Craig, his 193cm height and extremely impressive body being obvious characteristics, but which in combination with his delicate, softly spoken nature made him irresistible to me. I was so inspired by everything he'd done, having played AFL for over a decade, founded a successful t-shirt brand and trained to be a commercial pilot, to name the highlights, and everything he stood for, in terms of his honesty and accountability over his failings so far in his 38 years. He seemed so spiritual, so calm, so interesting, and he was interested in me - a regular 27-year-old born-and-bred Melbourne girl, with no formal qualifications, no self-confidence and no bloody idea what the hell she was doing. I was ambitious as hell, but had nowhere to place my ambition. And Craig, having lived a decade more than me, a hugely informative decade - one I was about to learn much about! - felt like a safe place to invest myself in. And so I did. That first night, at a Thai restaurant in Melbourne's CBD, we spent hours talking about our lives thus far, who we wanted to be and why we wanted to be more than we were. It wasn't a normal first date for me. I felt like I belonged to him, and that whatever he wanted to do was what we would do together.
I can't write a book on my Triangl story without including the second date - the story I have told over and over and with such insistence that this was the moment Triangl was born. The real truth of it is that by the second date, I was already so invested in the new identity I was forming with Craig that it didn't matter what was coming - I was going to agree to anything he wanted us to do. When you're a young woman dating a man who is a whole 10 years older than you and who you're really into, you are often fairly vulnerable. When you're a young woman dating an older man who suggests the beach as a location for your second date, you're terrified at the prospect of feeling as physically exposed as you already are emotionally!
If you know me, you know this story. If you're new here, the story goes like this: Craig suggested the beach, Half Moon Bay in Brighton, Melbourne, as the spot to spend the afternoon. I'm not a bikini girl - shock horror, the co-founder of Triangl didn't even really like swimwear! - but I'm a fashion girl. So I wanted to look good. And my Cotton On black bikini wasn't going to cut it. So, I spent a few panicked hours on a Saturday morning rushing around Chadstone Shopping Centre to find a bikini. And I couldn't find a bloody thing. It was either surf brands like Roxy, Billabong or Quiksilver, which didn't cut it in terms of prints and shapes. Or it was Zimmermann, whose bikinis were sitting at a pretty $155 a set, which was basically my entire fortnight's disposable income.
I became acutely aware of a complete lack of any cool, fashionable-looking bikinis under $100. I was an old retail girl by trade, and had a fair understanding of customer psychology and interest by this stage, combined with a total love for all things fashion and clothing, so I knew a big gap in the market when I could see it - and this was it!
I took this information, along with my $155 Zimmermann bikini - hey, a girl has to dress to impress - and proceeded to tell Craig all about my morning adventure.
I expected him to be impressed by my market awareness, but wasn't quite expecting his fervour at the idea of making bikinis ourselves. I'd never entertained starting a business before. I was a very career-driven girl with a ton of ambition but no real desire to start my own brand. I was still working my life out. I was playing it safe, working for a small business to understand it all before I ever dipped my toe into my own thing. I can't even honestly say I ever would have started my own business. I was very interested in the so-called freedom of working for myself. Not being a slave to the nine to five, or having a boss - all the usual things. But I felt like I was too young to know what I even wanted to do yet. I felt I had a lot more growing up to do before I did something as adult as starting a business.
However, this was not Craig's way of being. He'd had a business. He was bankrupt when we met, which I remember him telling me early on, although I can't quite recall when as it felt like such an insignificant part of who he was. It was simply something that had happened to him, and he explained the bankruptcy so openly that it didn't faze me at all. He was the first person I'd ever even met who was bankrupt, and because of his apparent integrity and worldliness, it really shaped my opinion of bankruptcy in business. It felt like he'd just been through a lot, it felt like he'd made mistakes that we all have made or will make in life, but he had just been caught out by some significant ones, in terms of timing mainly. What I didn't really realise at the time was that Craig was focused on launching a new business, and applying the lessons from the mistakes he had made, to ensure its success, or at least ensuring it wasn't impacted by the same mistakes as last time.
To this day, I see bankruptcy as a blessing to those in business who have been through it. To those who overcame fear and had a real go at making something work. The lessons I saw Craig apply to Triangl as a result of his bankruptcy were hugely formative in the setup of our business, and I am inspired by anyone who has been through a failure and uses it to push forward once again.
After our second date, this defining day for the genesis of Triangl, our romantic relationship continued to grow, alongside our business relationship. I am a hopeless romantic - I love love, and being in love - so my focus was on nurturing this side of us, while Craig was far more focused on the Triangl version of us and continued to move forward with the setup of a brand. These experiences initially set the tone for Craig and me. He was always the most loving and most happy when creating, and discussing design with me. He didn't want to differentiate our personal relationship from our work relationship, which I resented almost immediately. I always wanted to split the two. To have a work-life balance, to have a date night where we kept work at work and talked about everything or anything else. But this wasn't of much interest to him, and I could tell I got so much more from him when we spoke about Triangl, so I obliged and adapted to his way of being - and, in turn, began to abandon my own.
With both of us working full-time jobs, Craig as a denim designer for a manufacturing company, and me in ecommerce customer care, it was usually at night when we would sit and map out the infancy of the brand, him at his desk and me on the bed. (I'd moved in to his house in Brighton over the summer.) The logo, the name, the initial designs. The name was a simple enough process. We wanted a niche, so our original plan was to do a 70s-style triangle bikini. A string bikini top and a little hipster bottom. It was all I wore at the time, and it was the style Craig liked the most too, so it was a no-brainer to focus on that shape at the start. I'd worked enough in the industry to assert that a niche product was easier to market for a totally new and unknown brand. Keeping it simple would appeal to an impulse-buying mentality. It would create a talking point among friends: 'Have you seen the brand that makes the triangle bikinis? It's called Triangl.'
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We dropped the 'e' at the end of the word - reason being it was going to be impossible to register the name 'Triangle' anywhere globally, as the name was already ubiquitous, but also it would have been hard to search us on the internet as 'Triangle' and actually find our brand, again because it is such a common word. Triangl would be an easy one to find, while sounding exactly the same as the original word.
Funnily enough, I despised the word! For so long I felt such embarrassment saying it. It was quite masculine and direct and made me feel uncomfortable. I've said 'triangle without the e' more times than I can even fathom. But, like all things in life that hang around for a while, I grew to love it, eventually.
We had the name, we had the style, we also had a logo. Another conscious decision we made was to keep our logo black and white. The less aligned to a colour we were, the more wide-ranging appeal we had. I'm all for colour, personally. And our intention was to definitely make bikinis in colours but to appeal to as many people as possible, and while we were working out who we were as a brand, black and white was the choice.
All this part of building a brand identity felt fun. I remember it felt like a big game of "pretend". Let's pick a logo! A name! A style! It was all creative, with no real skin in the game of putting a product out to market. At this point, everything works - you're making decisions on your foundational business markers in bed at 10pm, where it all seems fanciful, hopeful and even a little bit silly. I definitely didn't see Triangl going anywhere at this point. It felt like a fun side project of flippant creation. I was trying hard to accelerate my career, working in ecommerce as a customer care and development manager at a Melbourne-based company called Green with Envy. Initially the place to go for a formal dress, GWE had since become a multi-brand retail store, stocking the likes of Alexander Wang, Zimmermann, Nicholas, and Camilla and Marc, and were moving into taking it all online. These were days where online was a luxury, just a new option to sell fashion from. Not a necessity, just something different, where sales could be occasionally procured by a girl sitting on her bed at night on her work laptop.
My years in retail sales and interest in customer behaviour naturally led to the ecomm space. I loved being able to find ways to draw a customer to buy a dress from her favourite shop while she was at home. It felt so smart, because it's how I wanted to shop. I was working all week long, and having only two nights a week to go to the stores felt too restrictive.
At the time Craig and I were working on Triangl's initial launch, Green with Envy was setting up an online store (eboutique as it was known then) and had brought me in to set up the customer-facing side of the store. It was this experience that drove Craig and me to move to an online-only model fairly quickly (although we did briefly dabble in the wholesale space after launch, as a means to market the brand and use physical retail spaces as a tool for people to see us and then come and find us online).
As focused as I was on my full-time job, I knew there was a ceiling that I was fast approaching. In the short months since Craig and I had met, my eyes had been opened to the world of the entrepreneur. The allure of having no boss, no set hours, and no expectations from management started to seem like the goal, and Craig and I started planning how to make Triangl really happen.
To launch a product, you first need one. We'd worked on a handful of initial designs, all in one shape, the standard-issue triangle bikini, which was all I ever wore at the time, and all that Craig liked me to wear as well. It was really the main reason behind our brand name. Our first style was not made of the neoprene for which we became famous, but a standard bikini fabric that was an 80/20 blend of nylon and spandex.
Craig had already been involved with manufacturing in China and had built good relationships with agents and manufacturers - enough to draw up a tech pack and have a sample made. This was a lengthy process in early 2012, and often took up weeks of our time. We'd email off a tech pack, receive a physical sample to fit perhaps two weeks later, make fit changes, email them back and repeat. With all our commitments, there was limited time we could spend on the business, and it seemed like we'd be years off launching a brand we were proud of.
With this in mind, after visiting Hong Kong in April 2012 as part of his role at the time as a designer for a denim brand, Craig returned home to announce his plans for us both to make the move to Hong Kong, not only because it was closer to Chinese manufacturers, but it was also taking us away from any of the potential distractions of our reasonably comfortable life in Melbourne.
I'd never even visited Hong Kong before, and it wasn't a city on my radar in any way, shape or form. However, it was not really up to me (in my mind, anyway). By this stage, I'd already begun to isolate myself from my friends, something I was prone to doing in romantic relationships, and this helped me process the move overseas as I was already fully invested in our life together, as just the two of us. The thought of quitting our jobs and moving to another country felt terrifyingly exciting. At the time, I didn't think too much into the future, other than the feeling of complete trust and blind faith in the decision Craig was making for us - and for Triangl.
At the time, I had been suffering from an eating disorder for a number of years, which had started after a break-up when I was 24. I had told Craig of my bulimia fairly early on in our relationship. The intimacy of sharing my hopes and dreams, as well as my problems, with Craig meant I felt extremely tied to him because of all he knew and accepted about me. I also had an idealistic view of leaving behind the "old me" in Melbourne and starting afresh in Hong Kong. I felt perhaps I could be happy and healthy over there, and that leaving Melbourne would mean leaving my mental and physical issues there too.
It was an easy decision to say yes to the move, and get over there as quickly as possible.
I resigned from my job the very next day. The easiest resignation of my life, with the excuse "I'm moving overseas". I remember feeling so excited, yet frustrated by the lack of excitement of those around me. My boss at the time told me I was just about to receive a large promotion within the business and asked if I really wanted to go overseas for no reason. My close friends were the same, and my family too, although, knowing me the best, they weren't going to get in my way when I'd made up my mind.
It felt like no one believed in me, and while perhaps that was helpful because it gave me the drive to get over there and succeed, at the time it felt awful to feel these snippets of doubt from those around me.
Craig and I sold all we had in those five short weeks before we left. Listing items on eBay during the week and having them collected all weekend long was how we spent our last weeks in Australia. At the end, we had about $10,000. Enough for the flights over there, to pay for the rent of a small studio apartment for a few months, and other necessary living costs.
Those last few weeks in Melbourne felt largely hopeful. I was doing something no one else I'd known had done. I was moving to another country, to turn a dream into a reality. It sounded so romantic!
Deep down, though, I was desperately battling with my mental health. The natural fears I had about this monumental move were being pushed into the back of my mind. I remember bringing up my fears once with Craig, a mere week out from our planned departure, and his reaction being so inflamed at my even mentioning any doubts over the move, that I immediately retracted what I had said, and didn't bring it up again, with him or anyone else.
My inability - or lack of freedom - to verbalise what was a completely normal thought process was extremely detrimental. It set the tone for how I communicated with Craig from here on out. I kept my fears buried deep down, not only as we proceeded with the launch of Triangl, but for years to come. This lack of communication and expression perpetuated my eating disorder, so that it became even more of a crutch I used to feel some sort of control when I wanted to express myself and felt I couldn't, or shouldn't, for fear of conflict.
All of this came down to my complete lack of sense of self, and not having done any self-development work. I was a 27-year-old, in an intimate and working relationship with a man 10 years my senior, moving countries with him to start a business, without any clarity about how that would look and feel because I hadn't developed a mental-health toolkit for myself yet. That girl I was needed some guidance and support, and was going it totally alone.
I remember I had arranged a dinner with my best school friends, the night before we flew out. Craig and I were ready to get on that plane, packed and all, and our imminent departure was feeling all too real in those last moments at our home, so I was flustered on my way to dinner. I arrived late, and so was seated at the end of the table. It made me feel like a bit of an afterthought rather than the guest of honour, so I was perhaps not as engaging as I usually was at social events. Midway through the dinner, which was reasonably enjoyable by then, we got to talking about my adventure ahead, and I played into the idealistic dream awaiting me. My new life, with my inspirational boyfriend, where the sky was the limit and success was inevitable. All was going well until my girlfriend Carli chimed in with a cutting statement. "I don't know, babe, but this feels wrong - this doesn't feel good. Are you sure you want to go away with him? We don't even know this guy!"
I'll never ever forget this moment because it felt like she'd seen my soul, and she knew. I wasn't ready to go away like this. I was scared. What if we failed? What if I let him down? What if he knew I wasn't any good at anything at all?
I bit back, in classic Erin form (I'm a Scorpio rising after all!), and assured her I was in love and we were going to do something great, something special, together. And at the end I added in to appease her - and to calm myself down - that I could always just come home if I wanted to. I was a mere plane ride away.
I knew I had to go; I knew I needed to do it. My resolve was strong, and I still had enough self-belief at this point to know I wanted something special for my life and that I had to go and make it happen, even if it might break me in the process.
Craig picked me up after this dinner and I didn't mention what had transpired. Instead, I made a mental note to not talk to those friends again for a while. Keep them at arm's length. I couldn't handle being questioned, so avoidance was key.
The next day, June 3, 2012, we left wintry Melbourne for hot, sticky, sweaty Hong Kong to start our new lives - to start Triangl.
This is an edited extract from Hanging By a Thread, by Erin Deering. Affirm Press. $34.99.
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