From Pause to Practice: How ili ili Took Shape in 2025

In early 2025, I found myself in an in-between season.

I had just left a full-time role and found myself in a three-month in-between. Everything that was familiar about work fell away. When you’re used to being busy, useful, always in motion, a long pause feels like two things at once…a rare luxury and an uncomfortable kind of emptiness.

So I picked up a side project I had shelved for months. It started as a silly idea. Making my own accessories from beads I’d collected over time, from overseas trips and online finds, just for fun.

Experimenting with logotype, props, and illustrations for ili ili.

Learning by making.

Instagram and Pinterest became my main sources of inspiration for this side project. It brought me back to my early days at Nanyang Polytechnic, doing mood boards, branding, and storytelling. There was a lot of threading, unthreading, and re-threading, with plenty of trial and error. I realised how much I had missed working with my hands, and how grounding it felt when everything else in this pause was abstract and uncertain.

As a product designer, I spend most of my time in front of a screen. Over the years, practicality and logic have taken the front seat, shaped by constant stakeholder discussions and problem-solving. And today, all around me, AI tools were speeding everything up, making things more generative, scalable and instant. Making something slowly, one bead at a time, felt like I was taking back a small sense of control.

So, if others can do this, why can’t I? I played with colour palettes, tested proportions, and told small stories through combinations of shapes and tones. It was a fun process!

Building the ili ili brand story was a fun process.

My first order came in.

Not from a big launch. I did not make much sales from my first launch to be honest. It was very slow and quiet. Of course I have messages from people I know thanking me; friends and family supporting the idea, wearing the pieces, encouraging me to keep going.

Running ili ili alongside everything else meant constantly juggling time and energy. Perfectionism crept in. I admit I am a bit of a control freak because I want things to turn out the way I imagine them. 😆 (Hence, multiple occasions of re-threading).

Creating content, keeping up with posts, staying inspired even when I already had mood boards and references was challenging because I was new to this and it demanded discipline and consistency. Some days the ideas flowed. Some days they didn’t. There were moments of self-doubt, wondering if I was being inconsistent, if I should be more structured, more strategic, more serious about turning this side project into something real.

The physical process itself was also honest in its own way.

When I was tired, I would string the wrong bead or miscount, only to realise near the end that I had to undo everything!!! That was always the signal. It meant I needed to slow down, stop, and rest. Unlike digital work, where mistakes are invisible and reversible with a click, craft makes your limits visible.

Somewhere along the way, ili ili shifted from being just a way to pass time into a small side gig. I am not trying to scale it aggressively. It has simply become a space where creativity and a bit of commerce coexist. I know it will not make me much money, but it is more about recognising that care, taste, and time have value, and that it is okay to take your own work seriously for fun too~

Looking back, that three-month pause in early 2025 was not empty. While waiting for the next full-time role, I was also building something with my hands, training my eye, sharpening my sense of colour and form, and learning to sit with uncertainty without rushing to resolve it.

At the same time, I never really stepped away from technology hahah the irony~ I was still using AI to generate visuals, captions, and ideas for ili ili’s content. The digital and the tactile were happening in parallel. One helped me move fast, test, and communicate. The other forced me to slow down and feel. Almost like a way of trying to stay fluent/relevant in both worlds, letting tools handle speed, while my hands stayed responsible for taste, intention, and restraint.

Challenging myself to use AI beyond work, and bringing it into ili ili as a creative partner. It has helped me to push ideas, speed up exploration, and see the brand from new angles. 🧡

I’m not breaking even yet, but I’m proud of how far I’ve come. The learning and small wins already made starting worthwhile. I’m still experimenting. ili ili, is a work in progress; teaching me to trust small beginnings, move at my own pace, and balance technology with hands-on craft.

Visit instagram and grab something if you like: worldof_ili