There is something special about meeting someone again who knew you before life became complicated.
Lucy and I went to high school together. We were young, playful and full of laughter, long before businesses, responsibilities and the life lessons that came later.
When we met again, the laughter was still there, but so was a little more maturity. Over the years, both of us had been through significant health challenges, which in different ways changed how we think about health, relationships, resilience and what really matters.
Perhaps that is why reconnecting felt so natural.
Before we share more about the work we are beginning together, we wanted to first hear from Lucy in her own voice, about the experiences that shaped her, what she learned along the way, and the values she now brings into her work.
A channel for passing on something good.
I was never an exceptional person. What I had was a restlessness for finding the thing I
wanted to do, and once I found it, I went at it with something close to obsession. If I set my mind on something, I went after it with my teeth clenched.
Three years at an insurance company, three years in department store retail, two years as a presenter on a shopping channel. Finance, retail, broadcasting — I passed through all three before I started a business of my own. Looking back, those eight years are all still working for me. Not one of them went to waste.
In that time I learned an odd rule about the market: it isn’t the well-made product that sells, it’s the well-packaged one. Under the hottest studio lights, the information reaching people was always narrow, and things that were beautiful only on the outside were everywhere.
That contradiction stayed with me. So I went out into the rough open water of Instagram, where nobody was working yet. I sought out brands made honestly from good ingredients and told their story exactly as it was, unpolished, and with a group of influencers I built something new around community purchase. While others called marketing a technique for making money, I decided to call it a channel for passing on something good.
It worked. One brand that refused to compromise on its ingredients — we took their hand at the planning stage, asking nothing in return, and within a few years we had grown the company several times over together. After that, brands came to us. We had our hands on the products of dozens of brands, and the supplement we created ourselves, made for women’s bodies, sold in the millions. If it was a question of proving things with numbers, I knew how to do that.
And then it all fell apart
In September 2022, our child arrived.
I spent seven months of the pregnancy on medication for sickness. Partway through I injured my back and lay flat for two months, unable even to sit up on my own. I gave birth in June 2023, and afterwards fluid collected in my lungs and kept me in hospital another week. There was a night when my blood pressure spiked to 220 in my sleep and I was taken to A&E. My body went first. My mind followed.
Panic disorder came. Depression came, and with it obsessive symptoms brought on by stress. They left me in a fog. Whole days passed without my knowing what I was saying or what I was doing. The company grew harder to run, and I had become a person made entirely of irritation.
I blamed them. My husband. My child.
When I fell apart, my husband fell apart, and so did our child. He still says it was the hardest period of his life. The whole family came undone.
And then one day I noticed that my child’s face, looking at me, had no expression on it. I
wept where I stood.
Why am I alive. What am I living for. I want to stop now. Those thoughts took me over.
And yet — strangely — the thing that made it hardest was also the thing that held us up. Our child and my husband. That was what got me to a doctor, and back into a church I had not attended in years. And from that point I began to look for what my calling was, and what my life was for.
Sustainability begins with one person
During that time, sitting at the bottom of it all, a lecture my husband attended changed the direction of our conversations. It was about ESG and sustainability, and its argument was this: we talk about the environment, about society, about governance — but all of it begins with a single individual and expands outward from there. Which means we have to ask a prior question. What is it that makes one person sustainable?
He brought that question home with him, and we sat down and talked for a long time. Money was not the answer. Business was not the answer. I had held both, and I had still fallen apart.
The answer we arrived at had three parts. Health. Relationships. Resilience.
What keeps a person going is health, relationships and resilience. Without those, neither
the environment nor society can be sustained.
It is not an original answer. Ask almost anyone and you would probably hear something
similar. The difference is that we did not arrive at it by thinking. We arrived at it by losing all
three. And there, we realised, was work only we could do — to speak about rebuilding as people who had lost the lot.
What put me back together
What put me back together was not some grand theory of management. It was aromatherapy made with care, deep meditation, food close to how nature made it, medicine and meals made from honest ingredients. It was the exercise that taught my body to move again, and music that made me cry for no reason I could name. In all of it was the rough, solid sincerity of the people who had made it. There was comfort I found in faith, too. Everything that lifted me was truthful, close to nature, and safe.
Above all, it was art that undid me. In a period when I could do nothing at all, I stood in front of a painting I had come upon by chance and cried for a long time. It was from Inae’s Adoration series. I can do nothing; I can only adore — it was a painting like a confession. The scent around me that day comforted me without saying anything. I remember it as the scent of consolation.
That was when I understood that recovery does not arrive by persuasion. The senses wake first, and the mind follows after. So I held onto the word “senses” for a long time. If I wanted to know what is essential in a person, I first had to understand what my own senses were telling me.
We call this awareness. Looking back, my recovery did not begin with a grand resolution. It began with noticing — the moment I saw that my child’s face had no expression. Before anything can change, it has to be noticed.
A little later I learned one thing more. Beyond noticing what you feel, there is a further place to stand: noticing that you are noticing. From there you can see your own feelings and your own state from a small distance. You can be falling apart and know that you are falling apart.
Recovery is still going on.
We still sit down for couples counselling every week, I am still
learning to meditate, and I still get the treatment I need. Anyone who has fallen apart knows that recovery is not a single event but a state you keep noticing and keep maintaining.
The first place that sends the signal
Building our supplement brand, I had already learned that when the gut goes, the skin goes with it — that the inside and outside of the body are one connected thing. But it took falling apart myself to learn something else. When the body and mind collapse, the first place to send out a desperate signal is the skin. And the first place to show a sign of recovery is the skin as well.
That is how Aqu’aque came about. We call it skin consciousness. It means the skin is not an object of beauty but a sensory window that registers and records the state of the body and the mind. The skin always notices first. We are simply late to notice what it noticed. Skin consciousness is the work of closing that gap.
Which is why the sustainability we talk about does not stop at the natural world. Every act by which we keep from losing our senses — that is what sustainability means to us.
Aqu’aque was a brand we had been preparing before the pregnancy. But its direction was rewritten entirely through the pregnancy, the birth and the recovery. And at the end of 2023, barely six months after our child was born, still in the middle of my own recovery, it went out into the world.
For the ones with no stage
Since what saved me was art and the experience of the senses, I could not keep it to myself. So we began to create exhibition pop-ups where brands and art meet. Beginning with Art X Seoul at The Shilla, we have built eight of these spaces so far.
The purpose of these spaces is not sales. Brands made with real care from good ingredients that never get seen because they have no marketing craft. Old Korean brands that have held onto their heritage stubbornly and are known to no one. Artists who have poured their souls into work and have no stage to show it on. Every time we come across sincerity like that, my heart starts up again. It is because of what I went through that I can see the sincerity others have overlooked.
In those spaces people meet meditation, scent and performance, and return to their own senses for a while. What we are really trying to create is a moment of noticing — a place where someone realises, if only briefly, what state their body is in and what they have been missing. Taking the things that lifted us and placing them into someone else’s day: that is what this business means to us.
In the end, it is values that last
Our company works now with a clearer sense of purpose than before. Profit still matters, but we want to live inside our values and run the business inside them too. Strangely enough, once we set that standard, good teams and good stories began gathering on their own.
Working with influencers for years taught me something. There are plenty of people who are likeable, beautiful and full of talent. But the ones who last are a different group. Brands are exactly the same. The ones with something real move people, and the ones who move people are the ones who remain. Whether it is a person or a brand, what endures follows the same principle.
Branding today runs on content. But content is consumed and passes. What lasts, in the end, is the values a brand has kept. So we grow brands with their values at the centre. We do not want to be a sales outfit dressed up in polished adjectives; we want to be the people who draw out the soul hidden behind a brand’s numbers and let it shine. Because that is how I was saved.
What comes after success? It is a question I intend to carry with me, even while running a business.
Ending Note
Lucy and I knew each other long before either of us had companies, brands or stories like these to tell. Years later, we meet again with the same laughter, but also with experiences that have shaped how we think about health, life and the things worth building.
Thank you, Lucy, for sharing your story so openly.
As LYEONS and Lucyvagency begin this next chapter together, we look forward to sharing more about our partnership and what we hope to create together.
For now, I am simply very happy that Lucy met Lucy again. 🙂
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