PALME. When It Was Just a Feeling.
In 2023, I was sitting in meetings at my last job, newly pregnant with my second daughter, and my mind just kept wandering. I couldn't steady it. In many ways I was present, but there was a quieter version of me running underneath all of it, constantly filling a small black leather-bound notebook with brand names, fonts, sketches of nature and names of far off places. I was also constantly questioning the concept of luxury, and how the mainstream understanding of it was so different to how I see it.
Pictured: Me at David Jones HQ in Melbourne. Inserted is a page from my notebook with early brand ideas.
I had worked in fashion for almost a decade by then, across some of Australia's most loved brands. I had travelled to Paris and New York for fashion week, multiple times, and worked alongside people who have since become some of my closest friends, and genuinely the most talented people I know. It was a life I am so proud of, and one I worked exceptionally hard to build.
Pictured: My people - Yulia, Ashton, Sophie. Missing: Rachael, Jules & Emily
I am not sure I could tell you exactly when my relationship with the industry shifted. Whether it happened slowly over the years, or whether something about being a mother made me impatient with things I had previously been willing to accept. Perhaps when you work within it long enough, you begin to see the gaps and holes in it clearly. But I remember the feeling, a growing sense that luxury, as an industry, was so lost on me.
On how it looked from the outside, rather than the structural substance of it. More specifically on how synthetic fabrics received such high praise and pricing for, well...plastic.
And I kept coming back to sleepwear. To the fact that I could not find what I wanted anywhere. Something comfortable, clean in terms of fabric, made from something real, by artisans who are paid properly, from cottons not grown with harmful chemicals. Pieces designed to be worn and worn and worn again. The more I looked, the more certain I became that it simply did not exist in the way I imagined it.
And so in August 2023, through introductions I had been lucky enough to build over a career in the industry, I found a factory. And I began sampling, quietly, alongside my job.
Then I fell pregnant, and I put it all away. It felt like something I could not justify. Life was getting serious and I needed to be responsible. The samples went into a bag. I told myself I would come back to it someday. In all honesty, I did not think I would. The idea of getting something like this off the ground at the stage of life I was at felt, at best, overwhelming.
Pictured: Me, pregnant with our youngest daughter, our first daughter, Gigi, who our hero set is named after. And Cali, our darling GSP who we sadly lost in March 2025
In a passing conversation one evening I told Anthony, my husband, about the idea of PALME. He didn't humour the idea, he believed in it, genuinely, before there was anything to believe in. He encouraged the sampling. He asked questions about the factory. He got excited about fabrics, and about the market. He did this when PALME was barely a concept, when it was still just a notebook and a feeling.
In July 2024, I was on maternity leave with my youngest, who was three months old by then, and I reopened the drawer. I have since come to accept that I am not all that good at sitting still.
What I did not expect, what I could not have anticipated, was how many of the people I had worked alongside over the years would show up for me, unprompted, when I told them what I was trying to build.
One helped me understand the financial structure of a business. Sat with me and walked me through the costs I needed to build into pricing to run something properly, and in a way that could last. Another helped me with branding and styling, navigating me through shoots, castings, and creative direction, through an area that was well outside my comfort zone. Another guided me through PR, my first press release, how to engage with the media, how to put PALME in front of the right people. Another helped me find the manufacturers I now trust with everything.
Before we launched, I brought them all together at home for an evening. We ate tiramisu. We ran through every detail of the brand. That evening will always stay with me. My closest friends showed up, gave their time, and helped me build something from nothing. I am forever grateful and humbled by that.
And then there is Anthony. Who, in the hours after the children were down and his own workday was finished, built the PALME website. No external agency. No shortcuts. He built it, and then he kept building it. He helped with the marketing, the Meta side of things, the parts of running a business that I would have struggled to navigate alone. He still does. Without him, PALME would never have left that black leather-bound notebook.
Pictured: Anthony, my husband. After his own long work days, he built our website from scratch and manages it alongside our advertising. Everything you see on PALME (including packing up all orders) is done by the two of us.
I say all of this because there is a version of the PALME story that makes it sound like something one person built alone. It was not. It was built on a decade of relationships, and on one person in particular who never stopped believing in it.
Once I knew PALME was actually happening, I told my work what I was building. They were kind, and genuinely supportive, in a way I will always be grateful for. In November 2024, the first order left the factory. In December, we did our first shoot. In February 2025, PALME launched, and in April 2025, I handed in my resignation.
Twelve months later, we have sold out multiple times and I have just placed our fourth order with the factory.
There is more to this story - including five months in our first year where the business had to wind down because the delivered stock was not what it should have been. I was not willing to compromise the integrity of PALME and what I was trying to build, so we more or less shut down for a few months right after we launched. It was deflating in a way that is hard to describe, but I'll share more about that another time.
I started PALME because I believed women deserved something better than what existed. That belief remains true. I have such admiration for women. Not only the women who have found PALME, but women in general, for everything they carry. And I'm so grateful, and genuinely honoured, that so many of you have trusted PALME in your most intimate moments. That in some small way, we are here to help you show up for yourselves.
So there you have it, the beginning of our story, and a sense of what it took to get here.
I look forward to sharing more soon, as we continue to look back on PALME's first 12 months.
With love,
Tami