09/03/2026
What is DUSTY LINEN?
I’ve been thinking about this for a while.
DUSTY LINEN has changed many times over the last five years. Sometimes because I changed my mind. Sometimes because something wasn’t working. Sometimes because I simply didn’t know yet what I wanted it to be.
For a long time I thought the business was struggling to find its identity.
Now I think I was too.
DUSTY LINEN and I are difficult to separate. It carries my taste, my decisions, my mistakes, the things I’ve learned and the things I’ve had to let go of. It has changed with me because, in many ways, it could not have done anything else.
I remember starting it with very naive expectations.
I had ideas about how things would work. About business. About people. About myself.
Five years is enough time for many of those ideas to fall apart.
There was a lot of happiness in those years. There were also losses, tears, disappointment, confusion, exhaustion and periods when I genuinely wanted to stop.
A lot of people came into my life during that time.
Some stayed. Some disappeared. Some helped me enormously. Some hurt me. Some probably changed the direction of my life without ever knowing they had done it.
I know I will never have the chance to thank every person who was somehow part of these years.
And strangely, I wouldn’t remove much of it now.
There are things I certainly would not want to live through again. But with some distance, I can see what they changed in me.
Things are quieter now.
Not perfect. Not finished. Just quieter.
There is less chaos in my head and less need to constantly prove that DUSTY LINEN should be something bigger, louder or easier for everyone to understand.
I know much more clearly what I want to make, how I want to work and, perhaps most importantly, what I don’t want to do anymore.
I want DUSTY LINEN to carry some of that calm too.
This post is probably a small marker for myself more than anything else. A way of putting into words that I want to continue differently from here.
I don’t want DUSTY LINEN to try to be for everyone.
That doesn’t mean I think what we make is somehow above other things. It simply means I no longer want to keep changing what I believe in just because something might be easier to sell.
Some people will understand what we do here and care about it. Others won’t. Both are fine.
I also don’t want DUSTY LINEN to become another nice-looking shop full of nice-looking things.
The older I get, the more I think about objects differently.
A curtain is still a curtain. A couch cover is still a couch cover. I don’t need to pretend they are something mystical.
But they didn’t appear from nowhere either.
Someone thought about the proportions. Someone chose the fabric. Someone cut it. Someone sat at a sewing machine. Someone noticed that something wasn’t working and had to solve it. Someone packed it.
There are people behind the things we bring into our homes.
I think about that more now when I buy something myself.
Money always ends up somewhere. And, in a small way, every purchase helps decide whose work gets to continue.
That thought matters to me.
The same is true for how I want to work with people who come to DUSTY LINEN.
If you have a problem in your home and I think we can solve it, I will genuinely try.
Sometimes that means making something differently.
Sometimes it means answering twenty questions.
Sometimes it means saying that our product is probably not the right answer for you.
I’m becoming increasingly comfortable with that last one.
I don’t need every conversation to end with an order.
I would rather someone leave knowing they received an honest answer than buy something I already suspect will disappoint them.
Maybe this also means DUSTY LINEN will make fewer things.
Maybe we will say no more often.
Maybe we will spend more time improving what already makes sense instead of constantly adding something new.
I don’t know exactly what the next years will look like, and I’m quite relieved that I no longer feel the need to pretend that I do.
This is simply where DUSTY LINEN and I are now.
And this is where I want to continue from.
Rita
