Our story
Follow your passion
Your future may be hiding in your past.
What next?
As my 60th birthday approached, I found myself asking a question that probably comes to many of us at significant milestones:
After decades as a Chartered Estate Surveyor, entrepreneur, Pastor, leader and, more recently, Executive Coach, I could have looked at 60 as a point to begin slowing down.
Instead, I began wondering:
What if there is still more?
What if age doesn’t only tell us how much life we’ve lived, but also gives us a richer collection of experiences, gifts and passions from which to create what comes next?
And strangely, the answer to WHAT NEXT? began by looking backwards.
Same questions.
A different perspective.
A brighter tomorrow.
More than 40 years ago…
Back in the late 1970s, while still in secondary school, the first little business I ever tried involved decorating T-shirts using iron-on vinyl.
Nothing sophisticated. Just a teenager figuring out how to put designs onto shirts — and persuade people to buy them.
At university, that creative instinct grew. I would buy fabric, create designs, have a tailor make shirts and trousers, and sell them to fellow students, friends and family.
Then life happened.
Careers. Business. Ministry. Marriage. Family. Leadership. Responsibility.
The clothes disappeared.
Or so I thought.
Some passions
don’t disappear. They wait.
More than four decades later, I found myself creating again. Designing. Making. Experimenting with garments, print, photography, different materials and new technologies.
Learning new techniques. Making mistakes. Ruining the occasional garment — and more than one expensive ChromaLuxe panel. Starting again.
And, of course, buying equipment I didn’t know I needed until approximately five minutes before I absolutely needed it. 😂
But underneath all the experimentation, something much more important was happening.
I was rediscovering a part of myself that had never really disappeared.
Breadcrumbs of grace
As I looked back over the different chapters of my life, I began to recognise something else.
There were breadcrumbs of grace everywhere.
Through the opportunities. Through the successes.
Through the failures. Through the unexpected turns.
Through doors that opened and others that closed.
The undeniable Grace of God had been woven through the story all along.
And suddenly I had words for it:
Branded by Grace.
That’s how BBG was born.
BRANDED BY GRACE is a faith-inspired visual branding and lifestyle brand built around a simple conviction:
Faith isn’t only something you live privately.
It’s something you can express.
Something you can display.
Something you can wear.
Something you can share.
Today, that expression takes different forms — from apparel and visual display pieces to branded merchandise created for people, organisations, events, schools and communities.
Different products. Different canvases. One underlying idea:
Wear it. Display it. Share it.
Same passion.
Different season.
A lifetime more experience.
A second swing of the bat.
Perhaps the most important thing BBG represents to me personally is this:
It is not too late.
Not at 40.
Not at 50.
And, as I’m discovering, certainly not at 60.
I believe life can give us a second swing of the bat.
Sometimes the thing waiting for us in our next season isn’t something we’ve never seen before.
Sometimes it’s a gift we neglected. A curiosity we stopped exploring. A creative instinct that became a hobby because “real life” got in the way. Perhaps those things weren’t wasted. Perhaps they were waiting.
Coming full circle
isn’t going backwards.
You can return to the same place carrying a completely different version of yourself.
So BRANDED BY GRACE isn’t simply another business I’ve started at 60.
For me, it is evidence that our future can sometimes be hiding in our past.
That creativity doesn’t have an expiry date.
That purpose isn’t restricted by age.
And that grace can take the scattered pieces of a lifetime and reveal that perhaps they were connected all along.
This is my second swing.
Welcome to BRANDED BY GRACE.
Follow your passion.
Your future may be hiding in your past.