Inspiring Conversations with Faith Perrin of MAHA Studio

Today we’d like to introduce you to Faith Perrin.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
My story starts with fashion — long before I ever entered the industry, when I was just a little girl. I was always drawn to beauty and fashion, and I tapped into the magic of clothes at a young age. Clothes became an avenue for self-expression when I couldn’t find my voice, and clothes connected me to parts of myself that I still credit for helping me get to where I am today.

That love followed me into my education. I studied fashion design for my undergrad and spent four years in the industry — working in New York, helping with New York Fashion Week, working retail, and working for smaller designers in Chicago. No matter where I put myself within the fashion industry, I never felt like I belonged, and for a long time, I assumed that meant I was the problem and needed to find a different career path.

That assumption sent me down an unexpected road. I worked as a holistic nutritionist under an MD in Chicago, then went on to get my Master’s in Counseling Psychology and opened my own therapy practice. What I never saw coming was the different ways these career paths would play a role in my healing journey — guiding me back home within myself through the physical, mental, and spiritual.

That healing is what eventually brought me back to fashion, and to a different realization: the industry itself had been the problem all along, not me. I didn’t need to leave fashion — I needed to find my own way into it, one that came from the heart instead of trying to fit a mold. I spent the next few years exploring how fashion, beauty, and healing could blend together through self-reflection, nervous system work, meditation, and inner-child healing. MAHA Studio was born from over a decade of finding my way back to myself — to my truth.

MAHA comes from a Buddhist term meaning expansion and greatness, and that’s exactly what this business has been for me — allowing myself to expand more fully into the truth of who I am, and helping other women do the same through the clothes they wear every day.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
It’s been anything but smooth, and I don’t think I’d be honest with your readers if I said otherwise.

I had a difficult start to life that carried into adulthood, and for most of my life I struggled with severe depression, panic disorder, and severe anxiety. Throughout my whole life, I could count the people I could go to for safety and support on one hand, and that was true until fairly recently. I can’t fully explain how I got through those years, or what kept me going. Looking back, I think my connection to fashion was part of it: dressing in a way that felt true to me helped me stay tethered to my heart and soul during the times I could have easily lost myself completely.

Professionally, things weren’t any easier. As I mentioned, no matter where I put myself in the fashion industry, I never felt like I belonged, and that assumption sent me searching for a different career path for years — through holistic nutrition and then psychology — before I found my way back to fashion after all.

And building MAHA Studio has come with a whole new set of challenges. Leaving something familiar and stable — a successful therapy practice with a waitlist for over two years — to pursue something that felt more aligned but far less certain has been its own kind of struggle. It’s meant learning to trust my heart, my vision, and what feels true over logic, even when logic says to stay where things are secure. I didn’t have a mentor when I started, largely because I’m new to this area and didn’t have an existing network to lean on, so a lot of my first several months were trial and error instead of working from a clear strategy. In order to make space for the time and energy this business needs, I significantly cut back my clinical hours — an intentional trade-off as I invest more of myself into MAHA Studio. The struggle is learning to build it the way I wish I’d built things before — steadily, without burning myself out — instead of repeating old patterns.

Building MAHA Studio has asked me to face myself on a deeper level than I ever have, and to dismantle societal and generational belief systems much closer to the root. There’s the self-doubt that comes in the early stages, when so much of the work is happening behind the scenes and you haven’t yet hit the success you’ve envisioned for yourself. Building a business from the ground up can teach you many different lessons about yourself — how to believe in yourself, how to stay patient, how to pick yourself back up when self-doubt gets loud, how to stay rooted in your vision when every part of you wants to give up and go back to what’s known. It’s humbling, and it builds a deeper level of self-trust. Building this business has helped me come home more deeply within myself — it’s been a different kind of healing than anything I’ve done before, and that same remembrance is what I help other women find within themselves through MAHA Studio.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about MAHA Studio?
MAHA Studio is an Energetic & Intuitive Fashion Styling business based in the Los Angeles area. It bridges four years of experience in the fashion industry with six years of running my own private practice as a licensed mental health therapist specializing in trauma work.

Energetic and Intuitive Styling is a 1:1, in-person process that uses clothing as a tool for self-connection. The process starts with a complimentary 30-minute call, where I get to know you and figure out which level of support fits you best — whether you simply need a second set of eyes to get ready for a specific event, or you already feel fairly connected to yourself but aren’t sure how to express that through clothing yet. Or maybe you feel completely disconnected from yourself and want more hands-on support finding your way back home. The process entails guided meditation exercises that help you understand how different parts of you want to be expressed through color, fabric, and style. Together, we identify what kind of energetic container you’d like to create — for an event, or for this phase of your life — and build your closet around that. An energetic container is simply a combination of the different parts of you that want to be expressed, brought together through clothing. For example, maybe for an event you want to express your creativity, your groundedness, your playfulness, and your attention to detail — that container is built by identifying the colors, fabrics, and styles that let all of those parts come through in one outfit. The process can also include shop-alongs, where I join you and help style potential purchases in real time, a personalized lookbook, and closet revamps.

What sets us apart is the direction the work comes from. Traditional styling is externally driven — it starts from color theory, silhouette rules, and trends to determine what “looks good.” Energetic Styling is internally driven, built from the inside out, with self-connection as the foundation and aesthetics second. Whatever brings a client to this work, she tends to recognize the emotional and energetic depth of clothing: a genuine love and appreciation for the beauty within the art of fashion, and a pull toward using it as a tool for self-connection. More than trends or a bigger wardrobe, what she wants is to open her closet and feel connected to what’s hanging there. She wants to feel connected to herself in the day-to-day too, regardless of the many hats she wears — whether that’s showing up in a boardroom, at a launch, a gala, or a press interview, as a mother in the school pickup line, running errands at the grocery store, out for a girls’ night, at a family gathering, on a date night, or just working from home on an ordinary Tuesday.

Someone recently asked me what I feel most proud of when it comes to MAHA Studio, and my answer is this: MAHA Studio was born from the final two years of that decade-long journey — two years of concentrated meditation, heart-space work, and nervous system regulation, all in service of discovering how beauty, fashion, and healing could co-exist within my brand.

I’m proud that I didn’t build this by looking outside of myself. I’m proud that I let my younger self co-create with me. Expanding more fully into my true self — letting my soul express itself through this work — is what I’m most proud of today.

What were you like growing up?
I had a huge imagination as a kid. I’d spend hours outside barefoot, running around, riding my bike, just letting my imagination run wild. I loved being outside — I spent a lot of time on my grandparents’ farm, picking cherries, snapping green beans, and helping with whatever else I could. I grew up next door to my grandparents’ farm and surrounded by farmland, so I was always stopping by to say hi to the animals — I was deeply connected to animals and the earth from a young age. I’d sit under trees and color for hours.

I loved making bracelets, reading, and making homemade videos. I’d turn on music and pretend I was the artist — standing on my bed with a microphone, putting on full concerts. I made up my own dances and tried to learn the ones from whatever songs were popular at the time.

I was also fascinated by fashion and beauty even then. I loved dressing up and experimenting with different hairstyles and clothing styles, trying on different versions of myself.

Personality-wise, I was fearless and had big dreams for myself from day one. I was also incredibly social — I’d walk right into my neighbors’ houses to hang out or see what they were up to, no invitation needed. I was talkative too — I got sent to the principal’s office often in kindergarten for talking to my neighbor too much. I got excited easily and about a lot of things, and honestly, that hasn’t changed.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://mahastudio.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mahastudio__/