Today we’d like to introduce you to Sam Chin.
Sam, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
In the past few years, it grew really apparent to me how sick and confused I had become of being extremely self-critical. I had carried low self-esteem paired with a facade of confidence since I was in grade school, and by the age of 23, I was just done with it. I was tired of feeling nervous to be myself while everyone else in my life only showed me love. I was tired of not believing in the Me that others could see, and I felt like I was holding myself back from some feeling I didn’t know yet and couldn’t fully understand.
The idea of “self love” sounded nice to me, it sounded helpful, but I couldn’t wrap my head around not noticing and addressing my flaws while loving myself fully at the same time. Learning to completely love who I am sounded like a fairytale that I may or may not reach later in my life. I thought that this mentality was for certain people, a more evolved time in my life, or just might not be possible at all.
My self-talk included magnifying the things that I didn’t like about my physical appearance, dwelling on situations that I could have handled better, and telling myself that “I can’t” in various ways. I knew that I loved myself to a certain point, but it was wavering and I could easily knock it to the ground by sitting in perceived flaws. For a while, my argument was “But I’m just being realistic.” This felt like I was keeping myself safe.
I really wanted to break down these belief systems of “not being enough” in one way or another, and to figure out what “seeds of thought” were planted in order for me to have built a belief system around them.
What helped me was defining what a belief is at all.
A belief is just a thought that is repeated so often and for so long that it becomes something we think is greater than ourselves. The key to that for me was that it’s just a thought. Not a fact, not a rule, just a thought.
As I was able to understand this, I decided to experiment in taking those seeds, uprooting them, and planting new ones of my own that were really the way I wanted to feel about myself.
Since a lot of my self critiquing happened when I was in front of a mirror, I began making tee shirts and sweaters for myself so that anytime I caught my reflection or stood in the mirror, I could have a moment to remind myself that I was going to be okay. That I needed to love and trust myself.
Positive affirmation practice of writing and repeating sayings wasn’t clicking with me, and the easiest way for me to digest these new seeds ended up being subtly putting them on clothing for myself. I would hand embroider clothing that served as reminders of what I wanted to mentally practice. Versions of “Self Love”, “Inner Wealth”, and “In Self We Trust” written backward were my staple phrases I began with. It was affirmation by fashion expression: a phrase just said to me when I looked in the mirror, clothing purely for my enjoyment, not necessarily a statement for others to immediately “get”.
I felt like I was setting goals with the words I put on my clothing and then was living out these goals every time I chose to wear them, because every moment of those days when I caught glimpses of my reflection anywhere, I was reminded of those new beliefs I wanted to plug into my mind.
Understanding that acceptance is a form of love took a lot of pressure off. I was able to accept where I was at and just leave it there. As I continued to implement this, I then freed up mental space to simply believe in myself more.
Eventually, these clothes felt like a security blanket with a boost of self-empowerment and I became proud to strike up conversations about the clothes and openly tell people I was working on accepting myself. It felt good to say it like it was normal. Then I found that this should be normal, to love ourselves and accept ourselves, and build emotional strength to push through the journey of truly understanding who we are as individuals.
içi began as just a way for me to get through the day. I did not think it would get me to this powerful of a place where I could just accept Me all the time, no matter what that looks like or what that feels like. I never really could have projected how içi was going to help me in such a way, but it feels important to share that anyone can do this.
No matter how much some may resist the idea.
Self-love is for everyone, right now and forever.
Although it’s gotten significantly easier for me to find acceptance in everything I do, this doesn’t mean that negativity entirely ceases to exist in my mind. The key thing is the resilience that I’ve gained. We are human, we are bound to experience criticism and negativity out of our control, it’s just a matter of not fueling that fire by wallowing in those thoughts – that which we do have control over.
I see içi growing in a symbiotic relationship with my own growth. Every design I create comes from personal experience and testing things out until they stick. The process of growth never stops, we don’t reach a capacity, and I think that aspect is really beautiful even though growth can sometimes show up in an ugly package. As we shed layers of ourselves that no longer resonate with who we are and who we are becoming, we get to feel like we’re meeting our “real” selves for the first time – over and over again.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Almost all of the struggles I faced came from a place of fear. Fear that I couldn’t execute my ideas fear that my ideas were stupid or wouldn’t be received by other people. I realized that the only way to get over these hurdles was to trust myself fully. As I began leading with the idea that “If I truly resonate with what I’m creating that’s all that matters”, I was able to let my creativity flow and take action into physicalizing what was in my head. My brand’s slogan “Leap and the Net Will Appear” is that vital self-trust. Taking a leap on ourselves without trying to control the outcome is when life finds a way of catching and guiding us. We’ll never know what we don’t try, and “failures” are just lessons to implement on the following leaps we decide to take.
Please tell us about içi.
içi is a streetwear brand designed to normalize self-empowerment. All of the designs are backward so that the messages are read to just you when you look in the mirror, and the same designs are written right-ways on the back in larger print, symbolizing that what we feed to ourselves we are also able to emanate to others around us. The backward designs make the time in the mirror that most of us use for self-critiquing a more healing moment. They serve as subtle reminders so that we can begin to break down negative self-talk and introduce a headspace that we can feel safe and powerful in.
The designs I’ve released so far are “love you”, “beauty”, and “abundant”. “love you” is to give the love to ourselves that we so openly give to others, and make it normal to tell ourselves that we love who we are, at every stage and every form of our journeys. “beauty” is to break the belief that others having certain qualities means that we are automatically lacking in them. Instead, we recognize that beauty begins as a feeling even though we most often associate it with the physical world. What we notice in others comes from a place of familiarity in qualities we possess ourselves, so the way I see it, the beauty we see in others is the same beauty we already have too. “abundant” introduces how although abundance is experienced in many physical ways, just like beauty, it has to come from a feeling first. Abundance and Joy feel very similar- most of us are more familiar with joy. The more we take note of the things that bring us joy, the more we can understand what abundance feels like. It is then when we experience abundance as physical manifestations- ease getting a long list of tasks done, material wealth flowing to us without much effort, attracting a circle of like-minded people, etc.
Most clothing companies create designs that are to be stated to whoever is looking at you while you’re wearing whatever item it is. içi is different in that the experience is primarily for you when you’re wearing the clothing and looking at your reflection. It’s important that we recognize who we are and embrace that because it’s the easiest way to survive through the natural ups and downs of life. When we accept and love the mind and body we’re in, we can get up much faster from getting knocked down. It creates a resilience that is untouchable by anyone but ourselves.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
I honestly wouldn’t change anything in the process that’s gone on. Even though I had the idea to create içi in 2017, I don’t think I was emotionally ready to lead the voice of this brand until now. The solitude of this pandemic was really hard to adjust to at first, but it made way for me to listen to what my soul was actually hungry for and that was to share my mindset and growth through clothing. I didn’t know when I would ever get this abundance of time, where the “normal” working world was pretty much shut down, so I decided to take this as an opportunity to create something different for myself because quite honestly, I wasn’t happy with the hamster wheel I had succumbed to before COVID happened.
Although working as a one-woman show has been a lot of work, I’ve enjoyed all the learning that I’ve gained from wearing all the hats I possibly can. I taught myself how to use Photoshop and Lightroom, asked for help from friends who had their own clothing brands, took time to find the right professionals who could dye and print my clothing the way I envisioned it, and ultimately got out of my own way.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.iciforyou.com
- Email: info@iciforyou.com
- Instagram: @ici______
Image Credit:
Legend Antonopoulos, Mitch deQuilettes, Adam Montgomery
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