Six Years in the Making: Part One

Wire, Blue Tack and My Mum's Sewing Machine

If you've ever wondered how someone starts a brand, I'm going to walk you through the (quite random) set of steps I went through to create STÆRKE.

For me, it started with a problem I couldn't stop thinking about.

I'd just started lifting properly, and I was obsessed with all of it. New wrist straps, ankle straps, liquid chalk, the pre-workout shots that were everywhere at the time. Yet, I had nowhere to put any of it. I literally scoured the internet to find a mini gym bag, and there just wasn't anything available. I couldn't understand why, given how much gear people carried and all the hype around gym clothes, nobody had designed a bag that actually made sense for the gym floor.

So during an internship at Accenture in 2019, instead of paying attention in meetings (it was a telecommunications project about fibre broadband... nah), I started sketching what I thought that bag should look like. The shape came from somewhere a bit unexpected: the Japanese lunch boxes kids at school used to bring in, the ones that were everywhere in the department stores in Malaysia when I was growing up. Compact, structured, everything with its place. I wanted a gym bag to feel like that.

The sketches sat for a while after that. I went back to my corporate job, and it wasn't until I hit a wall, badly burnt out and in the middle of a mental health crisis I didn't have a name for yet, that I left the job and moved home to Denmark. STÆRKE started as something to work on while I figured out what came next. And honestly, part of the motivation was making sure I never had to go back to a corporate desk job.

I pulled the 2019 sketches back out and started again, this time trying to actually work out how the bag should be built.

I had no idea what I was doing. I didn't know how to research materials, and I couldn't work out sizing just by drawing it, my brain needed to see it. So I bought elephant wire and blue tack and started building.

I made a few different sizes and tested each one the same way: would a water bottle fit, was it small enough to actually carry, was it big enough to hold everything I needed for a session. I mocked up the interior the same way, working out where I wanted an open pocket, where I wanted a zip pocket, based entirely on what I wished I had. At one point we wrapped baking paper around the wireframes just so I could actually see the structure properly instead of imagining it through wire.

Once I had a shape I trusted, my mum sewed the first prototype on her machine, using fabric I'd bought with no real plan. I took it to the gym straight after and I was obsessed with how much easier it made everything.

Now I just had to figure out how to find a supplier, and work out what on earth I'd actually give them to build out this vision I'd made in the form of a little fabric sack...