I've been writing on the internet, off and on, since 2005 — first on a Tumblr called Covet on a Budget, where I figured out that the thing I cared about wasn't the budget. It was the eye. The eye doesn't know what something costs. It only knows whether it's right.
Between then and now, I built things. Quietly, mostly. I'm a CEO & founder — hair, beauty, maybe one day rum from my family's land in Jamaica — and I've spent the last decade learning how to build the kind of company that doesn't need permission to exist. I'll write about that work here, when there's something useful to say. Not before.
This site is the place I come back to write the things that don't fit anywhere else.
It is not a platform or a rollout of my strategic personal brand. It is not optimized for a feed. It is not measuring me by what I post or how often or whether the right people noticed. The algorithm cannot find this place, and that's the point.
What this is, instead, is a garden. Slow. Tended by words. Built around six pillars, because I wanted some structure: The Covet List for books and ideas, The Coveted Body for what I'm learning about being in the body that runs the work, The Coveted Home for the spaces I love, The Coveted Table for the meals and the people around them, The Coveted Passport for the places I keep returning to, and Building, Out Loud for the founder work I've spent a long time doing without saying much about.
I write here because the women I most want to read aren't writing online anymore. Or they're writing in places where the work gets flattened by the platform. I write here because my father — who I connected to through writing and who read every essay I ever published, who was asking me to keep going right up until he wasn't able to anymore — would have hated to see me stop. I write here because I'm tired of optimizing.
If you've found your way to this site, you're probably tired of optimizing too.
A few things to know:
I am not selling you anything you don't actually need, and the things I do recommend are in The Shop, with affiliate links flagged. I make a small commission. The recommendations are not for sale.
I will be wrong about some things, and I'll say so when I figure it out. The corrections live publicly.
I send a quarterly letter — four times a year, no filler. If that pace works for you, you can subscribe below. If it doesn't, that's fine too. The site is here without it.
If you're going to be a bear, be a grizzly.
That's been my philosophy since I was twenty-four years old, and it hasn't moved.
Welcome.
Dafina