How We Found Our Illustrator (and Turned Birds into Hammerheads)

We had a brand and no idea how to draw it. The story of finding Yuliia on Behance, Caroline's moodboard, and adapting a Galápagos pattern for the water.

Here’s an awkward truth about starting an apparel brand built on prints: we can’t draw. Not really. We can tell you exactly what a soggylife pattern should feel like, a reef packed with creatures, colors that make you smile at 6 a.m., a specific place captured in fabric. We just can’t make our own hands produce it.

So the first real hire soggylife ever made wasn’t a factory or a website. It was an illustrator.

Caroline’s moodboard came first

Before we went looking for anyone, Caroline built a moodboard. Colors pulled from actual dives, the marine life we wanted swimming across the fabric, the mood of each region we dreamed of turning into a print. It sounds like a small thing. It’s the opposite. A moodboard is how you hand someone the picture in your head without having to draw it yourself, and it turned out to be the single most useful document in the whole process. Every conversation that followed pointed back to it.

If you’re ever briefing a creative person and tempted to just “explain it in an email”, don’t. Build the board. Show, don’t tell.

Falling for a style on Behance

Then came the hunt. We spent evenings scrolling Behance and portfolio sites, and most of it was fine, competent, forgettable. Until we landed on the work of Yuliia and both went quiet.

Her patterns had exactly what we couldn’t articulate until we saw it: vibrant color, detailed natural elements, and a sense of storytelling. Not clip-art animals floating on a background. Whole little worlds. Yuliia is a Ukrainian illustrator and, fittingly, an avid bird-watcher, so her nature patterns are packed with the kind of loving detail you only get from someone who actually looks. She even had a Galápagos-themed pattern already, full of birds, and we stood there thinking the same thing: what if those were underwater instead?

The brief: swap the birds for the deep

So we wrote to her. We told her we were launching a brand (we were still calling it Soggywear back then, if you can believe it) and asked whether she’d adapt her Galápagos pattern for a diver’s version. Replace the birds with the animals you actually meet down there. Hammerhead sharks. Marine iguanas. The emblematic residents of a Galápagos dive.

She said yes. And here’s the part we didn’t expect to enjoy so much: the process was a genuine back-and-forth. Sketches first, in black and white, so we could shape the composition before any color went down. We approved the sketches, then she brought them to life in full color in Adobe Illustrator, building everything as vector art so it could be printed crisp at any size on fabric.

About three weeks from approved sketch to finished pattern. Files in every format a textile printer could ask for. And a marine world that looked like our moodboard had grown fins.

The birds, reincarnated as hammerheads. Exactly the swap we’d hoped for.

Why this mattered more than we thought

We could have bought a generic ocean print off a stock site for a few euros. Plenty of brands do. But the pattern is the whole point of soggylife. It’s the thing that makes someone smile on a cold dive deck. Getting it right, working with a real artist who cared about the storytelling as much as we did, was the first moment the brand stopped being an idea and started being a thing with a face.

That Galápagos print is the one we later hand-sewed into our very first prototypes and carried to the actual Galápagos to test. Full circle, and it started with a moodboard and a stranger’s beautiful birds.

Working with a creative on your own project? Build the board first. Thank us later. Stay soggy.